Sorry We Shot Your Kid, But Here's $500

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003571125

The most revealing new information on Iraq -- guaranteed to make readers sad or angry, or both -- is found not in any press dispatch but in a collection of several hundred PDFs posted on the Web this week.

Here you will find, for example, that when the U.S. drops a bomb that goes awry, lands in an orchard, and does not detonate -- until after a couple of kids go out to take a look -- our military does not feel any moral or legal reason to compensate the family of the dead child because this is, after all, broadly speaking, a "combat situation."

Also: What price (when we do pay) do we place on the life of a 9-year-old boy, shot by one of our soldiers who mistook his book bag for a bomb satchel? Would you believe $500? And when we shoot an Iraqi journalist on a bridge we shell out $2500 to his widow -- but why not the measly $5000 she had requested?

Last June, The Boston Globe and The New York Times revealed that a local custom in Iraq known as "solatia" had now been adapted by the U.S. military -- it means families receive financial compensation for physical damage or a loss of life. The Globe revealed that payoffs had "skyrocketed from just under $5 million in 2004 to almost $20 million last year, according to Pentagon financial data."

[merh]

1. shit, no wonder the war is so expensive

we are paying off the families of those we kill



NOT.IN.MY.NAME. :cry:

[zbdent]

2. But this administration is trying to keep the disability pay

from the very ones who gave up body parts for this country ...

Or, if a soldier dies, they try to "bean-count" it so that the soldier didn't die from war wounds but well after he/she was away from the battlefield, so that they don't have to pay the higher amount ...

[youngdem]

3. Sounds like a deal financially. $20M is what we spend in less than 2 HOURS in Iraq

We are spending $2 billion a week roughly. That's $11,904,761.90 an hour. So, we are only spending 100 minutes worth of our cash a year on victim compensation in a theater where there is daily combat, house to house raids and airstrikes. That seems absurdly low to me.