Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: President should act now

Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2003 | 8:46 a.m.

"60 MINUTES" ON CBS Sunday night shined light on a subject matter too often pushed aside by our military and political leaders. Nevada's Sen. Harry Reid has been waging his own war in efforts to change what has become a national embarrassment. Our returning prisoners of war have been forgotten or sold out in the market of truces and peace agreements since the late 1940s until now.

Let's take a look at our shameful acts following World War II. Our diplomats sold the rights of the American POWs to sue Japan after being held for more than three years and being used as slave laborers. The few thousand who survived and came home were rewarded with $1 a day for pay. Even today the less than 5,000 remaining survivors have been blocked by our White House, Department of Justice and Department of State from suing the wealthy Japanese corporations that used them. Yes, the same corporations that sell Americans billions of dollars of their goods every year.

Is this just the administration of President George W. Bush? No. President Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan also participated in blocking the former POWs from receiving justice. This has all been done in the name of international diplomacy and our original selling out of these Americans following WW II. There are experts in international law who believe that governments cannot forfeit the rights of its citizens where violations of human rights are involved. This legal interpretation has been rejected by several presidents and their Justice and State departments.

This situation didn't get much better when a truce was signed in 1953 with North Korea. President Dwight D. Eisenhower knew that more than 900 U.S. servicemen captured in Korea had been sent to the U.S.S.R. Philip Corso, an intelligence officer for the National Security Council, told a Senate committee that the commander in chief agreed that "the POWs should be given up for dead because the Soviets would never relinquish them." There are still several thousand Americans missing from that war.

Finally, even Congress got fed up with this nonsense and passed a law which allows American victims of terrorism to sue a small group of nations that promote or tolerate these activities. Among those listed was Iraq and this has been used by 17 American POWs brutalized when captured in the first Persian Gulf War. They targeted the Iraqi assets frozen by the U.S. from which $95 million had already been paid to American civilians used as human shields by Saddam Hussein in 1991.

Last April the president was given power to void all laws concerning Iraq and Bush used it to block the payments of almost $1 billion a court had awarded to the 17 former POWs and their families. Not only was the payment blocked, but the Treasury Department and other federal agencies refuse to even discuss their actions. The money is to be used to rebuild the country that had tortured them.

Sunday night, on television, four of those POWs were more than reasonable when saying that they would even settle for less than the awards if the remainder were used for future POWs. If the president has already spent those dollars they are willing to wait for the dollars made available when Iraq again produces large quantities of its vast oil reserves. What they really want is an end to our leaders protecting the governments that brutalized American prisoners.

The first step toward this end can only be taken by our president enforcing, rather than denying, the original court awards made to these former POWs.

There can be no better time than now for him to act.