The Big Bet to Hold Banks Liable for Terrorism

[antigop]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-19/are-credit-suisse-rbs-standard-chartered-hsbc-and-barclays-terrorist-banks-

How a New Jersey lawyer is fighting to make banks liable for violent deaths at the hands of extremists

Steven Vincent had just left a money exchange in the southern Iraqi city of Basra when a group of men in police uniforms drove up in a white truck and grabbed him and his translator. It was Aug. 2, 2005. Vincent, a freelance American journalist, had reported on the war for two-and-a-half years. British troops occupied Basra, but he operated without an embed arrangement. British and Iraqi authorities later found Vincent on the outskirts of the city shot dead. The Iraqi translator survived.

Three days earlier the New York Times had published an op-ed article by Vincent, “Switched Off in Basra,” in which he described the infiltration of the local police by Iranian-backed Islamic extremists. “Steven was executed for what he wrote,” says his widow, Lisa Ramaci. She’s set up a foundation in his name that donates money to the families of Iraqis injured or killed because of their work with U.S. journalists. And Ramaci did something else. In November she joined a lawsuit on behalf of relatives of U.S. soldiers and civilians who’ve died in Iraq as a result of violence linked to Iranian-backed militias and terrorist groups.

The suit, filed in federal court in Brooklyn, N.Y., seeks hundreds of millions of dollars not from death squads, whose members aren’t likely to show up with lawyers in tow. Instead, it targets five of the largest banks in the world: HSBC, Credit Suisse, Barclays, Standard Chartered, and Royal Bank of Scotland. “Defendants,” the suit declares, “committed acts of international terrorism.” The suit, known as Freeman v. HSBC, takes its name from lead plaintiff Charlotte Freeman, whose husband, Brian, an Army captain, died in a Jan. 20, 2007, attack by Iranian-trained militants in Karbala, Iraq.

This far-fetched-seeming attempt to pin culpability for violent deaths on bankers relies on an intricate theory of causation: The European-based banks have handled hundreds of billions of dollars in international transfers for Iranian financial institutions. The Iranian financial institutions, in turn, have moved money for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an elite Iranian paramilitary organization, and for Hezbollah, the militant Shia movement based in Lebanon and backed by Iran. The Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah have trained and armed Shia groups in Iraq that have kidnapped, shot, and blown up Americans, including Vincent and Freeman.

[yurbud]

1. I thought this would be more about Saudi and our other allies backing al Qaeda & ISIS