WASHINGTON POST – November 15, 2024 – As the nation celebrated veterans this week, there’s one group among the feted who appreciate the praise but also want compensation that’s been blocked by a dispute between federal agencies.
The group is 274 survivors of the 1983 Beirut barracks and 1996 Khobar Towers bombings. They should receive $116 million from a federal fund for terrorist victims, according to one office’s calculation. But another agency, which would have to actually make those payments, disagrees.
n what Secretary of State Antony Blinken called “the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima,” two truck bombings near the Beirut Marine Corps barracks murdered 241 U.S. military personnel, among others. Thirteen years later, another truck bombing at the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia killed 19 U.S. Air Force personnel and wounded more than 400 other people.
Elvis Rusnak was a 28-year-old Air Force loadmaster who lived on the fourth floor of Building 131 in the Khobar Towers complex when the explosion forever changed his life. It could have killed him, as it did three of his six-man crew, had he not left for a gym workout minutes earlier. By phone and email, the Milford, New Jersey, resident and 24-year military veteran, who now has another decade as a federal civilian employee, emotionally recalled the gruesome scene.
Rusnak was okay physically, but only compared with others. Yet the lasting impact, including from severe PTSD, means he’s not really okay. “The smell of death and dismemberment filled the air. The event was over,” he said, “but the trauma had just begun.”
How could he be okay?
Now Rusnak fears he and others might not get the money the GAO says they deserve, because Justice Department guidance did not do them justice.
The lump sum payments at the heart of the dispute refer to “certain Beirut barracks bombing and Khobar Towers bombing victims who had not fully participated or participated at all in the fund’s earlier regular payment distribution rounds,” explained Triana McNeil, the GAO’s homeland security and justice director.
The GAO’s position is that claimants needed to apply for catch-up payments and “could submit successive applications in order to specifically apply,” McNeil said.
A fund notice included in the report discouraged catch-up applications, saying, “Claimants do not need to file additional or separate applications for lump sum catch-up payments. Each claimant has one claim before the USVSST Fund for all compensation, including lump sum catch-up payments.”
“The GAO appears to suggest that the [fund’s] Special Master may grant an extension of the application deadlines to the 274 claimants who made no affirmative submission during the application window,” Moeser wrote, citing what she called the “GAO’s decision to deviate from the Fund’s long-standing application procedures” for the Beirut barracks and Khobar Towers victims.
Angela Mistrulli, a 9/11 survivors’ and victims’ advocate, said she supports “all terror victims,” while disagreeing with the GAO’s findings for the Beirut barracks and Khobar Towers survivors.
To resolve the dispute, the GAO urged Congress “to allow any of the 274 victims who did not apply for lump sum catch-up payments due to DOJ’s guidance to receive such payments,” by amending the Justice for United States Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Act.
That would help Clayton Zook, who was a 23-year-old senior airman when the Khobar Towers bomb exploded. He was in a building about 300 yards from the blast, yet that was strong enough to blow him off his couch and tear his left shoulder.
“The DOJ is not going to move off their position,” said Zook, a resident of Oakland Township, Michigan. “So, yes, this solution is going to have to be a legislative fix.”
