Congress Wants to Make Iran, Palestinians Pay Terror Verdicts

Congress is weighing several legislative actions to compensate US victims of Iranian and Palestinian terrorism amid bipartisan frustration with the Obama administration.

A Senate Judiciary panel led by presidential candidate Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is looking into several avenues to ensure that victims and their families receive the awards they're entitled to after winning in US courts. Attorneys and outside experts laid out several options at an emotional hearing Nov. 4 with families of the victims, during which both Cruz and his Democratic counterpart vowed to work together on solutions.

“Despite the slaughter and maiming of an untold number of American citizens at the hands of Palestinian and Iranian terrorists,” Cruz said in his opening statement, “the United States government has, rather shockingly, failed time and time again to fulfill its sovereign duty: to obtain justice for its citizens.”

Despite some rhetorical bombast from the Tea Party champion, the panel heard several serious proposals for pushing back against terrorist attacks without unraveling the Palestinian Authority or the nuclear deal with Iran. Witnesses testified at the hearing that victims of Iranian terrorism have received just $225 million — half of 1% — of the $44 billion awarded to them in 85 US court judgments, a statistic that seemed to rattle all the members.

“Our focus really ought to be how to help get justice, which includes recovery, for the victims of terrorism, in a way that deters future acts of terrorism by … nonstate actors and state actors,” said ranking member Chris Coons, D-Del. “How do we really achieve justice for victims?”

He thanked the panelists for providing “concrete menus of potential action that we could take.”

…

Among these are proposals from Orde Kittrie, of the conservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, to establish a US office of “lawfare” that would work with victims in devising legal strategies to “go after US adversaries and achieve justice.” Kittrie also urged the US government to “maximize the ability of US victims to seize appropriate Iranian assets in foreign countries” in a way that would both achieve justice for terror victims and “level the playing field” for US companies, which are still largely prohibited from doing business with Iran under the terms of the nuclear agreement.

… 

Read the full article here.