Looks like this is the behavior we have come to expect, from an Administration that negotiated a “deal” with the biggest sponsor of terror in the world.
Via Fox News:
Attorneys for 11 American families who won a potential billion-dollar judgment against the Palestinian leadership, which a federal jury blamed for a string of deadly terror attacks, say the U.S. government took the side of terrorists when it weighed in on the case Monday.
The State and Justice departments filed a “statement of interest” in the case known as Sokolow v. PLO, urging U.S. District Judge George Daniels not to force the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian Liberation Organization to post bond of up to $30 million per month while it appeals the jury’s February decision. Daniels had previously said he may require the bond as “some meaningful demonstration that the defendant is ready and willing to pay the judgment.”….
“The State Department should stand on the side of the American terror victims and not on the side of the Palestinian suicide bombers,” attorney Nitsana Darshan Leitner told FoxNews.com Tuesday.
The families’ legal team bitterly cites the fact that the Palestinian government continues to pay imprisoned terrorists and the families of suicide bombers as evidence it has money to meet its legal obligations….
The families won a $218.5 million judgment in February after a seven-week trial in Manhattan Federal Court in which a jury found the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority were responsible for a string of attacks from 2001 to 2004 that killed 33 and injured hundreds. A 1992 law that requires damages in such cases to be tripled, as well as interest on the award, would push it to as much as $1.1 billion. The judgment, which the Palestinians are appealing, would equal nearly a third of the Palestinian Authority’s annual operating budget….
Related:
Times of Israel: The 11 families at the heart of the landmark PA terror trial
Haaretz: Leaked Documents Trigger Outrage Over Palestinian Corruption
And Obama keeps saying that terrorists should be prosecuted in U.S. courts. Ha!
But what resources do the Palestinians have to pay the damages? Presumably their only assets consist of “donations” from governments including ours. So judgments like this are something of a sick joke, because (I assume) all the Palestinian finances are a sick joke, and we’re the butt of that joke. They say Arafat had a vast fortune (billion$) stashed away when he died; whatever became of that?
I’d guess that this is a case where the legal structure to sue terrorists was set up purely for show, by politicians who figured they’d demonstrate how they supported the victims. But it was a fluke that someone actually got a judgment and actual assets were supposed to be seized; that wasn’t supposed to happen! So everyone will waffle for a while, and then it will all quietly disappear, and the world will be as our leaders intend. That’s my speculation, anyway.
Why am I not surprised!
The Republican Party has trapped us in lesser-of-two-evils scenario for a long time. Result: the madness of the present.
Remember this?
The families of the September 11 victims have instituted a trillion-dollar class-action law suit against the Saudi government…
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/3209#.Vc7hvtuPupo
Same reason they are allowing them to gather strength.