Freezing Afghan funds leaves me, other terrorism victims behind
Over the last several months, victims of terrorism like myself have watched an uncomfortable but alltoo-predictable legal fight emerge throughout our community — and it’s time for our elected officials to put an end to it.
This legal mess started back in February when President Joe Biden issued an executive order regarding $7 billion in frozen Afghan funds, and ostensibly set aside half of the total amount for the benefit of a very small group of victims of terrorism. The problem is that his order bypassed a bipartisan system designed by Congress to handle complex terrorism victim compensation issues and instead left the issue to the courts to decide which victims were deserving enough to recover from the limited funds.
Despite the unseemly legal drama unfolding, there is a way forward. President Biden can either issue another executive order or Congress can pass legislation that instead directs the money into the U.S. Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism (USVSST) Fund. That simple fix would solve this problem altogether, put an end to the messy fighting and send a strong signal that American victims of terrorism — especially its military veterans, who are left out in the cold by the executive order — have not been forgotten.
Support for military victims of terrorism is a deeply personal issue. In 1983, I was serving in the U.S. Army and assigned to temporary duty with the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, when Hezbollah attacked the Embassy by detonating a van packed with 2,000 pounds of explosives. The force of the blast hurled me out of a fifth-story window where I was impaled through the skull and hand on the metal antipersonnel spikes of the gate encircling the compound, causing immense physical injuries.
Assumed dead, I was finally found by a young Lebanese boy who heard my cries. I was then removed from the fencing and rushed into emergency surgery, where I was twice pronounced dead before falling into a coma. I was fortunate to awaken but with permanent injuries, such as the loss of my eye and nerve damage when so many of my friends and colleagues were killed.
My story is disturbingly common. Thousands of others share similar experiences of suffering as a result of vicious terrorist attacks like those targeting the USS Cole in 2000, other Americans in Beirut during the 1980s, and American embassies in East Africa in 1998. We have endured the aftereffects of these attacks for decades .
For many years, we had no legal remedies at all. In 1996, Congress paved the way for us to bring lawsuits against state-sponsors of terrorism for their role in facilitating the attacks. Despite obtaining judgments, we often could not satisfy those judgments; what little assets of the terrorist state existed, thousands of equally deserving victims had to battle one another in court for a chance to obtain them.
Congress finally acted to alleviate our suffering by establishing the USVSST Fund in 2015 to help victims like me receive compensation for our injuries, suffering and losses. The fund equitably distributes funds that the U.S. government obtains from violators of terrorism-related sanctions programs among all eligible victims of terror so that we do not have to cruelly weigh the suffering of one victim against another, as is happening now. Instead, the USVSST Fund rightly recognizes that every terrorist attack is a tragedy, regardless of where or when the incident took place, or which terrorist actor or state the funding arises from.
The USVSST Fund serves both 9/11 families and those military victims, like me, who have waited decades to satisfy our longstanding judgments. It was born from a carefully crafted, bipartisan piece of legislation with the blessing of both the Obama and Trump administrations to be the sole mechanism through which funds are pooled and distributed to avoid painful infighting between victims who have already endured so much personal tragedy.
It is a common-sense solution to a very complex problem. We are seeing the unfortunate effects of President Biden’s decision to skirt that solution.