The American Civil Liberties Union has built an online database of 500 “claims” by Iraqi citizens on the American armed forces due to death or injury caused by U.S. troops. The database is extremely extensive, attaching the PDF-ed claim files to each of the cases.
OWGA came by this database via this excellent article in the NYT. The Times piece illuminates that this sampling is only a small portion of the $32 million the Armed Forces has paid to Iraqi and Afghan civilians during the course of the war. The first of their kind to be made public, the story page is worth a visit if only to see the Iraqi Claims Pocket Card, distributed by U.S. troops so as civilians may immediately lodge their loss with Uncle Sam. (I couldn’t find a picture of it to link here, but they’ve got a mini version on the Times website.)
The piece points to some general trends in the data (largely, the haphazard nature in which claims are either accepted or rejected.) As one former adjudicator of these claims puts it, “I just didn’t have enough money.”
It has not always worked as planned, said Sarah Holewinski, the executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, a nonprofit group in Washington.
“Sometimes families would get paid and sometimes their neighbors wouldn’t,” she said. “It caused a lot of resentments among the Iraqis, which is ironic because it was a program specifically meant to foster good will.”
In the actual text of the Foreign Claims Act, under which this type of activity falls, there is the following proviso: “[I]n the case of a national of a country at war with the United States, or of any ally of that country, the claimant is determined by the commission or by the local military commander to be friendly to the United States;”. I wonder how much this clause gets invoked: perhaps not often, but considering the current situation proving one’s U.S.A. bona fides seems like an impossible task.
While the Times article styles it that citizens rarely get more than $2000, the upper bound on the Foreign Claims legislation is $100,000. Ah, the legislative magic of determining how to pay for the life of an innocent.
One final note: anyone interested can download the International Committee of the Red Cross’ recent Iraq Report.
