Confirmed Cases of Zika Virus in America

Posted on January 28, 2016January 28, 2016 by Denise Simon

InquisitR: Zika virus has been confirmed in Hawaii by United States health officials on January 16, 2016. The first case of the mosquito-borne virus in a birth on U.S. soil came with a newborn baby suffering from brain damage at a hospital in Oahu.

According to Reuters, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesman Tom Skinner cautioned against assuming that the Zika virus was circulating around Hawaii. He stressed, however, that the imported disease could make the jump to local transmission.

“But I think it’s important for us to understand that there are going to be imported cases of Zika to the United States and we won’t be surprised if we start to see some local transmission of the virus.”

The Zika virus, which is spread by mosquitoes, has been found in nearly two dozen Latin American countries. The virus is suspected of causing birth defects. Health officials are concerned it could spread to the US and Canada.

CNN: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged pregnant women to postpone travel to Bolivia, Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Saint Martin, Suriname, Samoa, Venezuela and Puerto Rico. The CDC also recommended that women who have recently traveled to these places during their pregnancy be screened and monitored for the virus.

That’s because the virus has been linked to an uptick in babies born with a neurological condition called microcephaly, which can cause abnormally small heads and serious, sometimes deadly, developmental delays.

The WHO attributed the virus’ rapid spread to the fact that people in the Americas lack immunity because they haven’t been exposed to it before.

***

USAToday: A Minnesota woman has tested positive for the Zika virus after traveling to Central America, state health officials announced Wednesday.

About a dozen Americans in a handful of states have been diagnosed with Zika after visiting outbreak zones, but there is no evidence the virus, which is linked to an outbreak of birth defects in Brazil, is spreading in the USA. The virus doesn’t spread from person to person, like the flu. It’s spread by mosquitoes, like malaria and West Nile Virus.

The mosquito species that is known to spread Zika, the Aedes, doesn’t live in Minnesota, making it unlikely the disease will spread in that state.

The new case was diagnosed in a woman in her 60s from Anoka County, Minn., according to the Minnesota Department of Health. Her symptoms began Jan. 1, after she returned from Honduras. She was not hospitalized and is expected to make a full recovery, health officials said.

About 80% of people infected with Zika virus have no symptoms at all, according to the World Health Organization. Those who do become ill tend to have mild symptoms, including a low fever, rash, joint pain, headache and pink eye.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Posted on January 27, 2016January 27, 2016 by Denise Simon

As survivors of the Holocaust dwindle, 71 years later, memorials are taking place across Europe.

FNC: Commemoration of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the camp in Poland where 1.1 million Jews were murdered, is always a somber event, but on the 71^st anniversary current events have cast a new and dark shadow. Waves of refugees from countries where hatred of Jews is taught and practiced have flooded Germany, prompting some of the nation’s 100,000-strong community to fear for their future. More on the story is here.

Eichmann refused to admit any guilt during last minute pleas.

Embedded image permalink

In 1962:

Berlin mulls uses for Goebbels’ abandoned love nest

Wandlitz (Germany) (AFP) – History weighs heavily on the German property market, no more so than at a sprawling lakeside villa that once served as a love nest for Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

Berlin has been trying to sell the — in theory — prime slab of real estate north of the German capital for 15 years.

But rather than a gem that the cash-strapped city, which is scrambling to pay for a record refugee influx, can liquidate, Berlin has admitted it sees the asset as little more than a millstone around its neck.

Berlin Immobilienmanagement GmbH (BIM), the city’s wholly owned real estate agency, has in effect given up on the sale and expressed concerns it could fall into “the wrong hands”.

“I am really afraid that this could become a shrine for Nazis and I don’t think we should take that risk,” the executive director of the BIM, Birgit Moehring, said.

Instead, it hopes to lease the property, whose idyllic setting is nestled in a wood and perched on the small Bogen lake.

The squat, sprawling house was used by the top Nazi as “country retreat” perfect for trysts with a revolving cast of budding actresses and paramours.

“It was refuge from the busy city” 40 kilometres (25 miles) to the south, BIM spokesman Christian Breitkreutz told AFP.

Berlin itself bought the land complete with a small cabin in 1936 for Goebbels, Hitler’s nefariously skilled spin doctor, in honour of his 39th birthday.

Goebbels was taken with its secluded setting and subsequently had a much larger villa built on the site bankrolled by UFA, the movie production house he ran with an iron fist.

The luxury facilities included a private cinema and spacious living quarters overlooking the lake.

View of the villa built for Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels between 1936-39, near the Bogensee …

– Attacked by damp cold –

Today, the original generous picture windows, rich wood panelling and marble fixtures can still be seen, said Roberto Mueller, who has worked as a guard at the site since 1984.

But the house, ravaged by moisture and biting cold in the isolated and abandoned site, has begun to rapidly crumble.

The city had repeatedly tried to sell the house in recent years and a last attempt, via a public tender, came up dry in December, Moehring said, confirming that BIM had finally given up.

Goebbels and his wife Magda committed suicide in Hitler’s bunker as Berlin was overrun by Soviet Army troops in May 1945, after she murdered their six children.

Entrance to the main building of the Communist Free German Youth (FDJ-Freie Deutsche Jugend) school …

Dealing with the Goebbels villa has been all the more complicated because it is on the same slice of land as another vestige of the country’s tumultuous past.

In the post-war years, East Germany built a vast complex on the land in the Stalinist style of the early 1950s to house a training centre for the FDJ, the communist party’s youth indoctrination organisation.

The regime also used it to put up visiting party cadres from “brother states” such as Vietnam, Cuba and Angola.

At the time, the neighbouring Goebbels villa was converted into a supermarket for FDJ students and a children’s nursery, Mueller said.

In total, the four main post-war buildings cover some 1,400 square metres (15,000 square feet) of bedrooms, conference halls, reception and banquet space.

Villa built for Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels between 1936-39, seen near the Bogensee lake n …

Day by day, they are falling apart.

– Phantom village –

“At present there is no heating, no running water, there is serious damage to the facades, the roofs are falling apart and inside there is a lot to do too,” Moehring admits, saying renovation costs would be “considerable”.

Currently the only viable use for the phantom village has been as a unique, evocative film set, most recently for the adaptation of the international wartime bestseller “Alone in Berlin” starring Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson.

“What would really appeal to us would be if someone arrived with an intelligent concept to use this place which is so steeped in history,” Moehring said, suggesting a continuing education campus or a hotel as other possible options.

She said BIM had been in touch with potential investors. But a major stumbling block remains the fact that the Goebbels villa is a listed building.

Because that prevents any major change to the structure, Moehring would like to see it stripped of its protected status.

“I am someone who absolutely defends the importance in this city of always being able to feel the presence of history,” she said.

“But you also have to ask the question whether it is sensible to maintain certain buildings under the protection a historic monument grants.”

If it were lifted, Moehring said the best thing might be the most radical measure: razing it to the ground.

Germany has often been confronted with questions over how to deal with the toxic legacy of sites linked to its bitter 20th century history.

Hitler’s own “Eagle’s Nest” mountain-top lodge now has a restaurant, a cafe and shops selling books with titles such as “Hitler’s Mountain” that draws thousands of tourists each year.

Many of Germany’s ministries pitched up in the Nazis’ former official buildings when the government moved to Berlin from Bonn in 1999.

And the hangars of the former airport Tempelhof, a prime example of the Nazis’ architectural gigantism, and the erstwhile headquarters of communist East Germany’s feared Stasi secret police are both being used to house tens of thousands of asylum seekers.

Kerry Allowing Iran and Russia to Dictate Syria Peace Talks

Posted on January 26, 2016January 26, 2016 by Denise Simon

The Obama administration just ‘made a scary retreat’ in its Syria policy, and negotiations are quickly unraveling

BusinessInsider: In a meeting with members of Syria’s opposition in Saudi Arabia on Saturday, US Secretary of State John Kerry demanded that rebels accept a set of preconditions dictated by Russia and Iran in order to participate in peace talks, according to an explosive report by the daily pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat.

The terms Kerry reportedly asked the opposition Saudi-backed High Negotiation Committee (HNC) to accept — including a “national unity government” instead of a transitional governing body that would phase Syrian President Bashar al-Assad out of power — represent “a scary retreat in the US position,” opposition sources told the head of Al Hayat’s Damascus bureau, Ibrahim Hamidi.

According to translations provided by multiple Middle East analysts on Twitter, Kerry told the opposition delegation that, based on an “understanding” he had reached with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Assad has the right to run for reelection and there will be no set timetable for his departure.

That stands in contrast to the White House’s previous position that while Assad does not have to go immediately, the timing of his departure should be addressed during negotiations.

Kerry also signaled the Obama administration’s endorsement of a four-point peace plan for Syria created by Iran, a staunch ally of Assad. The plan calls for an immediate ceasefire, the establishment of a national unity government, the anchoring of minority rights in the constitution, and internationally supervised presidential elections in Syria.

United Nations (U.N.) Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura attends a meeting on Syria with representatives of the five permanent members of the Security Council (P5) at the United Nations European headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, January 13, 2016. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse Thomson ReutersUN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura.

UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura pushed for the national ceasefire on Monday, saying in a press conference from Geneva that “the condition is it should be a real ceasefire and not just local.”

The ceasefire would apply to all warring parties but the ISIS and Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. As Al Hayat has noted, that implicitly would grant legitimacy and “an official status” to the Shiite militias Iran has built in Syria to support Assad.

Including minority rights in the constitution, meanwhile, would serve as an attempt to “anchor sectarian tensions” between Sunni and Shiite Muslims within a legal framework.

These demands are “a desperate move” by the US to make the negotiations “look like progress,” tweeted Hassan Hassan, coauthor of “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror” and resident fellow at the DC-based think tank Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

“De Mistura also echoed Russia’s demands. Short-sighted of the US to think this will go well,” he added.

So far, it is not going anywhere. Members of the HNC reportedly rejected Kerry’s demands and have threatened to boycott the negotiations altogether. They reiterated that they will not attend the talks until the government halts air strikes and ends its sieges of rebel-held territory, in accordance with UN resolution 2254, adopted last month by the UN Security Council.

syria opposition aleppo Abdalrhman Ismail/ReutersProtesters carry banners and opposition flags as they march in Aleppo, Syria, asking for the release of prisoners held in government jails and the lifting of the siege on besieged areas.

The terms of that resolution have failed to materialize, but Kerry apparently pressured the opposition into attending the talks anyway. Rebel sources told Al Hayat that Kerry went one step further and threatened to cut off US aid to rebel groups if they failed to show up at the negotiating table.

On Monday, Kerry reiterated that preconditions are a nonstarter for negotiations. But he categorically denied that he had threatened to cut off aid to the rebel groups.

“The position of the United States is and hasn’t changed. We are still supporting the opposition, politically, financially and militarily,” he said, according to The Associated Press. “We completely empowered them. I don’t know where this is coming from.”

He noted, however, that “it’s up to the Syrians to decide what happens to Assad,” effectively echoing Russian officials.

Nawaf Obaid, an Al Hayat columnist and visiting fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, further noted the meeting’s most significant and “shocking” points in a series of tweets on Sunday: The series of tweets are here.

In the following six tweets, readout of yesterday’s meeting between @JohnKerry & Dr Riyad Hijab is outlined. It’s shocking to say the least!

While the HNC’s senior negotiator, Mohammad Aloush, promised a “strong reaction” to these demands in a press conference on Sunday, HNC spokesman Salim al-Muslat told Reuters that the meeting with Kerry had been “positive” overall.

Former Syrian opposition leader Hadi Albahra noted, too, that the reports circulating about Kerry’s requests for the HNC were “not fully accurate.”

On Monday, however, de Mistura announced that talks will be postponed at least four days, to January 29, while negotiators work to resolve lingering disagreements over which members of the opposition will be invited to participate.

Kerry apparently stipulated that the HNC has to include certain Moscow-friendly opposition leaders into its delegation, including Kurdish PYD leader Saleh Muslim, former Syrian deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil, and Haitham Manna, exiled leader of the non-Islamist Syrian Democratic Council.

Thomson ReutersUS Secretary of State John Kerry takes his seat across the table from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

The Saudi-backed HNC has so far refused to expand its delegation, insisting that it represents all legitimate opposition players. In response, Bloomberg reported, the US and Russia are considering inviting a separate opposition delegation to the talks made up of rebel leaders Moscow has proposed and endorsed.

Middle East analyst Kyle Orton, an associate fellow at UK-based think tank The Henry Jackson Society, tweeted a grim analysis: “With the way things have stacked up, it’s hard not to see it as Obama and Kerry consciously working for the defeat of Syria’s opposition.”

Hassan Hassan put it bluntly: “US officials are telling Syrians what extremists have been telling them for years — the US isn’t your friend.”

In 2015: 84 million

Posted on January 25, 2016January 25, 2016 by Denise Simon

Just imagine, the cyber espionage….industrial espionage….the hacking…..

Do you really want to continue to tell the world about everything you do and who you are connected with on Facebook?

Cybercriminals Making Computer Malware at a Record Rate: Researchers

NBC: Last year was a particularly bad year for hacks and computer intrusions, and it looks like 2016 will only get worse, Panda Security says.

The Spain-based Internet security company said its lab researchers detected and disabled more than 84 million new samples of malware in 2015 — 9 million more than the previous year. The figure means cybercriminals were churning out new malware samples at a rate of more than 230,000 a day throughout 2015.

In fact, more than a quarter (27 percent) of all malware samples ever recorded were produced in 2015, Panda Security said in a news release.

“We predict that the amount of malware created by cybercriminals will continue to grow,” said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs. “We also can’t forget that the creation of millions of Trojans and other threats corresponds to the cybercriminals’ needs to infect as many users as possible in order to get more money.”

Malware is any type of software that is designed to gain access to and damage or disable a computer.

Trojans, a type of malware disguised as legitimate software, accounted for more than half the malware detected in 2015, according to Panda Security.

China topped the list of countries with the highest rate of infected computers, followed by Taiwan and Turkey. At the other end of the spectrum, nine of the top 10 countries with the lowest rates of infection were in Europe, led by Finland, Norway and Sweden.

***

Barack Obama has been a big user of BIG DATA but he experienced a huge firestorm after the exposure of the NSA programs by Edward Snowden. Barack Obama enlisted John Podesta, at the time his chief of staff and now Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign architect to commission a study. Sheesh…but nonetheless, here is what you should read in the findings.

From the White House: Over the past several days, severe storms have battered Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and other states. Dozens of people have been killed and entire neighborhoods turned to rubble and debris as tornadoes have touched down across the region. Natural disasters like these present a host of challenges for first responders. How many people are affected, injured, or dead? Where can they find food, shelter, and medical attention? What critical infrastructure might have been damaged?

Drawing on open government data sources, including Census demographics and NOAA weather data, along with their own demographic databases, Esri, a geospatial technology company, has created a real-time map showing where the twisters have been spotted and how the storm systems are moving. They have also used these data to show how many people live in the affected area, and summarize potential impacts from the storms. It’s a powerful tool for emergency services and communities. And it’s driven by big data technology.

In January, President Obama asked me to lead a wide-ranging review of “big data” and privacy—to explore how these technologies are changing our economy, our government, and our society, and to consider their implications for our personal privacy. Together with Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, the President’s Science Advisor John Holdren, the President’s Economic Advisor Jeff Zients, and other senior officials, our review sought to understand what is genuinely new and different about big data and to consider how best to encourage the potential of these technologies while minimizing risks to privacy and core American values.

Over the course of 90 days, we met with academic researchers and privacy advocates, with regulators and the technology industry, with advertisers and civil rights groups. The President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology conducted a parallel study of the technological trends underpinning big data. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy jointly organized three university conferences at MIT, NYU, and U.C. Berkeley. We issued a formal Request for Information seeking public comment, and hosted a survey to generate even more public input.

Today, we presented our findings to the President. We knew better than to try to answer every question about big data in three months. But we are able to draw important conclusions and make concrete recommendations for Administration attention and policy development in a few key areas.

There are a few technological trends that bear drawing out. The declining cost of collection, storage, and processing of data, combined with new sources of data like sensors, cameras, and geospatial technologies, mean that we live in a world of near-ubiquitous data collection. All this data is being crunched at a speed that is increasingly approaching real-time, meaning that big data algorithms could soon have immediate effects on decisions being made about our lives.

The big data revolution presents incredible opportunities in virtually every sector of the economy and every corner of society.

Big data is saving lives. Infections are dangerous—even deadly—for many babies born prematurely. By collecting and analyzing millions of data points from a NICU, one study was able to identify factors, like slight increases in body temperature and heart rate, that serve as early warning signs an infection may be taking root—subtle changes that even the most experienced doctors wouldn’t have noticed on their own.

Big data is making the economy work better. Jet engines and delivery trucks now come outfitted with sensors that continuously monitor hundreds of data points and send automatic alerts when maintenance is needed. Utility companies are starting to use big data to predict periods of peak electric demand, adjusting the grid to be more efficient and potentially averting brown-outs.

Big data is making government work better and saving taxpayer dollars. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have begun using predictive analytics—a big data technique—to flag likely instances of reimbursement fraud before claims are paid. The Fraud Prevention System helps identify the highest-risk health care providers for waste, fraud, and abuse in real time and has already stopped, prevented, or identified $115 million in fraudulent payments.

But big data raises serious questions, too, about how we protect our privacy and other values in a world where data collection is increasingly ubiquitous and where analysis is conducted at speeds approaching real time. In particular, our review raised the question of whether the “notice and consent” framework, in which a user grants permission for a service to collect and use information about them, still allows us to meaningfully control our privacy as data about us is increasingly used and reused in ways that could not have been anticipated when it was collected.

Big data raises other concerns, as well. One significant finding of our review was the potential for big data analytics to lead to discriminatory outcomes and to circumvent longstanding civil rights protections in housing, employment, credit, and the consumer marketplace.

No matter how quickly technology advances, it remains within our power to ensure that we both encourage innovation and protect our values through law, policy, and the practices we encourage in the public and private sector. To that end, we make six actionable policy recommendations in our report to the President:

Advance the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. Consumers deserve clear, understandable, reasonable standards for how their personal information is used in the big data era. We recommend the Department of Commerce take appropriate consultative steps to seek stakeholder and public comment on what changes, if any, are needed to the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, first proposed by the President in 2012, and to prepare draft legislative text for consideration by stakeholders and submission by the President to Congress.

Pass National Data Breach Legislation. Big data technologies make it possible to store significantly more data, and further derive intimate insights into a person’s character, habits, preferences, and activities. That makes the potential impacts of data breaches at businesses or other organizations even more serious. A patchwork of state laws currently governs requirements for reporting data breaches. Congress should pass legislation that provides for a single national data breach standard, along the lines of the Administration’s 2011 Cybersecurity legislative proposal.

Extend Privacy Protections to non-U.S. Persons. Privacy is a worldwide value that should be reflected in how the federal government handles personally identifiable information about non-U.S. citizens. The Office of Management and Budget should work with departments and agencies to apply the Privacy Act of 1974 to non-U.S. persons where practicable, or to establish alternative privacy policies that apply appropriate and meaningful protections to personal information regardless of a person’s nationality.

Ensure Data Collected on Students in School is used for Educational Purposes. Big data and other technological innovations, including new online course platforms that provide students real time feedback, promise to transform education by personalizing learning. At the same time, the federal government must ensure educational data linked to individual students gathered in school is used for educational purposes, and protect students against their data being shared or used inappropriately.

Expand Technical Expertise to Stop Discrimination. The detailed personal profiles held about many consumers, combined with automated, algorithm-driven decision-making, could lead—intentionally or inadvertently—to discriminatory outcomes, or what some are already calling “digital redlining.” The federal government’s lead civil rights and consumer protection agencies should expand their technical expertise to be able to identify practices and outcomes facilitated by big data analytics that have a discriminatory impact on protected classes, and develop a plan for investigating and resolving violations of law.

Amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The laws that govern protections afforded to our communications were written before email, the internet, and cloud computing came into wide use. Congress should amend ECPA to ensure the standard of protection for online, digital content is consistent with that afforded in the physical world—including by removing archaic distinctions between email left unread or over a certain age.

We also identify several broader areas ripe for further study, debate, and public engagement that, collectively, we hope will spark a national conversation about how to harness big data for the public good. We conclude that we must find a way to preserve our privacy values in both the domestic and international marketplace. We urgently need to build capacity in the federal government to identify and prevent new modes of discrimination that could be enabled by big data. We must ensure that law enforcement agencies using big data technologies do so responsibly, and that our fundamental privacy rights remain protected. Finally, we recognize that data is a valuable public resource, and call for continuing the Administration’s efforts to open more government data sources and make investments in research and technology.

While big data presents new challenges, it also presents immense opportunities to improve lives, the United States is perhaps better suited to lead this conversation than any other nation on earth. Our innovative spirit, technological know-how, and deep commitment to values of privacy, fairness, non-discrimination, and self-determination will help us harness the benefits of the big data revolution and encourage the free flow of information while working with our international partners to protect personal privacy. This review is but one piece of that effort, and we hope it spurs a conversation about big data across the country and around the world.

Read the Big Data Report.

See the fact sheet from today’s announcement.

The Biggest Silent Lie Yet?

Posted on January 22, 2016January 22, 2016 by Denise Simon

Hillary’s fingerprints are all over this and it is likely the biggest betrayal to the families and the U.S. taxpayers yet. The shame never ends.

EXCLUSIVE: U.S. TAXPAYERS, NOT TEHRAN, COMPENSATED VICTIMS OF IRANIAN ATTACKS AGAINST AMERICANS
BY JONATHAN BRODER

Newsweek: A little-noticed side agreement to the Iran nuclear deal has unexpectedly reopened painful wounds for the families of more than a dozen Americans attacked or held hostage by Iranian proxies in recent decades. U.S. officials, the families say, insisted that Tehran would pay for financing or directing the attacks, but American taxpayers wound up paying instead.

The agreement, which resolved a long-running financial dispute with Iran, involved the return of $400 million in Iranian funds that the U.S. seized after the 1979 Islamic revolution, plus another $1.3 billion in interest. Announced on January 17—the same day the two countries implemented the nuclear deal and carried out a prisoner swap—President Barack Obama presented the side agreement as a bargain for the United States, noting that a claims tribunal in the Hague could have awarded Iran a much larger judgment. “For the United States, this settlement saved us billions of dollars that could have been pursued by Iran,” Obama said.

But for the victims, the side deal is a betrayal, not a bargain. In 2000, the Clinton administration agreed to pay the $400 million to more than a dozen Americans who had won judgments against Iran in U.S. courts. At the time, American officials assured the victims that the Treasury would be reimbursed from the seized Iranian funds. That same year, Congress passed a law empowering the president to get the money from Iran. “We all believed that Iran would pay our damages, not U.S. taxpayers,” says Stephen Flatow, a New Jersey real estate lawyer who received $24 million for the death of his 19-year-old daughter in a 1995 bus bombing in the Gaza Strip. “And now, 15 years later, we find out that they never deducted the money from the account. It makes me nauseous. The Iranians aren’t paying a cent.”
Flatow’s cohorts agree. They include the families and survivors of some of the most high-profile foreign attacks against Americans in recent decades. Among them: five former Beirut hostages whom the Iran-backed Islamist group Hezbollah held for years during the 1980s; the wife of U.S. Marine Colonel William Higgins, whom Hezbollah kidnapped in 1988, before torturing and hanging him; the family of Navy diver Robert Stethem, whom an Iranian-backed group murdered in Beirut during the 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner; and a family whose daughter was killed in a Hamas bus bombing in Jerusalem in 1996.
Stuart Eizenstat, a deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration who helped negotiate the settlement, admits he never told the victims and their families the truth about the money. Unbeknownst to the victims and their lawyers, he says, Tehran had filed a claim with the U.S.-Iran tribunal in the Hague over the funds. “We didn’t have the full freedom to say we’re just going to take the $400 million because that money was now part of a formal claim,” Eizenstat says.
What’s further angered the victims and their families: A senior Iranian military official now claims the $1.7 billion is effectively a ransom for the five American hostages Tehran released in January. “This money was returned for the freedom of the U.S. spies, and it was not related to the nuclear negotiations,” Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi said Wednesday, according to the state-run Fars News Agency. The Obama administration denies any link between the prisoners and the $1.7 billion. But Republicans, already fuming over the nuclear deal, are now calling for an inquiry. “It’s bad enough the administration is giving Iran over $100 billion in direct sanctions relief, resumed oil sales and new international trade,” says Republican Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois. “But now it’s using U.S. taxpayer money to pay the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism a $1.7 billion ‘settlement.’”
Administration officials are trying to play down the deal, noting it follows a 2000 law that created the compensation mechanism for the victims and their families. One official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in accordance with State Department protocol, says the law only required the U.S. government, acting in place of the victims, to deal with their damage claims “to the satisfaction of the United States, which was the case with this settlement.” A major reason the U.S. was satisfied: The U.S. and Iran disagreed over whether the $400 million should have been placed in an interest-bearing account in 1979. “We reached this settlement on interest,” the official says, “to avoid significant potential exposure we faced at the tribunal on that question.”
But the revelation that Iran never paid the money has hit some of the families hard. They’ve lost the feeling that some measure of justice was served. “I feel like a schnorrer,” says Flatow, using the Yiddish term for a mooch, because U.S. taxpayers, not Iran, paid his damages. Other victims say they’re bothered by the administration’s reluctance to discuss the details of the side deal. It’s brought back memories from 20 years ago, when the victims won their judgments against Iran in U.S. courts, only to find themselves blocked at every turn by the Clinton administration. “There are limited ways to react to your child getting murdered,” says Leonard Eisenfeld, a Connecticut doctor whose son was killed in the 1996 bus bombing in Jerusalem. “Creating a financial deterrent to prevent Iran from more terrorism was one way, but we had to struggle very hard to do that.”
In a series of legal challenges, Clinton administration officials identified $20 million in Iranian assets in America. Among them: Tehran’s Washington embassy and several consulates around the country. But in arguments that sometimes echoed Tehran’s concerns, the officials maintained that attaching those assets to pay even a small portion the victims’ damages would violate U.S. obligations to respect the sovereign immunity of other countries’ diplomatic property.
Though their arguments succeeded in court, the optics were bad. The case caught the attention of the media and Congress, where many lawmakers openly supported the victims. The contours of a settlement began to emerge when lawyers for some of the victims, acting on a tip from a sympathizer inside the administration, located the $400 million in Iranian funds languishing in a foreign military sales (FMS) account at the Treasury. The money came from payments made by the shah for U.S. military equipment that was never delivered after the Iranian leader was overthrown in 1979. After several more clashes with the administration over the funds, first lady Hillary Clinton stepped in at a time when the bitter battles could have hurt her with Jewish voters in her 2000 bid for a New York Senate seat. She persuaded her husband to appoint Jacob Lew, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, to negotiate a settlement that would utilize the frozen Iranian funds.
That same year, Congress passed the legislation that paved the way for an agreement. The legislation required the Treasury to pay the $400 million in damages and empowered the president to seek reimbursement from Iran. Flatow, who had insisted the payments come directly from the Iranian account, recalls his negotiations with Lew. “I said, ‘Jack, where’s the money coming from? Is it coming from the foreign military sales account?’ And he said, ‘No, Steve. All checks that the United States of America writes come from the United States Treasury. But the statute says that we have the right to offset any payments we make against that FMS money.’ So I said, ‘OK, it’s not what I was hoping for, but it’s a settlement.’ We got paid in 2001. And we all believed that the government would reimburse itself from Iran’s foreign military sales account.”
Lew, now Obama’s Treasury secretary, declined to comment, as did former officials from the George W. Bush administration, which also never reimbursed the Treasury from the Iran weapons account.

In retrospect, Eizenstat, the former deputy Treasury secretary, says it was a mistake to pay the judgments against Iran using U.S. funds with no financial consequences for Tehran. The payments have made Flatow, Eisenfeld and the others the only victims of Iranian attacks to receive compensation. That is expected to change this year now that Congress has established a $1 billion fund to begin paying other notable victims of Iranian attacks, including the Tehran embassy hostages and survivors of the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut. This time, however, the money for their damage judgments will come not from U.S. taxpayers but from fines collected from a French bank that laundered billions for Iran.
For Flatow and others like him, that’s little consolation. In the agreement, he notes, “there wasn’t a single sentence, not a single word that would ameliorate the pain of people who lost their loved ones. That’s very hurtful.”