Posted 8/16/2002 12:31:00 AM by Douglas

This makes me sick. The neocons have been spouting for months how absurd our reaction would seem if the "greatest generation" would have reacted accordingly to the attack of Pearl Harbor. Well, now the lawyers have thrown their hats into the ring with this little gem. I swear when I saw it on CNN this afternoon the settlement was only $1 trillion, but now it has ballooned to $116 trillion. Let's start with the amount, shall we?

If you gave someone a million dollars each and every SECOND, it would take over 3 and a half YEARS to transfer that amount of money. Can you really put a dollar amount of human life? Lawyers have been arguing that point for years, but apparently they've summed it up quite nicely. Plus it sounds too much like the part from the first Austin Powers movie when Dr. Evil was trying to figure out how much the ransom should be. He was alarmed to discover that a million dollars wasn't a whole lot of money in 1997, when his son says, "Why not just ask for a kazillion dollars, ass?!"

Secondly, how on earth are they going to reach a settlement? They've acquired the services of Allen Gerson, one of the attorneys who negotiated a $2.7 billion settlement between the Libyan government and families of people killed when Pam Am Flight 103 was blown up. So you know he knows what he's doing. But is there some international civil court that I'm unaware of?

Finally, of all the comparisons to Pearl Harbor that have come out in comparison to the 9/11 attacks, let's dial back the clocks 60 years. Try to imagine the grieving widows suing the Emperor of Japan for "wrongful death" in 1942. We've got the full brunt of the American military industrial complex avenging the 9/11 attacks.

Is there any way to spin this to make these people not look like they are just in it for the money? The Federal Government has already offered them well over a million NOT to sue the airlines, the port authority, and the FAA.

This just seems like an attempt to make a name for themselves on CNN and line their pockets in the process.