This month marks the 30th anniversary of the truck bomb attack by a Hezbollah extremist that killed 241 U.S. Marines in their Beirut barracks. The massive blast on October 23, 1983, left few survivors; bent reinforced concrete columns “like rubber bands,” as a judge later described it; and seared the term “suicide bombing” into the American psyche.
Legal remedies have been slow. In October 2001, some 812 family members of the victims sued the government of Iran, which they believe directed the bombing. In 2007 the family members won a $2.65 billion default judgment in Peterson v. the Islamic Republic of Iran, with no obvious way to enforce it—until this year. On July 9 a federal district court judge in Manhattan ordered Citibank N.A. to turn over $1.9 billion in blocked Iranian assets to a trust pending resolution of Iran’s appeal. The proceeds would be shared by a now enlarged group of 1,210 claimants.
