D@mn...and I was going to go to bed. WHY IS IT that Israelis are "captives" and Palestinians are "fighters" whether currently being "beseiged by Israel" or not?
You think this sucks, just imagine what they (reuters) will do with the 'drunken Israeli soldier' shooting spree in Jerusalem tonight.
No way...Didn't hear about a drunken soldier spree yet...gotta link? thanks.
We haven't had much luck breaking captives free from Hizbollah either:
Supposedly from the Herald in the UK... :
ONE of the 22 "most wanted" terrorists named by George W Bush, the US president, on Wednesday is responsible for the deaths of more Americans in the past two decades than anyone except Osama bin Laden.
Imad Fayez Mughniyah, one of the driving forces behind Hizbollah, the Lebanese terrorist organisation, was top of CIA and FBI "sealed indictment" hit lists until bin Laden's bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 supplanted him.
Born in Lebanon, he now holds Iranian citizenship and is regarded as the second most dangerous terrorist on earth.
To Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, he is known as "the faceless man". The only photograph of him known to exist was taken during his 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner in Beirut.
Mughniyah is believed to have undergone plastic surgery twice since then to cover his tracks, although his fingerprints are on record and have been circulated to security agencies worldwide.
The CIA says he was involved in the kidnap and murder of William Buckley, the agency's station chief in Beirut, and Lieutenant-Colonel William Higgins, a US officer serving with the UN in Lebanon, in the mid-1980s.
Buckley was tortured. He had been targeted for terrorist attention after top secret papers found shredded when Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 were painstakingly pieced back together.
The reconstituted documents blew Buckley's cover in Beirut. The Iranians, Hizbollah's financial and military backers, passed the intelligence along.
Earlier, Mughniyah and two others had hijacked a TWA airliner. They discovered a US navy diver among the passengers and proceeded to beat him unconscious as a demonstration to the other hostages and because he was American.
He was shot and his body dumped from the aircraft to force the authorities to provide fuel for the onward journey, with the threat of further executions if they failed to do so.
However, it was Mughniyah's involvement with large-scale bomb attacks on the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s which propelled him up the wanted list.
In Beirut, he was instrumental in persuading a teenager to drive a truckload of high explosives into the US Marines multi-storey peacekeeping base in the city. The explosion killed 241 servicemen and wounded and maimed twice that number.
Mughniyah's role, assigned by his Iranian sponsors, had been to carry out a detailed reconnaissance of American interests in the city and come up with a prime target. He chose the lightly-defended barracks.
In Argentina, his first target in the widening war against "Americans and Zionists" was the Israeli embassy, the second a softer option, a centre frequented by retired members of Buenos Aires' large Jewish population. A total of 119 people died.
Intelligence sources say Mughniyah, despite his status within Hizbollah as a leading activist, owed his first loyalty to Iran's Revolutionary Guards. In effect, he became their hit man on a grand scale.
His early training fitted him admirably for the task. He started with the PLO's elite Force 17, a small group of extremists trained in the Bekaa valley terrorist camps to handle explosives and assassination.
He had also been a member of the PLO's radical Islamic wing, known as "Khomeini's Fatah Islamites" in honour of the ayatollah then ruling Iran.
Later, after induction into the Revolutionary Guards, he helped set up Islamic Jihad, a shadowy organisation the West and other Lebanese factions came to fear.
However, it was merely a front for terrorist activities for which Iran needed diplomatic deniability. It ostensibly kidnapped and killed and sought publicity but there was no organisation behind the bluff. It was a phantom that Mughniyah, by now Hizbollah's security chief, helped create. Its fighters were drawn from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and drafted in for specific jobs.
Even now, many militants throughout the Middle East believe Islamic Jihad was real. Militant Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have even formed an organisation of the same name in honour of its attacks on Western interests, apparently unaware of its real origins and purpose.
The real fear of the new international coalition set up to combat international terrorism is that bin Laden and Mughniya may already have established links to further their joint cause.
Ali Mohammed, an Egyptian who took American citizenship and became a sergeant in the US special forces, was one of those arrested after the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
Under questioning, he confessed he had been involved in the planning of the atrocities and to contributing knowledge of bomb-making acquired during his US army service. He also admitted being a senior member of Al Qaeda.
Mohammed then volunteered the chilling information that he had arranged a face-to-face meeting between bin Laden and Mughniya in Sudan before the East Africa operation.
As a result, Hizbollah had agreed to provide explosives and training to al Qaeda cells and to members of Al Jihad, the Egyptian fundamentalist group responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, in 1981.
A CIA source said last night: "An alliance between bin Laden and Mughniya is the worst possible scenario imaginable. They are the world's two worst terrorists, with access to global networks of supporters, arms and funds.
"We have to hope Ali Mohammed was lying for effect. There is no direct evidence to link them but it would be a logical marriage of convenience."
Meanwhile, the US government is hoping that if principle doesn't motivate people to turn in terrorists, cash might. John Ashcroft, US attorney general, said yesterday that hefty rewards for 22 suspects should help track some down.
Washington is offering up to £3.5m each for information leading to the capture of suspected terrorists wanted for crimes dating to 1985, and including the September 11 attacks.
- Oct 12th
I'd be very surprised if they were alive myself I would never let myself be captured alive by Muslims personally. They'd have to knock me unconscious without killing me.
Are these the three Israeli soldiers who were kidnapped in front of UN troops who did nothing, except to videotape the whole thing, and then refuse to turn over the video, and whose boss, "blood libel" Larsen, got indignant at Israel in the bargain?
yep... over and over and over... bending over! How many blind eyes can one turn?
