News-Info-Alerts

Re: PGW POWs Sue Iraq For US$900 Million

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: February 24, 2003

"Gulf War captives hit Iraq with $900 million suit
BY PATRICE O'SHAUGHNESSY
New York Daily News

NEW YORK - KRT NEWSFEATURES

(KRT) - In February 1991, Air Force Capt. Richard Dale Storr's bomber was shot down over Kuwait and he was taken to Baghdad, where he was held prisoner for 33 days.

After one interrogation, as he lay on the floor of a dank cell with a broken nose, dislocated shoulder and punctured eardrum, the Iraqi secret police kicked and beat him "just because they liked it," Storr recalled recently.

Those days of torture remain vivid, and "things like musty odors, or hearing the Arabic language spoken in person, put me right back in the cell," Storr said.

Hoping to deter mistreatment of future prisoners of war, Storr and 16 other Americans held as POWs in the Persian Gulf War filed a $900 million lawsuit last April against Iraq, dictator Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

And next month, as lawyers present evidence of torture in a federal court in Washington, Storr could well be back in the skies over Iraq, fighting this time as a lieutenant colonel in the Washington Air National Guard.

"I don't want to go back; no one wants to see another war," said Storr, now 41. "But I'm first in line if that's what it takes to finish it. It's not revenge, but," he adds with a slight chuckle, "I'd like to get a few punches in.

"Saddam Hussein is a nut case; no sane leader would allow torture like that," Storr said. "Hussein's a terrorist - the way he treated us and the way he treats his own people."

Storr's harrowing experiences and those of others held in Iraqi prisons with nicknames like "Baghdad Biltmore" and "Joliet" are documented in the lawsuit. The extent of the prisoners' plight - beatings, electrical shock, being urinated on, psychological intimidation - is largely unknown by the American public, which remembers the Persian Gulf War for its brevity.

"Congress said if we get a judgment we can get payment out of the frozen Iraqi assets," said Steve Fennell, of Steptoe and Johnson, the lawyer for the plaintiffs. Storr said the lawsuit's message is simple: "If you mess with our guys, you're gonna pay," he said.

To hear the POWs speak of their ordeals - in matter-of-fact military manner while pausing at certain details of misery, degradation or pain - provides powerful arguments for and against sending men and women to war.

Storr, the pilot of an A-10 Thunderbolt (Warthog) aircraft, was captured Feb. 2, 1991. At his lowest point, he said, "I was thinking I wouldn't get out alive, and hoping they'd just kill me.

"Three days in, my nose was broken, they dislocated my shoulder, busted my eardrum, I was vomiting, and I'm being kicked," he said in an interview from his Spokane, Wash., home. "I was screaming in agony, so miserable, in pain."

When his answers were unsatisfactory, he was shocked with an electric prod. He was always blindfolded, handcuffed, and cold and hungry during his captivity, which ended March 6, 1991.

He said the Iraqis wouldn't tell the Red Cross he was alive.

"My family thought I was dead, and they had a memorial service at the squadron at the base in Saudi Arabia," Storr said. "My mother died of cancer six months after I got home; I'm sure my captivity hastened it."

Despite a "terrifying experience that scares the hell out of me," Storr stayed on in active duty in the Air Force for more than a year after his release. His love of country and flying led him to join the National Guard in 1994.

Since 1996, he has been a 737 pilot for United Airlines and flies to New York about a dozen times a year. "I used to fly right by the twin towers," he said.

On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist Osama Bin Laden's henchmen steered United Flight 175 into the south tower of the World Trade Center and crashed United Flight 93 into a Pennsylvania field.

The link between the murder of his United co-workers by Bin Laden's terrorists and his torture by Saddam's thugs is not lost on the pilot. "It's like they're hitting us from all sides," Storr said.

His unit, the 116th Air Refueling Squadron out of Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, is waiting to be activated. "It terrifies me thinking I could be a prisoner of war again," Storr said. "Hopefully, this whole thing will be taken care of and we'll not have to go over there, but if we do, we'll go over there and win."

Navy Lt. Jeffrey Zaun set out on his first combat flight over Iraq on Jan. 17, 1991, in an A-6E Intruder, flying 500 mph, just 400 feet off the ground. He was the navigator-bombardier.

The Cherry Hill, N.J., native and his pilot were hit by an enemy missile, ejected from the plane and "woke up in the sand," Zaun, now 40, recalled. They were taken into custody by the Iraqi Army and turned over to the secret police. "Things got a little rough," Zaun said.

The 5-foot-3 Zaun lost about 30 pounds during the 46 days he was held as a POW. He was regularly beaten, had the ever-present handcuffs and blindfold, and suffered from hypothermia. His captors checked to see whether he was circumcised, and when he told them he wasn't Jewish they didn't believe him, only beating him more.

But the worst was the constant death threats.

"I'll remember the rest of my life, a guy with a nickel-plated pistol to my head, made me make a video," he said. "It's the worst thing I'd ever do, and I thought they'd kill me after I made the film."

Zaun's face was shown in newspapers and on televisions worldwide.

He would come to be known as "the face of the Gulf War." Cherry Hill was dotted with yellow ribbons until he came home to a hero's parade.

It haunts him still that he made the tape denouncing the coalition's military action against Iraq.

"I felt bad that I didn't have the will," he said.

He was awarded the Prisoner of War Medal, as well as the Distinguished Flying Cross for heroism in flight, and other citations. He left the Navy in 1998 and graduated from the Wharton School of Business. For a while, he lived two blocks from the World Trade Center while working at Lehman Brothers.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he was due for a job interview at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods in the twin towers. Sixty-seven of the company's employees died that day.

Zaun sat in a coffee shop recently at W. Broadway and Chambers St., recalling the destruction of the Trade Center.

"I thought, `Who could sponsor this sort of thing?' The people working there were noble, they were doing things to create jobs, enforce the rules of business. That is against everything Hussein is about.

"I thought of the lawsuit as a way to enforce the rules around POWs ... we'd be taking money from people who are making chemical weapons."

On the prospect for another war with Iraq, Zaun said, "There's a sinking feeling that it's the least bad alternative to have to fight over there again. It's an ugly place; the people are suffering there.

"My only piece of advice to military people going over there is to take care of your buddy."

Zaun was released on March 6, 1991. He is looking for a job in investment banking.

On Jan. 28, 1991, Marine Capt. Michael Craig Berryman was flying a Harrier AV-8B fighter-bomber, on his seventh mission, when he was shot down near Kuwait City. His wife, Leigh, was told he was dead.

"Sometimes it feels like yesterday," Berryman, now 40 and a major, said recently in an interview from Florida. "There's not a single day goes by that I don't think about being a POW. ... Something will trigger something from my 37 days there. Other times, it seems like a lifetime away."

On his first day as a POW, his captors broke his left leg with a metal pipe and beat him with an ax handle. His leg was not treated. He was kept blindfolded, and handcuffed so tightly the nerves in his hands were crushed.

"I would be hopping to the interrogations," he said. "They thought it was fun, I guess." His captors put lighted cigarettes on his face, neck and against wounds incurred when he ejected through a fireball after his plane was hit.

During one particularly brutal interrogation, he said he broke down and revealed part of his wife's home address.

"After the interrogator got that information, he told me the Iraqis were going to send a bomb to my house to kill my family," Berryman said. "I felt guilty realizing that I had given up my family in order to ease my own suffering for only a short time. From then on, I vowed never to give up, not even for an instant."

He said a family of birds outside his cell window in the "Biltmore" renewed his faith each morning that a better world existed outside the walls. "I drew strength from the birds in the morning and the American bombers coming into Baghdad each night," he said. On Feb. 13, Berryman gushed as he headed out to celebrate his 15th wedding anniversary, "I spent our third anniversary as a prisoner." He and his wife have 5-year-old triplets Michael, Zachary and David.

Berryman, who still suffers from dysentery and the effects of the leg injury, is stationed at the Joint Combat Identification Evaluation Team at Elgin Air Force Base, Fla.

"As much as I would like to (fight), I'll be stuck behind this desk," he said. "I'd like to finish the job I started the first time.

"If we do go to war, we can probably expect there will be POWs, and you can probably expect their treatment won't be any better than what we had. The military guys and girls over there will pay a price. But this is what we signed up to do." "