Posted on 07/23/2006 10:22:28 PM PDT by BurbankKarl
Hezbollah terrorists fire a missile from the southern Lebanese city of Tyre.
No, I just found an article that the Vatican had tried to obtain Shalit's release and that was the line from Hamas: they know nothing.
And as for Peres saying that the other two are in good health, that was based on the "word" of Nasrallah and the Lebanese Foreign Minister.
Still, I hold out hope for the alive and well recovery of all three, until I know differently.
And wasn't it Warren Christopher who advised Reagan to leave Beruit? Would take some real digging to find any connection there.
Inside Al Qaeda, by Rohan Gunaratna is considered the definitive text on that subject. Not sure about Mughniyeh, he has been "retired" for a decade or more, so relevent materials may be out of print.
I'd agree -- well, I do agree, I suppose, with your entire post -- but I think we've made that more difficult by failing to recognize his Chechnyan problems as "War on Terror" problems.
Admittedly, there are many issues there besides "Islamist terrorism," including Russia's political direction of late, but I think we should have been seeking common ground with them since 9/11. Instead, we've treated most of their incidents and responses the way the rest of the world has been treating Israel's this week.
Some of the same thing applies in our relationships with India and Pakistan. If elements within Pakistan are supporting Islamist terrorism outside its borders, we need to be "helping" Musharraf stop it. If he won't stop it, surely we can do things unilaterally without jeopardizing his friendship or his tenuous hold on power, which are important for us at this stage...
I believe Putin might come around very quickly on a lot of things -- like acknowledging and stopping his aid of the terrorists attacking us and our allies -- if we'd come around on that one thing. We urge Israel on in it's conflict with Hezbollah, but get stuck on "restraint" when Chechen Islamist terrorists kill Russians.
I'm no fan of this little slimeball or any of Russia's ex-KGB guys, and my thoughts on this issue have nothing to do with the "looked into his eyes thing" (he's ex-KGB, remember).
I believe, though, that there's gotta be a win-win deal, somewhere, we can offer him that will help him with some of his country's problems and get him -- and his country's resources -- solidly on the right side in the War on Terror. He's hurting, and he knows it -- his economy is down the tubes, organized crime is metastasizing like melanoma, and the aforementioned lack of respect for his terrorism problems has gotta leave a mark.
MUg-MEE-ah. The first syllable is sort of a cross between "Mug" and "Moog" and the G is half silent.
How long has Murtha been in Congress?..I know he took credit for getting Clinton to pull out of Somalia...maybe he told Reagan to get out of Beirut...lol
I have read that he did but did not realize that he had that much credibility with a Republican president. Someone sure did though as I have always thought Reagan himself would have stood up to this in a different way.
You mean, something like "Goebbels," with a Middle Eastern accent?
Is there a site we can refer people to about this guy?
Then you are even more blessed than I thought. :o)
That occured in July 1996- a ship interdiction that was planned to go off was cancelled when the Clinton Admin got a case of the quivering willies, same as they used to do when going after Aidid in Somalia. Mugniyah had attended a terror summit in Iran not long before and was thought to be aboard the vessel. We had everything in place and all was ready to go off when it got nixed for fear he might not be on the ship after all. The admin didn't even let the teams take a look-see to make sure he wasn't.
Tha Clinton admin couldn't help it though- they had too many things in 1996 to think about, like how much of our missile technology they were going to sell to Chiina for campaign donations, and how many FBI files to steal.
Here is Dan Rather's version which may be fake but accurate:
JULY 1996 : (PERSIAN GULF, US 'ATTEMPT' TO NAB MUGNIYAH) In the Persian Gulf, in late July 1996, US warships, a full complement of military hardware, and nearly 4,000 Marines, sailors and SEALs, were praying they could pull off the mission of their lives. They had been assigned to grab the man, who before September 11th, had killed more Americans than any other terrorist. His name is Imad Mugniyah, and U.S. intelligence believed they had tracked him to the waters of the Persian Gulf, aboard a merchant ship, the Ibn Tufail.
Marine commander John Garrett helped plan this top-secret mission to take down the ship, and take Mugniyah into custody. This is the first time he has ever talked about it publicly. In fact, no one involved has ever talked about it, until now. Dan Rather reports.
...One month earlier, 19 Americans had been killed in the bombing of the Khobar Towers Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia. The suspected mastermind? Imad Mugniyah. When intelligence indicated he might be aboard the Ibn Tufail, a massive operation was mounted almost overnight.
... There was nothing left to do but pull the trigger on the plan. In place, ready to attack, were 60 SEALs assigned to board the ship in secret. Dozens of Marine commandos, and hundreds of others were ready to search the ship from stem to stern. Then with one word from Washington, all the planning, all the adrenaline, and all the hope… for thousands of American sailors and Marines, came crashing down. The mission was called off.
Says Short: “I was just stunned. I mean disbelief. I mean it had been almost 48 hours at that point. And none of us had slept, and at the end of that, they tell you that it’s off, not standby, not be prepared, to just forget about it.” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/01/60II/main507784.shtml
Note that at this same time Bin Laden was in talks with Iranian intel officers and also that this was the time of the Olympic bombing and TWA flt 800 and Khobar Towers; Iraq was acting up again and Yousef was on trial in the case of the 1993 WTC bombing, and so on. Busy summer.
HAH! You should have heard my first pronunciation - came out sounding like mamma mia. Think I got it now - thanks for the help.
This is what I think Ginsberg said regarding Mughniyeh's elusiveness.
At 3:06 on Video………
“We have come so GD close, but yet every time the CIA and FBI have come to nab him, he’s escaped the dragnet….sometimes at the connivance of Arab governments, believe it or not.”
A reactor like that produces plutonium at a rates depending on the levels of power the reactor is run at. It is not a linear curve, and quantities produced drop off sharply below a certain knuckle in the curve.
Although Pakistan is a signatory to the NPT, they have never ratified it, but China is and has, so there is some measure of control, in theory at least.
The human race is moving from facing the spectre of nuclear annihilation on a national basis, to the lesser threat of lsoing entire cities in an instant, but the threat of proliferation is still one of the most significant challenges we face. Sustainable energy is another, and the combination of the two problems has the potential to be explosive.
Still, there is hope. Observing Pakistan and India evolve, after both looked into the abyss shortly before OIF, was encouraging. Although the process is slow, and in this case nearly invisible, even Iran is becoming aware that the power inherent in possessing nuclear weapons is tempered by the responsibility of certain knowlege that they and all their kind can vanish in a matter of hours, for all eternity.
For the record, I built more than 250 miles downwind of a major population center, more than 30 miles from the closest population center, and proliferation was at least a part of that decision making process.
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