Anniversary of bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by CATO, Oct 23, 2014.


  1. CATO

    CATO Monkey+++

    Another great example of Muslims spreading peace and goodwill towards men in the name of Islam.



    On this day in 1983, two trucks carrying explosives blew up two barracks buildings in Beirut, Lebanon resulting in the deadliest attack on Marines since Iwo Jima in 1945.

    Today we pause to remember the 220 Marines, 18 U.S. Navy sailors and 3 U.S. Army soldiers killed in the attack.

    Camp Lejeune will be hosting the 31st Beirut Memorial Observance Ceremony today at 10:30 a.m. EDT. Click the link below to stream the ceremony.

    DVIDS - Webcast - 31st Annual Beirut Memorial Observance Ceremony

    [US]
     
    stg58, KAS, sec_monkey and 1 other person like this.
  2. Yard Dart

    Yard Dart Vigilant Monkey Moderator

    [salute]
     
    stg58, KAS and CATO like this.
  3. tulianr

    tulianr Don Quixote de la Monkey

    Thanks for the link; but I was in Beirut, and it was American State Department naivete that killed my fellow military members; not Islam. It was an Iranian plan, carried out with Syrian duplicity, and executed by ignorant extremists. And had the American military members been in Lebanon as part of a military mission, instead of a peacekeeping mission, under the control of the State Department, the plan could have been foiled quite easily.

    Putting military members in the middle of a war zone, and disarming them with a truly ridiculous ROE and civilian control; and then choosing sides in an on-going civil war, is a wonderful recipe for disaster, and a disaster is what we got. Giving control of a military deployment to a bunch of suits, or khaki trousers and wind breakers in the case of most of the numbnuts in Beirut, is a good way to get people killed.
     
    Mountainman, kellory, stg58 and 2 others like this.
  4. CATO

    CATO Monkey+++

    I knew you were there. I'm glad you weren't in the barracks.

     
    tulianr likes this.
  5. CATO

    CATO Monkey+++

    Pardon myself from hi-jacking my own thread:

    If a missionary went into an area to give aid to starving people, and that person was killed by a Muslim stealing the starving people's food because the missionary was Christian, did the missionary get killed because of their naivete in trying to help others in an area wrought with conflict, or because the Muslim wanted to kill them because they were Christian, which was based on some linkage to Islam that Christians must die?

    Muslims killed those Marines, and they did it because of their twisted thinking, which was based on Islam.

    McVeigh killed the people in the federal building because of his twisted thinking that he was a defender of the Constitution from the fascist govt. Those responsible for Ruby Ridge and Waco didn't set that bomb off. McVeigh did.

    Now, back to honoring the Marines and the sacrifices they make. And thanks Tuli for your service! [boozingbuddies]
     
  6. Dunerunner

    Dunerunner Brewery Monkey Moderator

    Brave men died because our leaders believed we were immune from terrorist attack. This should have been a wake up call, yet it continues today.
     
    Mountainman and Yard Dart like this.
  7. CATO

    CATO Monkey+++

    David Kay Rebukes Washington Post

    Invitation to September 11
    By Kenneth R. Timmerman

    For more, read "A Marine 'Peacekeeper's' Story," below.
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    The spider holes where terrorists and the nation-states who back them hide from public view lie in the murkiest recesses of the murky world of intelligence. Rarely do victims of terrorist attacks get to face their attacker, let alone know his identity, especially when the attacker is a foreign government. Individual terrorists such as Osama bin Laden or Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (aka "Carlos the Jackal") - who openly boast of their evil deeds and thus can be tracked, targeted and eventually taken out - are the exception, not the rule.

    Or so said the conventional wisdom until a recent groundbreaking public trial in a federal courtroom in Washington that blew the lid off the world's most elusive terrorist sponsor: the Islamic Republic of Iran. That legal action was brought by the families of the 241 U.S. Marines who were killed when terrorists crashed an explosives-filled truck into their barracks near the Beirut airport on Oct. 23, 1983. It raises disturbing questions concerning some of our most basic assumptions about the war on terror.

    New intelligence revealed at the March 2003 trial, and independently confirmed by Insight with top military commanders and intelligence officials who had access to it at the time, shows that the U.S. government knew beyond any reasonable doubt who carried out the bombing of the Marine barracks 20 years ago and yet did nothing to punish the perpetrators. Even more disturbing is the revelation, which Insight also confirmed independently, that intelligence then available and known within the government gave clear forewarning of the attack. But this warning never was transmitted to operations officers on the ground who could have done something to prevent or reduce the impact of the devastating assault.

    Among the intelligence information initially uncovered by Thomas Fortune Fay, an attorney for the families of the victims, was a National Security Agency (NSA) intercept of a message sent from Iranian intelligence headquarters in Tehran to Hojjat ol-eslam Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus. As it was paraphrased by presiding U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth, "The message directed the Iranian ambassador to contact Hussein Musawi, the leader of the terrorist group Islamic Amal, and to instruct him ... 'to take a spectacular action against the United States Marines.'"

    Rear Adm. James "Ace" Lyons was deputy chief of naval operations for plans, policy and operation at the time and remembers well when he first learned of the NSA intercept. It was exactly two days after terrorists had driven a truck laden with military explosives into the fortified Marine barracks complex just outside the Beirut airport and detonated it, producing the largest, non-nuclear explosion in history, the equivalent to 20,000 pounds of TNT. "The director of naval intelligence carried the transcript to me in a locked briefcase," he tells Insight. "He gave it to me, to the chief of naval operations, and to the secretary of the Navy all in the same day."

    At trial, Lyons described the general contents of the message. In a personal tribute to the slain Marines and their families, he had obtained a copy of the NSA transcript and presented it in a sealed envelope to the court. "If ever there was a 24-karat gold document, this was it," Lyons said, "This was not something from the third cousin of the fourth wife of Muhammad the taxicab driver." Lamberth accepted the still-classified NSA intercept into evidence under seal to protect NSA sources and methods. It was the first time in nearly a dozen cases brought against the government of Iran by victims of terrorism that material evidence emanating directly from the U.S. intelligence community was brought forward in such a direct manner.

    The existence of this intercept - just one of thousands of messages incriminating the governments of Iran, Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq (among others) in deadly terrorist crimes against Americans - long has been rumored. Insight reported in May 2001 on similar electronic intelligence that unequivocally revealed how Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat personally ordered Palestinian terrorists to murder U.S. diplomats Cleo Noel and George Curtis Moore after a PLO commando took them hostage in Khartoum, Sudan, in March 1973 [see "Arafat Murdered U.S. Diplomats," June 25, 2001].

    Then as now, the release of such information shocks many Americans who find it hard to believe that the U.S. government could have had such clear-cut indications of impending terrorist acts and done nothing to stop them or to punish those responsible. And yet that is precisely what the intelligence indicates. And the reasons, far from some dire government conspiracy, appear to be the laziness and incompetence of intelligence officials and bureaucratic gatekeepers who failed to pass on information to the political appointees or Cabinet officers making the decisions.

    The message from Tehran ordering Iranian-backed terrorists to attack the U.S. Marines in Beirut was picked up "on or about Sept. 26, 1983," Lamberth said, noting it was nearly four full weeks before the actual bombing. With all that lead time, why did no one take steps to protect the Marines or to head off the attack? "That's a question I've been waiting 20 years for someone to ask," Lyons tells this magazine.

    Insight has learned that the CIA station in Damascus received a copy of the terrorist message almost as soon as it was intercepted and transmitted it back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. "The response I heard back from headquarters was, 'The Marines? We don't want to know about the Marines,'" a former CIA officer who saw the intercept and was involved in transmitting it to his superiors tells Insight.

    Marine Col. Tim Geraghty, commander of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit then stationed at the Beirut Airport, tells Insight that he never received a warning or even a report based on the message, although he was well aware that his Marines had become "sitting ducks" to hostile militias on the ground. "Generally, yes, we knew the problem," he said, "but we never received anything specific."

    This was not because the CIA was stonewalling him, Geraghty believes. "I became personal friends with Bill Buckley, who was CIA station chief in Beirut, and he was giving me everything he had. But we never got a warning mentioning a possible attack on the barracks or mentioning Iran." And yet, as Geraghty himself learned at the trial, such warnings indeed had been picked up and they were very specific indeed.

    For one thing, there was no other place but the barracks near the airport where a "spectacular operation" could have been carried out. It was the only major Marine bivouac in all of Lebanon. And then, there was the mention in the intercept of Hussein Musawi by name and the group he then headed, Islamic Amal - a precursor of what later became known as Hezbollah. Both were under direct Iranian-government control. But as former CIA officer Robert Baer tells Insight, in this case the warning "did not mention a specific time or place and so was not considered [by CIA managers] to be actionable." Because of this, the warning never was sent on to Beirut, where Buckley could have passed it on to Geraghty. Until 9/11 such a lack of specificity was a standard excuse.

    Michael Ledeen, author of The War Against the Terror Masters, was working as a consultant to the Department of Defense at the time of the bombing. The failure to share intelligence "drove a change in the structure of the intelligence community," he said at trial, "because what they found was that we should have seen it coming, we had enough information so that we should have seen it coming [but] we didn't because of the compartmentalization of the various pieces of the intelligence community. So the people who listen to things weren't talking to the people who looked at things weren't talking to people who analyzed things and so on." That failure, he said, led CIA director William Casey to establish the Counter-Terrorism Center, a new, cross-discipline unit whose sole purpose was to prevent terrorism and, when that failed, to fight back against terrorists.

    After the Beirut attack the intelligence on Iran's involvement all of a sudden looked different. And yet, despite evidence that Ledeen categorized as "absolutely convincing," the Reagan administration not only didn't fight back, but within three months of the attack secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger ordered the Marines to leave Beirut altogether, opening the United States to accusations that it had "cut and run" and inviting terrorists to have at Americans with impunity.

    Exactly why that happened is still a mystery to many of the participants, Insight discovered in interviews with Weinberger, former Navy secretary John F. Lehman, former deputy chief of naval operations Lyons, Geraghty, former CIA officer Robert Baer and others. To Baer, a self-avowed "foot soldier" in the war on terror, "The information we had on the Iranians in 1983 was infinitely better than anything we had on Saddam Hussein." The failure to retaliate for the attack "was all politics."

    For example, the CIA managed to identify the Hezbollah operative who built the bomb in the truck. "His name was Ibrahim Safa. He was working with the Pasdaran - the Iranian Revolutionary Guards - out of the southern suburbs of Beirut," Baer tells Insight. "In the hierarchy of things, he was just a thug who'd found God. He'd been a bang-bang man in the civil war in the 1970s who knew explosives."

    One option available to military planners was to target the actual planners of the operation, such as Safa, but that was rejected because of the congressional ban on assassination. "Assassination was forbidden, so we couldn't target individuals, the heads of Hezbollah," Ledeen recalls. "We would have had to go after Hezbollah training camps and kill a lot of innocent civilians." That was something Weinberger says neither he nor the president wanted to do.

    Soon the primary target became the Sheikh Abdallah barracks in Baalbek, the capital of Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. A former Lebanese-army barracks, it had been taken over by Iran's Pasdaran and was being used to train Hezbollah and house Iranian troops stationed in Lebanon. "We had the planes loaded and ready to take out the group," says Lyons, referring to Hezbollah and their Iranian masters in Baalbek, "but we couldn't get the go-ahead from Washington. We could have taken out all 250 of them in about one-and-a-half minutes."

    President Ronald Reagan was demanding retaliation, and asked the U.S. Navy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draw up target lists, Lehman tells Insight. According to several participants, the Syrian government also had played a role in the plot and several named Syrian officers were suggested as potential targets, as was the Syrian defense ministry.

    "It is my recollection that I had been briefed on who had done it and what the evidence was," Lehman says. "I was told the actual names of the Syrians and where they were. I was told about the evidence that the Iranian government was directly behind it. I was told that the people who had done it were trained in Baalbek and that many of them were back in Baalbek. I recall very clearly that there was no controversy who did it. I never heard any briefer or person in the corridor who said, 'Oh maybe we don't know who did it.'"

    Insight has learned that, within three weeks of the attack, enough intelligence had been gathered to determine exactly where and how to hit back, and a counterstrike package was briefed directly to the president. Planners say it included eight Tomahawk missiles launched from the battleship New Jersey against the Syrian defense ministry and other command targets in Syria. Carrier-based A6-A Intruders were assigned to bomb the Sheikh Abdallah barracks in Baalbek in a joint strike with the French, who had lost 58 marines when their own barracks, known as the "Drakkar," was bombed just minutes after the U.S. Marines. It also included selected "snatches" of Syrian officers based in Lebanon who had helped carry out the operation.

    Coordinates already were being programmed into the Tomahawks, and the A6 pilots and snatch teams were being briefed, say the intelligence and defense officials Insight interviewed, when someone pulled the plug. By all accounts, that someone was Weinberger.

    In his memoirs, Weinberger made clear that he had opposed deployment of the Marines to Beirut in the first place because they were never given a clear mission. He also expressed regret - which he repeated in an interview with Insight - that he had not been "persuasive" enough at White House meetings to convince the president to withdraw the Marines before the October 1983 attack occurred. "I was begging the president to take us out of Lebanon," he tells Insight. "We were sitting right in the middle of the bull's-eye."

    Weinberger believed the United States should only deploy U.S. troops in situations where "the objectives were so important to American interests that we had to fight," at which point, the United States should commit "enough forces to win and win overwhelmingly." Those conditions were not present in Lebanon in 1983, he argued. But Weinberger was overpowered by secretary of state George Shultz, who argued at the White House meetings that the United States could not afford to give the impression it would "cut and run" after the attack since that would only encourage the terrorists. As it soon did.

    Speaking with Insight, Weinberger insists today that the only reason the United States did not retaliate for the October 1983 attack on the U.S. Marines "was the lack of specific knowledge of who the perpetrators were. We had nothing before the bombing, although I had warned repeatedly that the security situation was very bad. We were in the middle of the bull's-eye, but we didn't know who was attacking the bull's-eye."

    Weinberger insists that he has "never heard of any specific information. If I had known, I wouldn't have hesitated" to approve retaliatory action. "Clearly the attack was planned. But it was hard to locate who had done it out of all the different groups. The president didn't want some kind of carpet bombing that would kill a lot of innocent civilians. There were so many groups and not all of them were responsible to the government of Iran. All we knew was that they were united in their hatred of America."

    Weinberger's account surprised several other participants who had firsthand knowledge of the intelligence information. "Perhaps Weinberger was never given the intercept by his staff," one participant suggested.

    At the time highly classified NSA material such as the Damascus intercept would have been given to the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. John Vessey, and to the military aide to the secretary of defense, who would determine whether the secretary would be apprised of the information personally. Weinberger's aide at the time was Maj. Gen. Colin Powell.

    But Vessey tells Insight he has "no recollection" of seeing the intelligence on Iran's involvement in the attack. "It is unbelievable to me that someone didn't bring it through the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency up to me and the secretary of defense." Somewhere along the line, the system broke down. "I just don't know what happened," Vessey says. Sources close to Powell suggest the intercept never made it into the president's daily briefing.

    On Nov. 16, 1983, Weinberger received a telephone call from Charles Hernu, the French minister of defense, informing him that French Super-Etendard fighter-bombers were getting ready to attack Baalbek. In his memoirs, Weinberger states that he "had received no orders or notifications from the president or anyone prior to that phone call from Paris," which he said gave him too short a notice to scramble U.S. jets.

    This reporter was covering the fighting between Arafat and Syrian-backed PLO rebels in Tripoli, Lebanon, at the time, and vividly recalls watching the French planes roar overhead en route to Baalbek. The raid was a total failure.

    Whatever the reasons behind the refusal of the United States to join that French retaliatory raid, there can be no doubt that the terrorists and their masters took the U.S. failure to retaliate as a sign of weakness. Just five months later, Iran's top agent in Beirut, Imad Mugniyeh, took CIA station chief William Buckley hostage and hideously tortured him to death after extracting whatever information he could. Since then, notes former Navy secretary Lehman, Osama bin Laden has "directly credited the Marine bombing" and the lack of U.S. retaliation as encouraging his jihadi movement to believe they could attack the United States with impunity.

    "The first shots in the war on terror we are in now were fired in Beirut in October 1983," says Geraghty. "The [Bush] administration is now doing exactly what we need to be doing, attacking the enemies of freedom where they live instead of letting them attack us in our home." But the failure to strike back against Iran and Syria in 1983 was a dreadful mistake, he says. "This was an act of war. We knew who the players were. And, because we didn't respond, we emboldened these people to increase the violence."

    Never again.

    Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight magazine.
     
    oldawg and tulianr like this.
  8. techsar

    techsar Monkey+++

    Lost some good friends back then...still kinda pissed off about the whole thing.
    [USMC]
     
    Sapper John and tulianr like this.
  9. robin48

    robin48 Monkey+

    I was on USS Pensacola. Those guys relieved the Marines we brought if I remember correctly. I operated landing craft so naturally I knew guys there. It hit us hard when we received word. That's when I realized we were at war with animals.
     
    techsar, Yard Dart and tulianr like this.
  10. tulianr

    tulianr Don Quixote de la Monkey

    I was in Beirut in 1983, and according to our Rules of Engagement (ROE), insisted upon by the American Ambassador and the State Department, and delivered to each Marine in writing, all weapons were to be unloaded at all times. Weapons were to be carried slung, in a non-threatening manner. Magazines were to be carried in magazine pouches, and the pouches were to be fastened. Withdrawing a magazine out of a magazine pouch without a direct order from a commissioned officer was a court-martial offense.

    The only occasion which would excuse removing a magazine from the pouch, inserting it into the weapon, and firing the weapon, was when being fired upon and being in fear of ones life, AND not being availed of appropriate cover. As soon as appropriate cover was obtained, the Marine WOULD cease firing, regardless of the type and rate of fire being received. I was a young corporal then, and I remember thinking, "These idiots are going to get us killed."

    I remember helping to dismantle a sand-bagged firing position from the roof of the MAU (Marine Amphibious Unit - precursor to the MEU) HQ, under the direction of some khaki and wind-breaker wearing dweebs from the embassy, because in their opinion the position reflected a hostile, military appearance; and we were, after all, PEACE KEEPERS.

    I remember remarking to another young corporal, as we watched cars whizzing by within a few dozen yards of the headquarters building, that a handful of monkeys (no disrespect to present monkeys) with RPGs in speeding cars could do us some serious damage, and there wouldn't be anything we could do in response. (I didn't know at the time that the local monkeys were thinking much larger than RPGs.)

    I had returned home on leave and saw the coverage of the bombing of the BLT (Battalion Landing Team) building on the news. I remember the burning feeling in my gut at the thought of my fellow Marines and Sailors who were in that building. And honestly, at the time, if a State Department dweeb and an Islamic Jihad monkey had been standing in front of me, I don't know who I would have shot first. Beirut was a betrayal of the worst sort, but it wasn't the first time, would not be the last, that the State Department would leave American service men and women hanging in the breeze.
     
    Last edited: Oct 26, 2014
    CATO, Yard Dart, robin48 and 2 others like this.
  11. robin48

    robin48 Monkey+

    Well said Marine, well said. It was the same for us running picket boats.
     
    tulianr likes this.
survivalmonkey SSL seal        survivalmonkey.com warrant canary
17282WuJHksJ9798f34razfKbPATqTq9E7