Benghazi seems a lot like Iran Contra

Floridatexan wrote:http://www.pensitoreview.com/2015/06/01/worse-than-benghazi-reagan-ordered-220-marines-to-beirut-where-they-were-slaugthered-by-terrorists/

Worse Than Benghazi: After Reagan Ignored Warnings, 220 Marines Were Killed by a Terrorist in Beirut

But Democrats led By Speaker Tip O'Neill blamed the terrorists, not the president, for the murders

JON PONDER



Left: The U.S. peacekeepers’ command center and barracks before the explosion; right: Service members pick through the rubble following the Beirut bombing Oct. 23, 1983. (Photo from the United States Marine Corps History Division)


"...In 1982, seven years into the Lebanese Civil War, Pres. Ronald Reagan ordered 2,400 Marines into Beirut as part of an international peacekeeping mission. As peacekeepers, the Marines operated under rules of engagement that prohibited them from firing their weapons unless they’d been fired upon first — and even then they could only respond with the same type of weapon that had been fired at them.

There were other restrictions. Violence in the city was so bad that they were confined to their base at the Beirut airport. Eventually, the entire American force, which also included Army and Navy personnel, moved into a large, modern office building that had been repurposed to house their command center as well as living quarters. (The building is referred to in many accounts as the “Marine barracks.”) And yet the gates to the facility were ordered to remain open at all times, and the sentries who manned the gates were to be unarmed.

In Washington, Reagan ignored warnings from his senior advisers that he’d put American troops in harm’s way.


“They had no mission but to sit at the airport,” Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger recalled years later, according to a Fox News report, “which is just like sitting in a bull’s-eye. I begged the president at least to pull them back and put them back on their transports as a more defensible position.”

On Oct. 23, 1983, at 6:20 a.m., the inevitable happened. A suicide bomber drove a truck into the compound through the open gate, plowed through a scrim of concertina wire, pulled up into the building and detonated his bomb. The blast was the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of dynamite. It ignited the largest non-nuclear explosion since World War II, flattening the building and killing 220 Marines, 18 Navy personnel and three Army soldiers.

Jane Mayer, then a reporter for the Wall St. Journal in Beirut, arrived on the scene not long after the bombing. “From beneath the dusty, smoking slabs of collapsed concrete, piteous American voices could be heard, begging for help,” Mayer recalled recently in the New Yorker. It was, she wrote, “the single deadliest attack on American Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima.”

So why was security at the base so dangerously lax? In an interview with Navy Times in 2008, Dakota Woods, then a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a former Marine Corps officer, said it was a case of politics trumping practicality. “There was a strong political imperative to avoid looking too hostile or aggressive,” Woods said, “so Marines on guard duty were prohibited from having their weapons in a ready-to-fire condition.”

Politics

The aftermath of the tragedy demonstrates the stark difference between the political realities of the Obama and Reagan eras. Republicans today blame the terrorist attacks on the American ambassadorial compound in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2011 — and the murders there of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American security officers — on Pres. Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In 1983, Democrats who controlled Congress — and who loathed Reagan as much or more than Republicans despise Obama now — blamed the terrorists, not Reagan, for the murders in Beirut..."

(more)

************

There was ONE investigation of the Beirut bombing...ONE...

ZVUGKTUBM wrote:Floridatexan brings up good points. Marines were getting picked-off by snipers and mortars in Beruit long before the bombing occurred. That should have been an indicator of how things were going to unfold there, but nobody was paying attention.

Kind of like the warnings that Bin Laden was planning strikes inside the U.S., but nobody listened in 2001........

Comparing Iran Contra to Benghazi is stupid, but the comparison originates from the obscure websites that PeeDog inhabits, so I digress......

Floridatexan wrote:http://www.pensitoreview.com/2015/06/01/worse-than-benghazi-reagan-ordered-220-marines-to-beirut-where-they-were-slaugthered-by-terrorists/

Worse Than Benghazi: After Reagan Ignored Warnings, 220 Marines Were Killed by a Terrorist in Beirut

But Democrats led By Speaker Tip O'Neill blamed the terrorists, not the president, for the murders

JON PONDER



Left: The U.S. peacekeepers’ command center and barracks before the explosion; right: Service members pick through the rubble following the Beirut bombing Oct. 23, 1983. (Photo from the United States Marine Corps History Division)


"...In 1982, seven years into the Lebanese Civil War, Pres. Ronald Reagan ordered 2,400 Marines into Beirut as part of an international peacekeeping mission. As peacekeepers, the Marines operated under rules of engagement that prohibited them from firing their weapons unless they’d been fired upon first — and even then they could only respond with the same type of weapon that had been fired at them.

There were other restrictions. Violence in the city was so bad that they were confined to their base at the Beirut airport. Eventually, the entire American force, which also included Army and Navy personnel, moved into a large, modern office building that had been repurposed to house their command center as well as living quarters. (The building is referred to in many accounts as the “Marine barracks.”) And yet the gates to the facility were ordered to remain open at all times, and the sentries who manned the gates were to be unarmed.

In Washington, Reagan ignored warnings from his senior advisers that he’d put American troops in harm’s way.


“They had no mission but to sit at the airport,” Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger recalled years later, according to a Fox News report, “which is just like sitting in a bull’s-eye. I begged the president at least to pull them back and put them back on their transports as a more defensible position.”

On Oct. 23, 1983, at 6:20 a.m., the inevitable happened. A suicide bomber drove a truck into the compound through the open gate, plowed through a scrim of concertina wire, pulled up into the building and detonated his bomb. The blast was the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of dynamite. It ignited the largest non-nuclear explosion since World War II, flattening the building and killing 220 Marines, 18 Navy personnel and three Army soldiers.

Jane Mayer, then a reporter for the Wall St. Journal in Beirut, arrived on the scene not long after the bombing. “From beneath the dusty, smoking slabs of collapsed concrete, piteous American voices could be heard, begging for help,” Mayer recalled recently in the New Yorker. It was, she wrote, “the single deadliest attack on American Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima.”

So why was security at the base so dangerously lax? In an interview with Navy Times in 2008, Dakota Woods, then a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a former Marine Corps officer, said it was a case of politics trumping practicality. “There was a strong political imperative to avoid looking too hostile or aggressive,” Woods said, “so Marines on guard duty were prohibited from having their weapons in a ready-to-fire condition.”

Politics

The aftermath of the tragedy demonstrates the stark difference between the political realities of the Obama and Reagan eras. Republicans today blame the terrorist attacks on the American ambassadorial compound in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2011 — and the murders there of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American security officers — on Pres. Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In 1983, Democrats who controlled Congress — and who loathed Reagan as much or more than Republicans despise Obama now — blamed the terrorists, not Reagan, for the murders in Beirut..."

(more)

************

There was ONE investigation of the Beirut bombing...ONE...

ZVUGKTUBM wrote:Floridatexan brings up good points. Marines were getting picked-off by snipers and mortars in Beruit long before the bombing occurred. That should have been an indicator of how things were going to unfold there, but nobody was paying attention.

Kind of like the warnings that Bin Laden was planning strikes inside the U.S., but nobody listened in 2001........

Comparing Iran Contra to Benghazi is stupid, but the comparison originates from the obscure websites that PeeDog inhabits, so I digress......