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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (168107)	5/19/2014 10:54:23 AM
From: sinclap	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224729

On October 23, 1983, a 19-ton yellow Mercedes-Benz stake-bed truck drove to the Beirut International Airport, where the U.S. 24th Marine Amphibious Unit was deployed. The 1st Battalion 8th Marines , commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Larry Gerlach, was a subordinate element of the 24th MAU. The truck was not the water truck they had been expecting. Instead, it was a hijacked truck carrying explosives. The driver turned his truck onto an access road leading to the compound. He drove into and circled the parking lot, and then he accelerated to crash through a 5-foot-high barrier of concertina wire separating the parking lot from the building. The wire popped "like somebody walking on twigs." The truck then passed between two sentry posts and through an open vehicle gate in the perimeter chain-link fence, crashed through a guard shack in front of the building and smashed into the lobby of the building serving as the barracks for the 1st Battalion 8th Marines. The sentries at the gate were operating under rules of engagement, which made it very difficult to respond quickly to the truck. Sentries were ordered to keep their weapons at condition four (no magazine inserted and no rounds in the chamber). Only one sentry, LCpl Eddie DiFranco, was able to load and chamber a round. However, by that time the truck was already crashing into the building's entryway. An Iranian national named Ismail Ascari,detonated his explosives, which were later estimated to be equivalent to approximately 9,525 kilograms (21,000 pounds) of TNT. The force of the explosion collapsed the four-story building into rubble, crushing many inside. "A former defense secretary for Ronald Reagan says he implored the president to put Marines serving in Beirut in a safer position before terrorists attacked them in 1983, killing 241 servicemen. "I was not persuasive enough to persuade the president that the Marines were there on an impossible mission," Caspar Weinberger says in an oral history project capturing the views of former Reagan administration officials. [H]e said one of his greatest regrets was in failing to overcome the arguments that '"Marines don't cut and run,' and 'We can't leave because we're there'" before the devastating suicide attack on the lightly armed force. "They had no mission but to sit at the airport, which is just like sitting in a bull's-eye," Weinberger said. "I begged the president at least to pull them back and put them back on their transports as a more defensible position." Shortly after the barracks bombing, President Ronald Reagan appointed a military fact-finding committee headed by retired Admiral Robert L. J. Long to investigate the bombing. The commission's report found senior military officials responsible for security lapses and blamed the military chain of command for the disaster. It suggested that there might have been many fewer deaths if the barracks guards had carried loaded weapons and a barrier more substantial than the barbed wire the bomber drove over easily. (Notably absent was any organized attempt by Democratic Congressional House members to investigate the Administration's knowledge of the military's defense strategy regarding the barracks.) It wasn't like the Reagan Administration had no inkling of the possibility of attacks on U.S. personnel in Lebanon. Six months prior to the Marine barracks attack, on April 18, 1983, a suicide bombing against the United States embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killed 63 people, mostly embassy and CIA staff members, several soldiers and one Marine. 17 of the dead were Americans. It was the deadliest attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission up to that time[.] Following the attack, the embassy was moved to a supposedly more secure location in East Beirut. However, on September 20, 1984, another car bomb exploded at this embassy annex, killing twenty Lebanese and two American soldiers. By Darrell Issa's standards, Reagan's corpse should be exhumed and the rotting Gipper should be forced to answer questions in front of his committee about the nearly three hundred Americans who were murdered in Lebanon while he was President.