Cozen O'Connor dealt blow in 9/11 lawsuit

Called the Flatow Amendment, after a 20-year-old New Jersey woman named Alisa Flatow who was killed in a suicide bombing in 1995 in Gaza, the law restricted terrorism lawsuits to governments that had been designated as state sponsors of terrorism.

White House and State Department officials, fearing that a flood of lawsuits from U.S. citizens might interfere with the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, had insisted on that restriction in return for their support.

Yet lawyers for the plaintiffs insisted yesterday that the designation requirement was intended only to establish one avenue for suing foreign governments. They said the Second Circuit, by failing to acknowledge other legal options provided by the act, had turned back the clock to an era when executive branch officials alone made the decision on whether U.S. citizens could sue foreign governments.

"This puts us back into the 1950s," Cozen said.

In their lawsuits, Cozen and other law firms allege that over a period of a decade or more, officials of the government of Saudi Arabia had financed Islamic charities that in turn had become the sources of funding for Islamic terrorists, first in Afghanistan and the Sudan and then later in the Bosnia-Herzegovina, and ultimately in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Read an Inquirer series on the lawsuit, plus yesterday's ruling and other court documents, at

Contact staff writer Chris Mondics at 215-854-5957 or cmondics@phillynews.com.