SPEAKING
FREELY US
punishes Iran for Palestinian
resistance By Ardeshir Ommani
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
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On a Sunday morning
in Beirut, October 23, 1983, a yellow Mercedes
Benz truck loaded with 12,000 pounds (5,443
kilograms) of dynamite slammed against the
four-story building that housed the US Battalion
Landing Team Marine Headquarters. The explosion,
which was heard throughout Beirut, killed 241
American servicemen. Minutes later a second truck,
full of explosives, slammed against the barracks
of French paratroopers nearby; the blast killed 58
French soldiers. The organization
Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the
bombing.
The question then arises: what
had led to this attack, and why, thousands of
miles away from their homelands, the American and
French troops were in Beirut in 1983 - in the
midst of Lebanon's 15-year civil war (1975-1990)?
The answer is directly related to the fact
that on June 6, 1982, Israel, led by General Ariel
Sharon, invaded Lebanon. The goal of the invasion
was to wipe out the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO), which had been pushed out of
its homeland and forced to seek refuge in Lebanon.
Israel's attack was so brutal that it left its
toxic trace on the Lebanese society for a long
time. In 18 weeks, according to the Red Cross, as
many as 17,000 people, mostly Lebanese civilians,
were killed by Israeli aerial bombardment.
Wherever the PLO was uprooted, a new organization
that called itself the Party of God (Hezbollah)
took root. Some 6,000 PLO fighters were forced out
of Lebanon, mostly into Tunisia. During their
presence in Lebanon, troops from the US, France,
Italy and Israel backed the Christian Phalange and
suppressed the Muslim majority. While in Lebanon,
the so-called international peacekeeping force did
not demand the total exit of Israeli soldiers from
Lebanon.
As a result on September 15, just
five days after the multinational force had
departed, Israeli troops directed the Christian
militia to attack civilians in the Palestinian
refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Israeli forces
launched flares into the night sky to enable the
killings. To the Lebanese Muslims it was not a
secret that the US and France were behind the
aggression and atrocities of the Zionist state.
Masquerading as peacekeeping forces, the US
Marines and the French paratroopers landed in
Beirut again on September 24. Soon the United
States administration of Ronald Reagan once again
took the side of the Christian Phalangists and
pressed against Druze and Shi'ite Muslims in
central and southern Lebanon. The American and
French so-called peacekeeping troops frequently
used their firepower to shell Druze and Shi'ite
positions in the mountains surrounding Beirut.
Spotting the enemy at home, on April 18,
1983, four months before the major attacks, a
suicide bomber drove his car into the American
Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 16
Americans. The attacker was able to wipe out most
of the CIA's Middle East agents, who were meeting
that day at the US Embassy. All these signs did
not teach the US administration any useful lesson.
On the contrary, US policy moved closer to the
Phalangist and escalated its attacks on Druze and
the poverty-stricken Shi'ite Muslims. Finally, the
end result was that on October 23, 1983, the
suicide bombers attacked the American and French
barracks.
As was shown above, "the most
brilliant act of terrorism" [1] on the American
and French military headquarters in Beirut in 1983
was a caustic criticism of the masses of wandering
and poverty-stricken Palestinians and Shi'ite
Muslims who were made homeless and destitute by
the unilateral and voracious policies of the US
administrations and overwhelming military forces
of the Pentagon and North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) in favor of primarily Israel
and a small minority of pro-imperialist Lebanese
landlords, financiers and foreign tradesmen.
That's where the money is The
tragedy in Beirut was the result of two obvious
reasons: that the US overt support for the Israeli
policy of territorial expansion and occupation of
the Palestinian homeland made the US credibility
and its military forces targets of the contending
forces, and the Islamic Jihad organization had
already professed its responsibility for the
bombings. Therefore, what made the US legal
system, the courts, the intelligence services and
the New York Police Department to freeze and seize
huge private, non-profit and governmental assets
in the US and countries in the European continent?
(See The
great US heist on Iranian assets , Asia
Times Online, May 1, 2012). The answer is, as the
correctional officers say: "follow the money".
It goes without saying that the Islamic
Jihad or the Hezbollah of Lebanon neither had
substantial amounts of money parked in the US and
European banks, nor could they be easily arrested
and hauled to court. Therefore, the US legal
system acted the way William "Willie" Sutton (June
30, 1901-November 2, 1980) did in the first half
of his active life in the 20th century. The law
officers curiously asked Willie why he robbed
banks; his answer was "because that's where the
money is."
Trusting the Imperialist
banks? If the Palestinian Hamas, the PLO,
the Islamic Jihad and the Hezbollah (Party of God)
of Lebanon don't have large amounts of cash or
assets that could be frozen or expropriated, Iran
- still trusting in the credibility of the world
financial system - has kept large amounts of
financial assets that could be easily shaken down.
Iran is therefore vulnerable to the malfeasance of
the US court system, which is weighted toward the
wealthy and profiteers. Not surprising then is the
report in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) from
December 12, 2009, that more than US$2 billion
allegedly held on behalf of the Islamic Republic
of Iran in Citigroup accounts were secretly
ordered frozen in 2008 by a federal court in New
York City. This illegal appropriation of a
sovereign country's assets appears to be the
largest seizure of Iranian assets overseas since
the 1979 Islamic Revolution. [2]
The
illegality of the act of confiscation of a
sizeable fund belonging to a sovereign state,
which enjoys immunity in the sphere of
international relations, speaks loudly when we
learn that 18 months after the execution of the
order issued by the US District Court for the
Southern District of New York, the file remained
under seal and was not made public. In 2007, a US
federal judge ruled that Iran should pay $2.65
billion to families of victims of the 1983 attack.
The question is why it took the US court system 24
years (1983-2007) to come up with an indictment
that Iranian authorities were involved in
directing the terrorist attacks on the US and
French troop barracks?
The Netherlands is
still trying to convince the US authorities to
return the remaining assets, which includes bank
deposits, gold and real estate property. The sum
of the $2 billion Iranian fund frozen in a US bank
is nowadays claimed by three parties
simultaneously: the Islamic Republic of Iran as
the owner of the fund; a group of lawyers who are
seeking to gain access to $2.65 billion (a sum
greater than the frozen $2 billion fund) for
personal enrichment and distribution between more
than 1,000 claimants who say they are relatives of
the dead or injured US troops; and thirdly, the US
government, which prefers to keep the large sum of
money frozen for the unforeseen future, knowing
the unlawful nature of its act. By signing the
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law
on December 31, 2011, President Barack Obama
required the US hold the Iranian money in the
frozen state and prohibits any proprietary access
to it.
In addition to the actual sums
frozen or expropriated by the US authorities,
there are "hundreds of billions of dollars in
default judgments against Iran, levied by US
Courts in favor of Americans" [3] and Israel.
Ford-era immunity The Foreign
Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), signed into law
by President Gerald Ford on October 21, 1976,
established limitations on whether a foreign
sovereign nation (or its political subdivisions,
agencies or instrumentalities) could be sued in US
courts.
If a foreign defendant qualifies
as a "Foreign State," the act provides that it
shall be immune to action in any US court -
federal or state. If a defendant establishes that
it is a "foreign state" under the FSIA, then it is
entitled to sovereign immunity. For Iran to prove
that it is a foreign state, it suffices to show
that it is a full-fledged member of the United
Nations and all its attachments. Accordingly, for
the lawsuit to be taken seriously by US courts,
the plaintiff must prove that one of the act's
exceptions to immunity apply. That came from a US
court ruling which concluded that "with massive
material and technical support from the Iranian
government," Hezbollah was able to carry out the
1983 attack. From there onward, and despite the
absence of any representation in court for Iran,
the court laid down the grounds for denying Iran
the right to declare its foreign sovereign
immunity from suits initiated by US citizens.
Put simply, the case the United States
courts and lawmakers in congress have laid against
Iran in the years since the Beirut attack is based
on the allegation that it provided material
support to Hezbollah in connection with the
bombing, and had been designated a state sponsor
of terrorism on January 14, 1984, again in
connection with that attack. The US decided that
Iran provided Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad with
materials that were ultimately used in their
attacks against the US barracks in Beirut that
resulted in the injury and deaths of US soldiers.
On that basis, George Shultz, the US Secretary of
State under President Ronald Reagan, marked Iran
as a "state sponsor of terrorism".
Such a
label that could equally be applied to the United
States government, since it is common knowledge
that the US is the biggest proliferator of
weapons, including missiles, warships, warplanes,
chemical weapons and nuclear armaments. Without a
doubt, these weapons are used to wage wars in
which people are killed for the purpose of
occupation, which fits the case of Israel against
the Palestinians or the people of Syria or Iran.
Within the peace and anti-imperialist
camp, there are organizations believing that the
struggle against the Islamic Republic of Iran for
its type of government and policies on gender and
dress code carry as much weight and significance
as their struggle against US intervention,
sanctions, terrorist activities, assassinations of
Iranian scientists, and war threats. This
political analysis tries abstractly to equate two
unequals by prescribing the same kind of treatment
to problems that are entirely different by nature.
The people of Iran are suffering from high prices,
unemployment and lack of vital industrial
commodities because of the US embargo and
sanctions, not because women are wearing head
scarves. In the words of Aristotle, "There is
nothing so unequal as the equal treatment of
unequals."
Ardeshir Ommani, president of the American
Iranian Friendship Committee (AIFC), is a writer
and political analyst with a background in
political economy. AIFC’s website is www.iranaifc.com.
The author may be contacted at:
ardeshiromm@optonline.net
Speaking
Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows
guest writers to have their say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
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