fullspinzoo

It just amazing how this guy can "slough off" the most serious of tragedies with contemptuous dialogue. He has shown "disrespect" for these four poor victims before. Pathetic!!! And now he's doing it again! https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/obamas_b******i_body_bags_no_mere_conspiracy_theory.html

debeda

Obama has always been an EXCELLENT liar. He says the most outrageous things with authority and apparent sincerity and certain people lap it up. It's his tone and the way he uses his words, not his content. Cuz the content is generally at least 60% bull dookey.

fullspinzoo

I'm not so sure because he's done it so lonlg, that he buys into his own bulls**t. He is one of those type that could sell ice to the eskimos and he proved it back in 2008.....unfortunately. But how he got away with doing it in 2012 I'll never know. A lot of corruption going on....Chicago type politics. Dead people, etc.

debeda

I agree. I was stunned when he won ree******n. I'm sure there was LOTS of v***r f***d..and v**er fear. Remember the Black Panthers decked out in fatigues at some polling places?

fullspinzoo

I remember a couple of Black Panthers h*****g out in front of a polling place in Philly and would intimidate the Hell out of people who wanted to v**e and I remember the chicken s**t Holder wouldn't do anything about it.

debeda

Holder is another one who SHOULD go down.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

http://www.buckscountycouriertimes.com/article/20121104/LIFESTYLE/311049866

In 1983 debacle, Reagan escaped the blame game

Posted Nov 4, 2012 at 12:01 AM

Next Saturday, Nov. 10, is a major milestone for the U.S. Marine Corps, America’s elite military force.

Throughout the world, Marines and former Marines will be celebrating the Corps’ 237th birthday. They’ll happily gather in pubs and banquet halls to listen to a message from the Commandant and raise their glasses in toasts to their spouses, their sweethearts and their Corps.

By contrast, these same Marines were recently commemorating another anniversary -- this time, a tragic one.

Tuesday, Oct. 23, a little less than two weeks ago, was the 29th anniversary of one of the greatest catastrophes not only in Marine Corps history but in American history.

At 6:39 a.m. on that autumn day in 1983, 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three American civilians were k**led and another 60 were injured as a result of a horrific explosion detonated by a terrorist suicide truck bomb that destroyed the Marine barracks at the airport in Beirut, Lebanon.

It was the largest one-day death toll for Marines since the Battle for Iwo Jima in 1945.

With a force of six tons of TNT, it was described as the largest explosion since the end of World War II.

Those Marines had been ordered into Lebanon by President Ronald Reagan as a part of an international peacekeeping force following the June 1982 Israeli invasion of that country and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s withdrawal.

Making an already-dangerous situation even more hazardous, the Marines were under strict p**********l orders not to load their weapons -- this, so that they would appear as peacekeepers and not as armed belligerents in the conflict and despite the fact that they were moving into a war zone.

Realistically, they had become “sitting ducks” from the moment they entered Beirut. And as a result of their absurd orders, when the explosives-laden truck sped toward their doomed barracks, the two unarmed guards had no way of stopping it.

According to Col. Timothy J. Geraghty, the commander of the Marines in Beirut: “It didn’t take a military expert to realize that our troops had been placed in an indefensible situation. Anyone following the situation in Lebanon in ordinary news reports could realize a tragedy was in the making.

“There was a growing feeling of frustration inside the Muslim and Druse community in Lebanon due to the United States’ direct backing of Israel in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon and other pro-Israel factions within Lebanon. These factions had been responsible for multiple attacks committed against the Muslim and Druse Lebanese population.”

While the blast led to the withdrawal of the international peacekeeping force from Lebanon, in retrospect, neither the invasion nor the Marine intervention should ever have occurred.

Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon insisted the invasion was justified in retaliation for PLO attacks on Israelis. Yet there had only been one Israeli death from such attacks in the previous 12 months.

From the outset, the American embassy in Beirut had sent numerous cables warning Washington that the invasion would provoke terrorism and undermine America’s standing in the Mideast. But there was no response.

On April 18, 1983, a delivery van exploded at the front door of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, k*****g 46 people, including 16 Americans, and wounding more than 100 others.

Against the vigorous opposition of Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Reagan then ordered Marine commanders to call in air strikes and other attacks against the Muslims and initiated a two-week-long bombardment by American warships, including the battleship USS New Jersey.

In his autobiography, then Maj. Gen. Colin Powell observed: “Since (the Muslims) could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target -- the exposed Marines at the airport.”

The Reagan administration immediately attempted to deflect blame for the attack with a deluge of false statements and misrepresentations. In a televised speech four days after the bombing, the president insisted the attack was unstoppable, erroneously declaring that the truck crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed-wire entanglements, and argued that the U.S. mission was succeeding.

Despite the fact that Reagan had dispatched the Marines into an impossible situation and then had issued orders that led to their inability to defend themselves, he suffered relatively little criticism from the press or partisan opponents, and after months of vigorous campaigning was overwhelmingly re-elected the following year.

Contrast this with the controversy over the recent attack on the U.S. consulate in B******i, Libya, where on Sept. 11, U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were assassinated.

Within hours of that attack, and with no evidence as to how or why it had occurred or how it could have been prevented, p**********l candidate Mitt Romney broke from what has long been traditional political protocol in situations of this type and attacked President Barack Obama, accusing him of sympathizing with anti-American interests in the Muslim world.

This, despite the initial assessment from U.S. intelligence sources that the attack had begun spontaneously following earlier protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, over the showing of an anti-Islamic motion picture.

Two weeks later, the intelligence assessment was revised and stated that “new information” revealed the B******i attack was “a deliberate and organized attack carried out by terrorists.”

Now, in the closing weeks of the 2012 p**********l campaign, conservative talk show hosts and columnists have been constantly accusing the Obama administration of covering up what actually occurred. Beyond that, they insist he failed to provide the adequate security to the consulate that had been requested by the Ambassador and his staff.

While the B******i attack was certainly a tragedy, and the possibility of a cover-up of what was initially known by the administration is still open to question, it pales in comparison with the errors in judgment by the Reagan administration that led to the Beirut bombing of 29 years ago and blatant cover-up that followed.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
P.S. One of my 'Nam buddies, Dale Dye, was stationed in Beirut for months just prior to the bombing. He had left for stateside to be released at the end of his 20-year service in the USMC. Most of the Marine deaths were of his friends. He later wrote of the tragedy foreseen by many well before the attack. https://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-8&fr=tightropetb&p=daledyeonbeirut&type=25355_103117

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

By Dale Dye
'You just don't get it.'
Beirut—30 Years Later
Posted by admin on October 21, 2013

“Left a hundred…drop fifty.” The Gunny gnawed off another chunk of his Mars Bar and squinted up at the Chouf settlements in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains where Druze gunners were launching rockets into our compound at Beirut International Airport.

“If they’ve got an FO up there he needs a block of military instruction—or glasses.” I moved to look over the Gunny’s shoulder and spotted the flash from the launch site as another Katyusha rocket headed in our direction. We had the best seat in the house, a couple of lawn chairs that we’d hauled up onto the roof of the 24 MAU CP located in the airport’s former Fire Department. As a couple of Vietnam Veterans with plenty of experience under fire, we’d staked out the rooftop as a little sanctuary where we could talk privately while the rest of the MAU scrambled to bunkers and battle stations.

“Reminds me a little of Con Thien…or maybe Khe Sanh.” The Gunny and I had served at those besieged battlefields during the Southeast Asia Wargames and both of us were quietly discussing the frustration and inevitable consequences of living in the ten-ring of a big target surrounded by people with evil intent and access to artillery, mortars, and rockets. Over the past six months or so, we’d seen it coming and watched various Marine commanders b***h about a nebulous mission to no avail. Various bureaucrats and diplomats up and down our convoluted chain of command wrote off the increasing levels of incoming fire as “overs” or unintentional stray rounds from battles up in the mountains ringing BIA where the Lebanese Army our Marines had helped train was engaging Syrian, Druze and other formations determined to unseat a government shot through with factional disputes.

“The big difference,” I told the Gunny, “was that at Con Thien and Khe Sanh we could shoot back. We start doing that here in Beirut—assuming we could even get clearance—and there goes the neutral peacekeeper image Washington keeps pushing.”

“There it is…” The Gunny nodded and walked with me down below our perch where I was packing to leave Beirut. “This ain’t gonna end well, Skipper. You’re lucky to be out of it.”

As usual, the Gunny was right on all counts. I was lucky to be out of Beirut. Just a few months after I returned Stateside, happy to be home but fraught with worry about the buddies I’d left behind, a suicide bomber drove an explosive-laden truck into our Battalion Landing Team headquarters. In one devastating second, the big building dubbed the Beirut Hilton, the building where I’d spent so much time on duty or visiting friends, disappeared. The structure that anchored our over-stretched perimeter around BIA collapsed in a near-nuclear detonation and crushed the life out of 241 of America’s finest fighting men. It took nearly everything I had to keep from screaming that it was bound to happen at the sad-faced pundits who announced the news on TV that day in October 1983.

Of all the experiences I have stored in the military section of my memory banks Beirut remains one of the most painful. For the second time in my life on that devastating day in 1983 I was home safe from the wars and dealing with survivor guilt. Maybe if I’d just volunteered to stay in Beirut I could have done something; maybe I could have found a way to shake up the bureaucracy and warn them of what the Gunny and most of the other Vietnam Veterans serving in Beirut could so plainly see coming in one form or another. When I left we had gone from peacekeepers to enemy combatants in the eyes of the anti-government factions and religious extremists who seethed while we trained the Lebanese Army and then called air strikes and naval gunfire missions on them. Peacekeepers don’t do that stuff. Warriors do.

Marines are warriors by nature and by training. You can call them Peacekeepers, or neutral observers or any other euphemism that politically suits a given situation, but you can’t—or shouldn’t—ask them to stand by and take a beating while they have the means to give better than they’re getting from an enemy on any battlefield. That’s a recipe for disaster. Of course being Marines and both highly dedicated and strongly disciplined, they will do as directed by lawful authority even if it obviously means they are likely to get k**led in the process. Boiled down to the essence, that’s what happened in Beirut.

The fact that it happened to some of the finest men—both veterans and boots undergoing their first trial by fire—that I’ve ever known is both sad and exasperating as I look back on the experience thirty years later. It’s also one of the things that make me most proud to be a Marine and to have served at their side in Beirut. And so, for the first time in those thirty years since the bombing in Beirut, I’m going to join a dwindling muster of survivors at Camp Lejeune where we will remember the experience and honor those who didn’t make it home. There will be a lot of b***hing, re-hashing, and remembering along with tears and tremors as we remember. But remember we will—even if the rest of the country does not.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Sorry, but, if needed...here's the link to this article: http://daledye.com/?p=185

bahmer

Amen and Amen

bahmer

Spot on.

padremike Loc: Phenix City, Al

Unquestionably an avoidable and horrible tragedy. We remember the vulgar, but accurate, acronym we servicemen used. "Situation normal"....etc, etc. Yet I'll wager a WAG that over 600 request for increased security measures were not sent by the Marine commander and denied. And the surviving Marines were not required to sign a non-disclosure statement and then given a monthly lie detector test to determine if they violated the NDS as we're the valiant Benganzi defender. They were fired, sent to Germany and had to pay their own way home. Obama and his mob lied.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Maybe, but certainly no worse than the lies Reagan perpetrated. Did you not read the article preceding the one you commented on?

"From the outset, the American embassy in Beirut had sent numerous cables warning Washington that the invasion would provoke terrorism and undermine America’s standing in the Mideast. But there was no response."

"The Reagan administration immediately attempted to deflect blame for the (Beirtut) attack with a deluge of false statements and misrepresentations. In a televised speech four days after the bombing, the president insisted the attack was unstoppable, erroneously declaring that the truck crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed-wire entanglements, and argued that the U.S. mission was succeeding."

The Beirut terrorist's truck went right through the gate and unarmed guards...as per President Reagan's orders. Over 300 casualties.

Read the following: https://www.thoughtco.com/ronald-reagan-k*****g-marines-in-beirut-2353738

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/01/30/aide-reagan-left-marines-vulnerable-in-beirut.html

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Mis-hit error.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Again.