U.S. court fines Iran $813 million for 1983 Lebanon attack
U.S. court fines Iran $813 million for 1983 Lebanon attack.
Saturday, 07 July 2012
A U.S. federal judge has ordered Iran to pay more than $813 million in damages and interest to the families of 241 U.S. soldiers killed in the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Lebanon.
“After this opinion, this court will have issued over $8.8 billion in judgments against Iran as a result of the 1983 Beirut bombing,” Judge Royce Lamberth wrote in a ruling this week, a copy of which was seen Friday by AFP.
“Iran is racking up quite a bill from its sponsorship of terrorism,” the Washington judge added, noting that “a number of other Beirut bombing cases remain pending, and their completion will surely increase this amount.”
On October 23, 1983, 241 American soldiers, including 220 Marines, were killed in Beirut when a truck packed with explosives rammed through barricades and detonated in front of the U.S. barracks near Beirut’s international airport.
The attack was one of the deadliest ever against Americans.
The same day, in a coordinated attack, 58 French paratroopers were killed by a truck bomb at the French barracks in Beirut.
The twin bombings have been blamed on Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran.
Lamberth, whose ruling was delivered Tuesday, wrote that “no award — however many billions it contained — could accurately reflect the countless lives that have been changed by Iran’s dastardly acts.”
The nearly $813.77 million verdict is the eighth against Iran resulting from the 1983 bombing.
In 2007, under a law allowing foreign governments to be sued in US courts, the same judge ordered Iran to pay $2.65 billion to victims’ families, an amount he wrote at the time “may be the largest ever entered by a court of the United States against a foreign nation.”
“The court applauds plaintiffs’ persistent efforts to hold Iran accountable for its cowardly support of terrorism,” Lamberth wrote in this week’s ruling.
“The court concludes that defendant Iran must be punished to the fullest extent legally possible for the bombing in Beirut on October 23, 1983. This horrific act impacted countless individuals and their families, a number of whom receive awards in this lawsuit,” the federal court in Washington added.
WarSclerotic 
July 8, 2012 at 7:43 AM
That is a lot more than the US paid to the families of the victims of the US attack on the Iranian Airbus Flight 655 on 3 july 1988.
“While flying in Iranian airspace over Iran’s territorial waters in the Persian Gulf on its usual flight path, it was destroyed by the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes (CG-49). All 290 on board including 66 children and 16 crew perished.
The United States agreed to pay US$61.8 million, an average of $213,103.45 per passenger.” (Wiki, Iran Air Flight 655)
813 million for 241 dead marines means US$3,373,443.98 per marine, which makes a marine worth 16 times more than an Iranian child.
However, with the total amount of 8.8 billion awarded thus far, the value of one marine rises to a staggering US$ 36,514,522.82, more than 171 times the value of an Iranian child.
This while there is no evidence whatsoever that the Iranian Government was in any way involved in the attack on the US marines, more than the general thought that Iran ‘backs’ Hezbollah.
The US and France, on the other hand, were actively killing Lebanese people in the period before the attack on the marines, and therefor not merely in Lebanon for ‘peacekeeping’:
“Col. Timothy J. Geraghty, the commander of the Marines in Beirut during the incident, has said that “the Marine and the French headquarters were targeted primarily because of who we were and what we represented; and that,
“It is noteworthy that the United States provided direct naval gunfire support — which I strongly opposed for a week — to the Lebanese Army at a mountain village called Suq-al-Garb on September 19 and that the French conducted an air strike on September 23 in the Bekaa Valley. American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality, and I stated to my staff at the time that we were going to pay in blood for this decision” (Wiki, 1983 Beirut barracks bombing)
Of course, the downing of the Iranian passenger plane was an accident, an honest mistake, or as the Americans love to say “shit happens”.
Imagine the reaction of the US Government if an Iranian warship would accidentally shoot an American passenger plane out of the sky, flying on its usual flightpath in American airspace, killing all 290 on board including 66 children and 16 crew.
And then the Americans whine, whimper, and wonder “why do they hate us so much” …
July 8, 2012 at 12:29 PM
Doing some research to learn more about the events leading up to the October 23, 1983 attacks on the American and French barracks, I found this rather sobering reconstruction:
“At first the American forces acted as objective peacekeepers. But gradually, the Reagan administration gave in to pressure by the Gemayel government to take its side against Druze and Shiite Muslims in central and southern Lebanon. American troops, welcomed with rice and roses in the Shiite slums of Beirut, slowly became pariahs in Shiites’ eyes. Mistrust turned to outright belligerence once American forces used their firepower to shell Druze and Shiite positions in the mountains surrounding Beirut.
On April 18, 1983, a suicide bomber drove his car into the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans—and most of the CIA’s Middle East operatives, who were meeting that day at the embassy. That loss of human intelligence would cost the United States dearly in the months and years ahead.
The Barracks Attack
The United States did not change tactics in Lebanon. Instead, it amplified its ties to the Gemayel government, which had little legitimacy among most Lebanese, and escalated its attacks on Druze and Shiite positions.
On October 23, 1983, the suicide bombers attacked the American and French barracks.
http://middleeast.about.com/od/usmideastpolicy/a/me081026d.htm