Injustice lingers from '83 Marine bombing

WASHINGTON - For a quarter-century, Lt. Col. Howard Gerlach thought the explosion had blown him out the window of his second-floor office. Then last year, at a reunion to mark the anniversary of the Oct. 23, 1983, bombing of the Marine headquarters at the Beirut, Lebanon, airport, he met his rescuer.

Gerlach had been found trapped between the pancaked second and third floors. He remembers nothing about the immediate aftermath of the blast, which broke his neck and left him partially paralyzed. "You sure look a lot better now than the last time I saw you," his colleague told him.

Cleta Wells, of Mariposa, Calif., lost her husband, First Sgt. Tandy Walker Wells, in the Beirut bombing, which killed 241 U.S. servicemen and was the worst terrorist attack on U.S. citizens before Sept. 11, 2001. Her grandson Michael Steven Pohle Jr., born eight days before the attack, was killed in the April 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.

The family had always seen Michael as God's recompense for Tandy. "He took both of them away," Wells said.

Gerlach and Wells are among hundreds of Americans, survivors and families both, who have waited 26 years for restitution for the bombing, fighting in court and in Congress - often against their own government.

On Sept. 30, District of Columbia U.S. District Chief Judge Royce Lamberth, who has presided over a decade's worth of terrorist victims' lawsuits against foreign powers, wrote in a 191-page opinion that "the notion of suing the terrorists out of business has not been realized."

"The harsh reality is that the promise of relief in these actions - if there ever was one - is more distant and seemingly illusory today than it was when this exercise started," Lamberth wrote, criticizing politicians in both Congress and the White House for falsely raising the families' hopes.

Lamberth was the same judge who in September 2007 ordered Iran to pay $2.65 billion to the families.

Four years earlier, he had ruled Iran was responsible for the suicide truck bombing against the Marines, whom President Ronald Reagan had sent to Lebanon as peacekeepers. The powerful, sophisticated, gas-enhanced bomb, with an explosive force estimated at 12,000 or even 22,000 pounds of TNT, had been the work of Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shiite group.

Now, as another anniversary passes, the survivors and their families fear they will be forgotten as the Obama administration moves toward diplomatic engagement with the country behind the 1983 attack: Iran.

Wells no longer sees footage of that terrible day on her television. "You don't hear anything. You don't see anything. They say, 'We'll never forget.' I'm sorry; they have forgotten."

If there was ever any doubt that Iran was behind the bombing, Lambert's 2003 ruling dispelled it.

Among the evidence in the trial, which Iranian representatives did not attend, were intercepted cables from Iran's Foreign Ministry to Ali Akbar Mohtashami, its ambassador in Damascus, Syria, urging an attack on the American servicemen.

Congress passed a law in 2008 that should have made it easier for families to collect. Still, they haven't gotten a dime.

The Justice and State Departments have gone to court repeatedly to block the families and their attorneys from seizing Iranian diplomatic property, funds held by foreign companies that do business with Iran, even 2,500-year-old Persian tablets on loan to the University of Chicago. Most assets in the United States held directly by Iran were moved out of the country as part of the agreement ending the 1979-81 Iran hostage crisis.

Most recently, in June, the Obama administration argued in federal court in San Francisco against the families and their attorneys, backing a judge's ruling that they could not claim assets of firms including CMA CGM, a French shipping company that does business in Iran.

Lawyers for State and Justice argued that the issue could have "significant, detrimental impact on our foreign relations, as well as on the reciprocal treatment of the United States and its extensive overseas property holdings."