On the recordOctober 1, 2015
I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, consider the case of Anne Dammarell, a USAID worker who was posted in the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983. At 1 p.m. on April 18, a suicide bomber in a delivery van drove 2,000 pounds of explosives into the front door of our U.S. Embassy and the blast demolished the front of the building and caused the upper floors to collapse on top of each other. When that went off, she was eating lunch in the Embassy cafeteria until suddenly she awoke outside, covered in cement, with 19 bones broken. Sixty-three people were killed in that blast. Now we have a moral obligation to ensure that these judgments for these victims, which represent Iran's legal debt to the victims of its official policy of terrorism, are paid. There have been 90 such attacks on Americans, and this legislation helps us fulfill that moral obligation we have to our constituents and to all Americans. What I will share with you is that it is not going to work to release the $100 billion first, because that $100 billion goes into the hands of the IRGC. They are the ones who have taken over the companies in Iran as of 1979, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces and the Quds forces are the ones that carried out these attacks. So the only leverage we are going to have in this negotiation is if we pass legislation that says, first, you have got $20 billion in reserves. Start the process of paying the victims of that attack.…
