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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (579042)	5/27/2004 10:52:13 PM
From: MKTBUZZ	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Let's see, the 1979 takeover of the American Embassy in Iran and the seizing of 63 hostages. Iran was a mere curtain raiser for the horrors that followed. During the 1980s the United States increasingly became the target overseas of Islamic radicals. In April 1983, a car bomb exploded in front of the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. Six months later, a suicide bomber in the same city drove an explosives-filled truck into the U.S. Marine Corps compound, killing 254 U.S. servicemen and 58 French paratroopers. In September 1984, a van bomb in front of the U.S. Embassy there killed 14 and injured 70. In March of 1985, journalist Terry Anderson was kidnapped in Lebanon and held for more than six years. In June, a TWA flight was hijacked to Lebanon, and American television viewers saw the body of murdered Navy diver Robert Stethem dumped onto the tarmac. In October, 69-year-old New Yorker Leon Klinghoffer was rolled in his wheelchair across the deck of the hijacked Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and tossed into the ocean. The same year also saw an attack on a U.S. military base in Frankfurt that killed three, including a GI. An American passenger was murdered on a hijacked Egyptian airliner, and an Arab hit-squad assault on U.S. and Israeli airport counters in Rome and Vienna killed 16 bystanders. The mayhem continued through the decade with more hostages seized in Lebanon, an explosion aboard a TWA jetliner approaching Athens that killed four passengers, and the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque popular with GIs. For more than two decades, Islamic radicals used crude but effective methods that employed massive amounts of explosives and fanatics who were willing to die. In December of 1988 came a demonstration of how technically sophisticated the enemy had become. Pan Am Flight 103, a Boeing 747 bound from London to New York and carrying a high-performance plastic explosive inside a radio-cassette player, was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 passengers and crew and 11 people on the ground. After 20 years of attacks "over there," terrorism came here. The first domestic attack little more than a feint came in January 1993 when a lone gunman, Mir Aimal Kansi, opened up with an AK-47 outside CIA headquarters, killing two employees and injuring three. Everything changed Feb. 26, 1993, when a 1,000-pound bomb in a car parked in an underground garage at the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan killed six people and injured more than 1,000. Those images of terrified office workers with soot-blackened faces fleeing through smoke billowing from the twin skyscrapers can now be seen as a frightening harbinger of an even more terrible blitz. Fortress America was no longer invulnerable to attack by outside enemies or from within. Overseas, the assaults continued and escalated. In March 1995, two U.S. diplomats were murdered in Pakistan in apparent retaliation for the arrest in that country of Ramzi Yousef, later convicted of masterminding the New York Trade Center bombing. In Saudi Arabia, seven died that same year in the bombing of a U.S. training center, followed by a 1996 bomb attack on the U.S. military's Khobar Towers barracks that killed 19 airmen and wounded 500. The following year, four Texas oilmen were murdered in Pakistan after Kansi was arrested there for the CIA shootings. In August 1998, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, killing 224 and injuring some 5,000. A small boat filled with powerful explosives was detonated by suicide bombers alongside the destroyer USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 sailors. It was another audacious assault on a symbol of American military might that left the nation wondering where the next would occur. Now we know.