An American flag flies at half staff outside the U.S. Supreme Court after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. (Photo: Brenda Smialowski/AFP/Getty)
The Supreme Court Wednesday upheld a judgment permitting families of victims of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut to collect nearly $2 billion from Iran. The assets, which are also available to the families of other terrorist attacks, are from frozen Iranian funds.
The high court on Wednesday ruled 6-2 in favor of some 1,300 plaintiffs related to 241 U.S. service members who died in the Beirut bombing and victims of other attacks that previous investigations and courts have linked to Shiite regime in Tehran.
Liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion for the court, which wholesale rejected the challenge to the judgement made by advocates of Iran’s central bank. They were essentially trying to stave off previous court orders that would have allowed the relatives to be paid monies currently sitting in a federal court trust account.
Iran’s Bank Markazi argued that Congress was intruding into the business of federal courts when it passed a 2012 law that instructs the banks’ assets in the United States to be turned over to the victims’ families. President Barack Obama issued an executive order earlier in 2012 freezing the Iranian central bank’s assets in the United States.
In fact, over the past two decades, the U.S. Congress has repeatedly amended the law and passed new laws to allow victims to sue over state-sponsored terrorism. However, Iran, who was recently given billions in freed assets through the Iranian nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration, has simply refused to comply with court rulings.
The law, Ginsburg wrote, “does not transgress restraints placed on Congress and the president by the Constitution.”
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not sign on to the opinion.
“The authority of the political branches is sufficient; they have no need to seize ours,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the dissent.
The Supreme Court case–Bank Markazi v. Peterson–involved $1.75 billion in bonds, plus accumulating interest, owned by the Iranian bank and held by Citibank in New York.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit included relatives of the victims of the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, the 1996 terrorist bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia which killed 19 service members, and other attacks that were carried out by groups with links to Iran. The lead plaintiff is Deborah Peterson, whose brother, Lance Cpl. James C. Knipple, was killed in Beirut.
“We are extremely pleased with the Supreme Court’s decision, which will bring long-overdue relief to more than 1,000 victims of Iranian terrorism and their families, many of whom have waited decades for redress,” said Theodore Olson, the former Bush administration Justice Department official who argued on behalf of the families at the Supreme Court.
