The Los Angeles Times reports that "the Bush administration is fighting the former [Gulf War] prisoners of war in court, trying to prevent them from collecting nearly $1 billion from Iraq that a federal judge awarded them as compensation for their torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime." Why? "Today's Iraqis are good guys, and they need the money." Want to know the definition of irony? Here it is:

Many of the pilots were tortured in the same Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers abused Iraqis 15 months ago. Those Iraqi victims, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, deserve compensation from the United States.

But the American victims of Iraqi torturers are not entitled to similar payments from Iraq, the U.S. government says.

Deputy Sleazeball Scott McClellan had this to say about the case when asked about it in 2003: "No amount of money can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering that they went through at the hands of this very brutal regime and at the hands of Saddam Hussein."

With this action, the U.S. government is in violation of the Geneva Convention, which says that a state can never absolve another state of liability for the torture of POWs.

(Via Metafilter.)