According to today's article in the New York Times:
A state appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the Port Authority was liable for damages caused by the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, because it knew about but chose to ignore “an extreme and potentially catastrophic vulnerability that would have been open and obvious to any terrorist who cared to investigate and exploit it.”
The ruling unanimously upheld a jury’s verdict that the agency was 68 percent liable for the bombing and the terrorists 32 percent liable. Under state rules, because the Port Authority’s liability was more than 50 percent, it can be forced to pay all the damages to injured survivors and to relatives of those killed.
...
In assigning fault, the court said, the jury considered not just the moral wrong of the terrorists, but how much the Port Authority contributed to the conditions that allowed the bombing.“The evidence, fairly considered, clearly supported the view that the defendant’s negligence had been extraordinarily conducive of the terrorists’ conduct,” the judges said.
Is this really a precedent our legal system should be setting? And in this particular case, how is this ruling affected by hindsight 15 years after the event, and seven years after the attacks of September 11th?
The decision was filled with pungent and scathing language. The judges said that the Port Authority should have realized that it faced a “potentially monstrous” risk. In one aside, they noted that the terrorists had fulfilled their mission “without meeting a scintilla of resistance.”There is ample evidence that the World Trade Center in 1993 was not sufficiently protected; but then again, what in this country was? Once you go down this path, where, and how, do you draw the line?
It seems to me that the lines between risk and accountability have been confused. Risks cannot be identified in a vacuum. Along with risk the probability of an event and its costs must be determined. Moreover, there is a difference between accidental risk, and the risk and its costs incurred as a result of a woeful act of negligence. There's a reason why your insurance company does not cover acts of war; there is no way to predict or actualize them.
Which leaves me scratching my head with this court decision. The 1993 bombing was tragic, but it wasn't an accident. A truck full of explosives wasn't accidentally parked in the underground lot. Nor was it accidentally detonated because someone lit a cigarette too close to the vehicle. A group of Islamic ideologues willfully conspired to build a car bomb, park it inside the structure, detonate the device, and "Allah willing," collapse one tower into the next, killing tens of thousands of innocent victims.
Yes security missed the vehicle, yes if a decision had been made to forgo the $100M in annual parking revenues and close the garage it would have been safer. But then, color me stupid, but didn't a group of men fly hijacked aircraft into the buildings less than a decade later? Is the Port Authority liable for that now too? Maybe they should have closed the whole building, it had already been attacked, so therefore because the attack didn't succeed in the intended manner they should have known they'd be attacked again.
Impassioned decisions made by juries are supposed to be checked by judges. Building security primarily exists (or existed) to reduce the threat of theft and larceny and to assist in preventing the loss of life due to fire and other accidental events. In today's world, we know that's changed, to now include loss of life and limb due to someone with a ideological grudge attempting to murder us so that they may find paradise. But unlike in the case say, where a building where the emergency exits have been locked, or proper building codes have failed to be followed, or security ignored an event in progress, how is the management company or owner of the property actually liable for an illegal, criminal event where the building and the people itself are the intended target of murderous destruction?
Moreover, how on earth does a jury place more blame (as if you can divide blame into percentages) on the Port Authority compared to the terrorists that instigated the attack? And how is it that you can be found liable for 100% of the damages if you're only found to be partly responsible for whatever liability they've deemed you responsible for.
How does this get past a judge who's presiding over the case?
How does this manage to get past a state appeals court reviewing the case?
How is it this case is still going on, fifteen years after the attack?
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