Court ruling denies Khobar Towers victims closure

The decimated Khobar Towers where U.S. soldiers were living

A court has awarded about $28 million to a soldier injured in the 1996 terrorist attack on the Khobar Towers residence for U.S. military personnel in Dahran, Saudi Arabia, and his parents in a lawsuit against the Islamic Republic of Iran, its minister of intelligence and security and its Revolutionary Guard.

Now plaintiffs in another case seeking damages for the death of their family member against the same defendants are wondering why Washington, D.C., Judge Deborah A. Robinson earlier this year dismissed their claim, asserting the plaintiffs "offered no evidence regarding the action of any official, employee or agent" of the defendants.

"We're talking about (a) judge who's obviously sympathetic to the terrorists more than to the airmen who protect her life," said Dari Bradley, who lost a nephew, Airman 1st Class Joseph E. Rimkus, in the attack. "That's just a downright shame."

She said she's asked Congress, through her representative, to consider impeachment proceedings against the judge over the actions in the case brought by her family and the survivors of others killed in that explosion.

Author Kenneth R. Timmerman, whose book "Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson" is available at Shop.WND.com, documented in a report that the judge's opinion came earlier this year just when European negotiator Javier Solana was in Tehran to present a U.S.-European offer to Iran in return for halting its nuclear weapons program.

A victims' advocate, Michael Engelberg, told NewsMax it appeared the State Department intervened to get the case dismissed in order to appease Iran. "This is more than coincidental," he reported at the time.

That 45-page ruling by Robinson rejected testimony from former FBI Director Louis Freeh and his deputy, Dale Watson, that Iran was, in fact, clearly involved in planning, preparing for and executing the attack.

The judge found "their testimony regarding the involvement of the government of Iran in the bombing of Khobar Towers" was just their opinion as private citizens.

But the new ruling, dated just two weeks ago by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth in a lawsuit brought by Paul Alexander Blais, who was seriously injured in the explosion and now is disabled, concluded that Iran and its agents could be held responsible under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act in the U.S. It concluded Blais is entitled to nearly $22 million, with additional amounts for his parents.

"In order to subject a foreign sovereign to suit under (this section), plaintiffs must show that: (1) the foreign sovereign was designated by the State Department as a 'state sponsor of terrorism'; (2) the victim or plaintiff was a U.S. national at the time the acts took place; and (3) the foreign sovereign engaged in conduct that falls within the ambit of the statute," Judge Lamberth wrote.

"Each of the requirements are met in this case," the judge found. "Here, Mr. Blais unquestionable experienced harmful and offensive contact in the forms of shockwaves of the explosion created by defendants' co-conspirators, and the physical contact of the rubble from the Khobar Towers building that fell upon him as a result of the explosion.

"Accordingly, defendants Iran, MOIS, and the IRGC are liable for battery under the theory of vicarious liability," he found. "First, defendants Iran, MOIS, and the IRGC provided material support to Saudi Hezbollah with the intent that Saudi Hezbollah would carry out attacks that would cause severe emotional distress. Second, the tragic bombing of the Khobar Towers by means of material support and civil conspiracy is an act that is nothing short of extreme, outrageous, and beyond all bounds of civil decency.

"As is the nature of terrorism, terrorists seek to perform acts that are deliberately outrageous and bring about extreme suffering in order to achieve political ends. Third, defendants' actions in facilitating and supporting the Khobar Towers bombing proximately caused Mr. Blais' emotional distress because the material support and direction given to Saudi Hezbollah ensured the event would occur."

However, the report from Timmerman about the first case said that while Freeh and Watson both clearly wanted to describe the FBI investigation into the bombing, "Judge Robinson actively thwarted their testimony."

"At one point, lawyers for the victims asked Freeh, 'Did the FBI learn of the involvement of any foreign government in the attack?' Judge Robinson struck the question, and insisted on directing the questioning herself after that," he reported.

Freeh noted during his testimony that six suspects he interviewed "admitted to us that they were members of Saudi Hezbollah … They implicated several Iranian officials in funding and planning the attack," Timmerman said.

Freeh concluded that "all the training and the funding was done by the IRGC with support from senior leaders of the Government of Iran."

That evidence, however, was uncompelling for Judge Robinson.

Timmerman noted that at key points during the hearing, the judge would recess the proceedings, disappear into her chambers, then re-emerge with long lists of questions that apparently had been dictated to her, seeking to impeach Freeh's testimony.

Michael Engelberg, whose American Center for Civil Justice works on claims by victims of state-sponsored terrorism, told Timmerman it appeared the judge was calling the State Department for instructions.

Lawyers for the State Department also submitted an amicus brief that supported the Iranian government, and said they had done so because the court asked them to intervene.

Ms. Bradley said the separate lawsuits are over the same attack by the same people on the same U.S. military compound with members of the same military unit the victims – and she wonders how such differing results can happen.

"How that can happen in today's America is unclear to us," she said. Her family, she said, does not have the habit "to go out and protest and cause a ruckus. But it is in our interest that justice be served."

"I'm proud to say my nephew was a young man devoted to God, his mother and his nation," she said.

But she said the families have had no closure, and that's their goal. A judgment would be one way to resolve that, she said, since under the Saudi Arabian procedures, no one can be put on trial for the attack until all suspects have been detained, and that isn't likely to happen.

The military has reported that it was late in the evening on June 25, 1996, when someone drove a sewage tanker truck into the parking lot adjacent to the building where U.S. soldiers were staying. Security radioed an alert but before the building could be evacuated, the truck exploded, stripping the fa?ade from the front of the building and killing 19 soldiers.

It was estimated to have had the force of 20,000-30,000 pounds of TNT.

"As the blast waves hit Building 131, they propelled pieces of the Jersey wall barriers into the first four floors. The outer walls of the bottom floors were blown into rooms. With no structural support below, the facades of the top three floors sheered off and fell into a pile of rubble. Walls on the east and west ends were blasted four feet from original positions, causing floors in several bedrooms to collapse. Building 131 did not collapse because it was made of prefabricated cubicles that were bolted together. Had it been built in a more traditional manner, it might have caved in from the blast," the military report said.

Military personnel later were relocated away from those buildings, because they could not be protected. Fourteen individuals were named in indictments in 2001 for the attack, but none has been brought to trial.

Freeh later wrote that he worked closely with the kingdom's antiterrorist police in tracking down suspects.

"Over the course of our investigation the evidence became clear that while the attack was staged by Saudi Hezbollah members, the entire operation was planned, funded and coordinated by Iran's security services, the IRGC and MOIS, acting on orders from the highest levels of the regime in Tehran," he said.

He said the White House "was unable or unwilling," however, to help the FBI gain access to several critical witnesses inside Saudi Arabia. "The only direction from the Clinton administration regarding Iran was to order the FBI to stop photographing and fingerprinting official Iranian delegations entering the U.S. …," he said.

Even with the statements from the terrorists indicting the Iranian groups, "the Clinton administration refused to support a prosecution." Then when President George Bush took office, a new prosecutor took over and the indictments were handed down.

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