March 20, 2016
A Ffederal judge in New York last Thursday ordered Iran to pay the immense sum of $10.5 billion to the families of those killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks, for the first time tying the Islamic Republic to the eponymous act of terrorism on American soil.
The news got remarkably limited media attention, considering the fact that it means a US federal court has convicted Iran of committing an act of war against the United States.
The financial penalty assessed against Iran raises by almost a quarter the sums Iran has been ordered to pay for acts of terrorism abroad in the 20 years since the Congress gave American “victims of terrorism” the right to sue the Islamic Republic.
US Judge George Daniels of the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York ordered Iran to pay a total of $7.5 billion to the survivors of those killed in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon almost 15 years ago plus $3 billion to go to insurance companies that had already paid out that much for property damage caused by the attacks.
The personal payments are broken down to comprise $2 million to each estate for the victim’s pain and $6.88 million in punitive damages for all of those who joined the suit.
The ruling is what is called a default judgment because Iran never responded to the court’s notification and never dispatched a lawyer to contest the suit. From 1995, when “victims of terrorism” were authorized to sue, Iran has never gone to court to defend itself. It has simply declared that the Iranian government enjoys “sovereign immunity” and cannot be sued in another country’s courts.
Sovereign immunity is a general principle of international law. But it is not absolute. The United States was the very first country in the world to put the principle of sovereign immunity into the statute books in the 1790s. Over the years, the US has added various exceptions—including the terrorism exception in 1995—until there are now about a dozen exceptions. While Iran argues that sovereign immunity is absolute, it has passed a law that allows its own citizens to sue the United States in certain circumstances, making hash of its own absolutist argument.
Judge Daniels actually found Iran responsible for the 9/11 attacks four years ago in a decision handed down in December 2011. It was only last week that he determined the volume of money Iran would be ordered to pay. Before his decision, two decades of court cases had piled up judgments totaling around $46 billion against Iran. The Islamic Republic has paid none of that. And the “victims of terrorism” have been able to find only small amounts of Iranian assets to seize.
Judge Daniels wrote that there were two primary ways that the Islamic Republic “furnished material and direct support” for the 9/11 attacks.
First, he described in detail how many of the 19 9/11 attackers crossed Iran going to and from Al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan with the government of Iran “ordering its border inspectors not to place telltale stamps in the passports of these future hijackers.”
Second, Judge Daniels said a “terrorist agent” of the government of Iran was assigned specifically to coordinate the travel of the hijackers.
Most of the evidence the judge cited for those Iranian links to the 9/11 attacks was taken from the US commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks.
Judge Daniels also cited an Iranian memo dated May 14, 2001, from Ali-Akbar Nateq-Nuri, who oversaw the Supreme Leader’s intelligence apparatus. The memo, the judge wrote, “clearly demonstrates Iran’s awareness of an upcoming major attack on the United States and directly connects Iran … to the planned attack.”