Make terrorists pay

Whose side is the U.S. government on? Picture this. You are the parent, daughter, sister of a U.S. citizen killed in a terrorist attack sponsored by a foreign government. You painstakingly use all legal means to condemn your loved one's killers. But your own country blocks your efforts to seek justice.

This is exactly the situation for the families of Armando Alejandre, Carlos Alberto Costa, and Mario M. de la Peña, three U.S. citizens assassinated by the Cuban Air Force on Feb. 24, 1996. Let us not forget well-documented facts: These fliers -- and a non-citizen -- were flying small, unarmed, civilian planes for Brothers to the Rescue. Cuban MiGs shot them down in contempt of international law, without warning, in international airspace.

Because the U.S. government has refused to press criminal charges against the Cuban government, the families themselves filed a civil lawsuit. In the first judgment rendered under provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, Senior U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King found the Cuban government outrageously culpable of murder and awarded the three families more than they asked for: $187 million.

Understand here that the point is not money. Victims of human-rights atrocities want the world to bear witness. They want to show the systematic killers, rapists, torturers that those unconscionable acts bring punishment. Moral condemnation is fine, but it means nothing to the amoral such as Fidel Castro. That is the point of punitive damages, a legal punishment.

The U.S. government awarded each of the three families $300,000 as a kind of symbolic recompense for their loss. But the White House and U.S. State Department, of the country that prides itself on defense of human rights, give only a string of unconvincing excuses for keeping the families from collecting court-ordered damages. Most recently and shamefully, President Clinton signed a waiver aimed at annulling a new law that would permit the fliers' families and a New Jersey family to collect valid judgments obtained under the Anti-Terrorism Act.

Whose side is the Clinton administration on? Its current reactive policy toward Cuba does little more than maintain the grinding status quo. Cuba's frozen assets haven't been used as a foreign-policy instrument in 35 years. Why not use them now? Pay the fliers' families in just support of human rights.