911 Families Allowed to Sue Saudi Arabia

[Crouton]

9/11 Families 'Ecstatic' They Can Finally Sue Saudi Arabia

I don't get this at all. How do you sue a whole country? Do they mean individual people? Or the Saudi Government? Either way this seems ridiculous.

 

[Hilander]

If they can prove Saudi Arabia financed al-Qaeda, a known terrorist organization, they have a case. 9/11 cost this country billions and many lives so they should be allowed to sue. Even if they win collecting might be a problem.

 

[Merc]

This is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of. This country would be bought and sold by now if we could get sued for how many civilians and innocents our armed forces have killed.

 

[Crouton]

I'm still confused on the whole "how do you sue a whole country" part. It's almost like these people are assuming that every single person who lives in Saudi is 100% a terrorist who helped attack America and deserves to be sued. Which is of course ridiculous, but this whole thing seems kind of stupid.

 

[dDave]

Thea absurdity of this idea is absolutely beyond me.

How can you possibly a sue a country for something like this? Even if they directly funded what we call terrorism, it's a relative term (not to mention 9/11 was the actions of a few men, we can't judge their whole country based on that). Many other countries aren't exactly pleased with some of the things our very own military does, are they going to sue us for that?

 

[Hilander]

They can file the lawsuit but that is a long ways from winning. They are going to have to prove the government of Saudi Arabia gave them money to carry out this act of terrorism and they knew what they were going to do. I really don't think they will be able to prove it but families of the victims will be happy they were allowed to sue and Saudi Arabia will only be out costs of lawyers which will be a drop in the bucket for them.

I'm amazed we haven't been sued. Probably will be after this.

 

[CaptainObvious]

This is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of. This country would be bought and sold by now if we could get sued for how many civilians and innocents our armed forces have killed.

The claim here isn't against the military, it's a wrongful death action against leaders of the country. The thing is jurisdiction would be in a court of law here, and the survivors would be able to collect from assets here. We can't force a country to pay for damages beyond that, a court here would have no jurisdiction to collect anything else. This really isn't stupid at all, if they can prove they were culpable in those deaths then assets here can be frozen and used to effectuate those judgments.

 

[Merc]

Our military is part of our government, it's a very logical comparison. Not to mention, why shouldn't they be allowed to sue the US government? After all, we did TRAIN Bin Laden (thank the CIA for that one) and equip Iraq with some devastating firepower. To me, it just sounds like something meant to stir up a reaction and to stoke the need for revenge that people still hold tight.

 

[CaptainObvious]

Military actions usually fall under the juridiction of different treaties and conventions. For the most part governments are immune for things done as military actions. This wasn't done as a military action by anyone, it falls closer to an illegal action such as murder. As far as suing for training Bin Laden I'm not sure a claim like that would stick as there is no foreseeability that training him would lead to the murde of US citizens.

Right after 9/11 there was a lawsuit filed by some of the families against Saddam, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and others. Since there was no answer filed a Default was taken against them, but the Bush administration froze all of the available assets that would be used to effectuate the judgment thus any such actions would be moot.