Bomb kills top Hezbollah leader

[thedrifter]

Bomb kills top Hezbollah leader

The Lebanese group, Hezbollah says one of its top leaders, Imad Mughniyeh, has died in a bombing in Damascus, and has blamed Israel for assassinating him.

Mughniyeh is widely believed to be behind a wave of Western hostage-taking in Lebanon during the 1980s.

He had been in hiding for years and was high on US and Israeli wanted lists.

The Israeli prime minister's office later issued a statement rejecting "the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement" in the killing.

Mughniyeh, in his late 40s, is variously described as special operations or intelligence chief of Hezbollah's secretive military wing, the Islamic Resistance.

Correspondents say his death is a significant blow to Hezbollah, which battled Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war, and its Iranian and Syrian backers.

Neighbourhood in shock

Syrian police kept media and other onlookers well away from the scene of the overnight blast in the well-to-do Kafar Soussa district.
With all pride we declare a great jihadist leader of the Islamic resistance in Lebanon joining the martyrs
Hezbollah's Manar TV

Hours later, Syrian state TV confirmed one person had been killed in a car bombing, but did not identify the victim.

"Scores of police and intelligence officers rushed to the site. People in the neighbourhood are shocked," said one resident quoted by Reuters news agency.

"We saw security officers hauling the body away," said one witness quoted by Reuters news agency.

Hezbollah-owned Manar TV in Beirut announced the death saying: "With all pride we declare a great jihadist leader of the Islamic resistance in Lebanon joining the martyrs... the brother commander hajj Imad Mughniyeh".

"After a life full of jihad, sacrifices and accomplishments ... he died a martyr at the hands of the Israeli Zionists," it quoted a Hezbollah statement saying.

Later, the Syrian government confirmed Mughniyeh had been killed and said investigations were still underway to find the perpetrators.
IMAD MUGHNIYEH
Born southern Lebanon 1962
Indicted for 1985 hijack of TWA airliner
Accused of involvement in 1990s Buenos Aires bombings
On FBI Most Wanted list since 2001



"Syria, which condemns this cowardly terrorist act, expresses condolences to the martyr family and to the Lebanese people," Interior Minister Bassam Abdul-Majeed said in a statement.

Iran also condemned the killing, praising Mughniyeh as a martyr and describing the attack as "yet another brazen example of organised state terrorism by the Zionist regime".

Hezbollah said a funeral service would be held in its stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Thursday.

The city has been tense ahead of a mass rally also on Thursday to commemorate three years since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

There have been repeated clashes between supporters of the pro-Western government and the opposition, which includes Hezbollah.

High-profile attacks

Hezbollah was founded in 1982 by a group of Shia Muslim clerics after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.


It has emerged in recent years as a major political and military force in Lebanon, after military successes against Israel.

Shia militants who went on to become members are thought to have planned some of the most high-profile kidnappings and attacks of the 1980s, including the 1983 suicide bombings in Beirut that killed hundreds of US and French service personnel.

Mughniyeh was among several suspects indicted in the US for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner in which a US Navy diver was killed.

Israel believes he was involved in planning the 1992 bombing of Israel's embassy in Argentina in which 29 people were killed, and the blast at a Buenos Aires Jewish centre two years later that killed 95.

The Israeli government, which has been accused of a series of assassinations of its enemies in various countries over the years, stopped short of an outright denial that it had killed Mughniyeh.

HAVE YOUR SAY As a Syrian citizen, I have the right to be scared that Israel could bomb many sites inside the country Khalil, Syria

"Israel rejects the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement in this incident," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said in a statement.

Israel was still investigating all reports as they emerged, it added.

But a former head of Israel's Mossad secret service, Danny Yatom, called the killing "a big achievement for the free world against terrorist organisations."

A spokesman for the US state department, Sean McCormack, described Mughniyeh as a "cold-blooded killer, a mass murderer and a terrorist responsible for countless innocent lives lost".

"The world is a better place without this man in it," he added. "One way or another he was brought to justice."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Accused mastermind of 1983 Beirut bombing dies <br />
Other crimes Hezbollah member said to be behind included murder of Navy diver in 1985 <br />
By Zeina Karam - The Associated Press <br />
Posted : Wednesday Feb...

[thedrifter]

Another One Bites The Dust

Ibd
1 hour, 19 minutes ago

Middle East: The worldwide war on terror has scored a major victory with the death of the terrorist, mass murder and Hezbollah chieftain responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. Marines and Israeli citizens.

Imad Mughniyeh is not a name most Americans are familiar with, though they should be. He was among those indicted in the U.S. for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed. Robert Stethem was brutally beaten, murdered and dumped on an airport tarmac in Beirut, Lebanon.

Before 9/11, Mughniyeh was responsible for the deaths of more Americans than any living person, starting with the bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut in April 1983, killing 63 people. Six months later, he masterminded the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 Americans.

In 1984, he was behind the bombing of the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut, killing 14. He was the reputed leader of a group that held Americans hostage in Lebanon. The hostages included Terry Anderson, the former Associated Press chief Middle East correspondent who was held six years.

Israelis were another favorite target for this terrorist killer. Israel believes he was the brains behind the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Argentina in which 29 people were killed and the bombing of a Jewish Center in Buenos Aires two years later that killed 95. Mughniyeh was a very busy man.

Hezbollah issued a ritual condemnation of Israel for his death, but Tel Aviv denies it. Mughniyeh was on an FBI wanted list with a $25 million bounty on his head. That's an amount reserved for those at the Osama bin Laden level.

"With all pride we declare a great leader of the Islamic resistance in Lebanon joining the martyrs," said a statement read on Hezbollah TV. "The brother commander hajj Imad Mughniyeh became a martyr at the hands of the Zionist Israelis."

The announcement came shortly after a late-night explosion in Damascus destroyed a vehicle. The area was quickly sealed by Syrian security forces. The Lebanese TV station LBC reported that Mughniyeh was killed as he left a ceremony at an Iranian school in Damascus. Iran's English-language satellite station, Press TV, identified Mughniyeh on Wednesday as the victim of the blast.

That Mughniyeh would be in Syria is no surprise. Damascus has long been the Club Med for terrorist groups. As Farid Ghadry, president of the Reform Party of Syria, recently wrote in the Washington Times, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Ghasem Soleimani and Mughniyeh regularly conferred in Damascus with a member of Bashar al-Assad's inner circle, former head of Syrian intelligence Muhammed Nasif Khayr-Bayk.

According to the Associated Press, Mughniyeh met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during a January visit to Damascus. The circumstances of his life and his death demonstrate how inextricably the global forces of terror are linked.

Mughniyeh was in Syria working for the Iranian terrorist creation Hezbollah, which is trying to overthrow the democracy in Lebanon to create another Islamofascist terrorist state. He was at the heart of every major Hezbollah attack over the past quarter-century.

Mughniyeh, who was Hezbollah security chief during Lebanon's civil war, was no doubt deeply involved in the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah campaign to overthrow the Lebanese democracy and the assassinations of a long string of anti-Syrian politicians and journalists who opposed their foreign interference in Lebanese affairs.

Don't expect the Democrats who whine that Osama bin Laden has yet to be captured to celebrate the death of Mughniyeh at whoever's hand. More likely, you'd hear the crickets chirp in the Democratic Caucus where the worldwide terror war is said to be a Bush fantasy.

As Mughniyeh showed, the global terror network and the threat it represents are quite real.

Today, there is one fewer thug with whom Barack Obama can conduct his "aggressive personal diplomacy."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Commander Became Prototype of Extremism
Suicide Bombing Tactics Adopted Widely

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 14, 2008; A21


Lance Cpl. Eddie DiMarco was the only survivor who saw how it happened. The big yellow Mercedes truck circled outside the Marine compound in Beirut, strangely gaining speed, until it broke straight for the building where a battalion of Marines slept. DiMarco, on guard duty at the four-story concrete building, was haunted by the driver's expression.

"He looked right at me . . . smiled, that's it. Soon as I saw [the truck], I knew what was going to happen," he later recalled.

Within seconds, the vehicle, laden with the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of explosives, set off the largest non-nuclear explosion since World War II, killing 241 U.S. military personnel.

It took two years, but U.S. intelligence eventually linked the 1983 bombing of the Marine compound to Imad Mughniyah, the high school dropout who became the prototype for a generation of extremists -- the enigmatic architect of the most notorious attack against U.S. targets until Sept. 11, 2001.

"Long before Osama bin Laden, there was Imad Mughniyah," said Bilal Saab, a Hezbollah expert at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center. "He introduced catastrophic suicide terrorism and many other tactics now used widely by many groups throughout the region."

The United States issued a sealed indictment against Mughniyah in 1985 -- three years before bin Laden formed al-Qaeda.

With Marines planning to mark this year's 25th anniversary of the barracks attack, the Marine commander at the time, Col. Tim Geraghty, reflected yesterday on Mughniyah's death in Syria. "It's very fitting that it was a car bomb. It was long overdue," he said from his home in Phoenix. "The fact that he was still active with a $5 million bounty on his head showed his genius for maintaining and running terrorism operations all this time."

For a quarter-century Mughniyah, pronounced Moog-NEE-yah, eluded intensive American pursuit, demonstrating the difficulty of capturing extremists targeting the United States.

Mughniyah's battle was a family affair. His Islamic Jihad, an embryo of what became Hezbollah, began abducting American hostages off the streets of Beirut in 1984 to win freedom for Mustafa Badreddin, a cousin and brother-in-law. The two men had been a deadly team. Mughniyah was the master planner, Badreddin an explosives expert for the Marine bombing and an earlier suicide attack on the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, according to U.S. officials at the time. Badreddin developed a trademark technique of using gas to enhance the power of already sophisticated explosives.

Badreddin was later imprisoned and sentenced to death in Kuwait for a series of 1983 bombings, including attacks on the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait City. But the United States and Kuwait both resisted Islamic Jihad's demands for the release of the 17 men held for the attacks in order to free the Americans.

The hostage drama dragged on for seven years. At one point, the Reagan administration traded arms to Iran in exchange for persuading Mughniyah to free three hostages in 1986. After the deal was complete, Mughniyah captured three more Americans.

The saga ended only after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991 and opened up its prisons, allowing Badreddin to slip back into Lebanon. Iran later paid off Mughniyah in exchange for the final hostage releases.

Thomas Sutherland, a former dean at the American University of Beirut who was seized in 1985, yesterday recalled his encounters with Mughniyah, whom he described as short with stubby hands.

"We met Mughniyah right after I was kidnapped. He shook hands with me and welcomed me. He told me that everything was good, very good, and very soon we would be freed," Sutherland said. The Colorado academic was instead held for six years and five months, the second-longest period of captivity among the American hostages.

Mughniyah won a place on the FBI's most-wanted terrorist list for the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847. During a stop in Beirut, hijackers took U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem to the door of the plane, forced him to kneel, shot him in the head and dumped his body on the tarmac. Passengers and crew were then held hostage for two weeks before being freed.

Cultivated and trained in part by Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mughniyah became the operational link between Hezbollah and Tehran. He was instrumental in setting up Hezbollah's military operations in south Lebanon before the 2006 war with Israel. He had since gotten Iran to resupply the Shiite Muslim movement with longer-range missiles, according to U.S. intelligence.

The U.S. military was elated by Mughniyah's death. The Pentagon says he was also involved in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, a compound for foreign military personnel in the Saudi city of Dhahran, where 19 American service members were killed.

"We welcome the news that Imad Mughniyah's life of terror has finally come to an end. From Beirut to Dhahran, he orchestrated bombings, kidnappings and hijackings in which hundreds of American service members were killed," said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell. "Hopefully, his demise will bring some measure of comfort to the families of all those military men he murdered."

But some Marine families had mixed feelings. Larry Gerlach is a retired Marine colonel whose injuries in the 1983 barracks bombing left him a quadriplegic.

"Your first reaction is yeah, good," said his wife, Patti. "But then you realize that what you're talking about is someone who was blown up in a car bomb -- and you don't want to feel happy about something like that."

Her husband interjected: "But I do."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Marines welcome news of plotter’s death
By Jeff Schogol, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Friday, February 15, 2008


News of death is rarely greeted with enthusiasm, but Tim McCoskey said he got a good feeling when he learned the terrorist who helped plan the bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 had been killed.

“At least he can go to hell now,” said McCoskey, 44, of Elloree, S.C.

McCoskey was a lance corporal with the Marines in Lebanon on Oct. 23, 1983, when a suicide bomber in a truck carrying 12,000 pounds of explosives crashed into a building at the Beirut airport where the Battalion Landing Team for U.S. peacekeepers to Lebanon was based.

A total of 243 servicemembers were killed in the attack: 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers. The U.S. mission to Lebanon ended months later.

Imad Mughniyeh, a Hezbollah terrorist who allegedly had a hand in planning the attack, was reportedly killed Tuesday in Damascus, Syria, when his vehicle exploded.

Other Marines who were in Beirut at the time of the attack expressed a sense of satisfaction about Mughniyeh’s reported demise.

“Being raised Catholic, I fear [it’s] a sin to welcome another human being’s death, but in Imad Mughniyeh’s case, I’ll make an exception and take my chances in the confessional,” said Glenn Dolphin, 50, of Aiken, S.C.

“I have to believe that the man upstairs is dealing out justice now, and for Imad Mughniyeh it not going to be pretty,” he said.

Craig Renshaw, 45, called Mughniyeh’s death “payback.”

“He got what’s coming to him and he got the same thing he did to others,” said the former lance corporal, who lives in Folkston, Ga.

Alan Opra, 43, said he considers Mughniyeh’s death to be poetic justice.

“I was happy that he died the way he died because he died in a car bomb and he orchestrated a truck bomb, so it was like karma,” said Opra, of Harrison Township, Mich., and a lance corporal at the time of the attack.

For the Marines attacked in Beirut, Mughniyeh’s death is “a long time coming,” said Randy Gaddo, 54, president of Beirut Veterans of America.

“We wish it would have happened 25 years ago … but better late than never,” said Gaddo, of Peachtree City, Ga.

Gaddo, a staff sergeant when the Battalion Landing Team building was hit, said Beirut veterans knew afterwards that the terrorists who killed their comrades would not go away.

“We always felt this is something that would come back to haunt us,” he said.

Because the Marines were not allowed to finish their mission in Lebanon, the U.S. was unable to prevent future incidents, such as Somalia, said Robert Jordan, 70, a major when the attack happened.

Jordan, who works at Fort Meade, Md., stressed that terrorists need to be confronted and eliminated or they will continue their fight.

It is a sentiment echoed by Don “Gunny” Inns, a Marine corporal during the attack in 1983, in an e-mail to Stripes:

“I cannot help but think that had we acted in such a vigorous manner to bring [Mughniyeh] to justice for the Beirut bombing twenty-four years ago, the war on terrorism would have been waged and won before reaching our shores and the Middle East would be enjoying a peace of ‘lasting value’ today.”

Ellie

[thedrifter]

February 14, 2008 <br />
Bomb in Syria Kills Militant Sought as Terrorist <br />
By ROBERT F. WORTH and NADA BAKRI <br />
<br />
BEIRUT, Lebanon — A top Hezbollah commander long sought by the United States for his role in...

[thedrifter]

05-16-2006

From the Editor:

Imad Mughniyah -- Master Bastard Of Terrorists (Part 1)


By Roger Charles

Hardly a day goes by that retired Marine Colonel John Garrett doesn't wonder if this is the day that Imad Mughniyah steps out of the shadows to take credit for latest deadly strike against the United States. For the past twenty-plus years, Mughniyah has plotted and then acted to murder Garrett's fellow Americans.

Garrett is certain of two things. Unless the US takes Mughniyah out, this cold, calculating killer will continue to murder Americans. And, if history is any guide, his successes will on occasion be spectacular.

Former Navy SEAL Platoon Commander, Tom Short goes through his day with similar concerns.

Ditto for former Marine sniper platoon commander Bill McSwain.

And these concerns are echoed and amplified by former member of the CIA's clandestine services, and best-selling author, Bob Baer. Baer spent much of his career in the bazaars and back alleys of the Mid-east and made a specialty of studying Imad Mughniyah.

"He is the most dangerous terrorist we've ever faced. He's a pathological murderer," says Baer. "Mughniyah is probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we've ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else. He enters by one door; exits by another. Changes his cars daily. Never makes appointments on a telephone; never is predictable. He only uses people that are related to him that he can trust. He doesn't just recruit people. He is the master terrorist, the grail that we have been after since 1983."

That year Mughniyah is credited with using a car bomb to destroy the US Embassy in April, killing several key members of the CIA's Near-east Division who were attending a regional meeting at the embassy. Mughniyah killed 63 in this attack.

Just six months later, Mughniyah made it personal for Colonel John Garrett when a suicide driver detonated a truck bomb inside the building serving as the barracks for Marines at the Beirut airport. Mughniyah's operation murdered 241 American servicemen, mostly Marines and Navy corpsmen. One of the murdered Marines was Capt. Mike Haskell who had been Garrett's first platoon sergeant in Viet Nam in 1969.

Garrett had stayed in contact with Haskell who rose through the ranks, making the rank of Captain by 1983. Haskell mailed Garrett from Beirut shortly before Mughniyah's attack on the Marine barracks. So for Colonel John Garrett, Imad Mughniyah was not just some abstract figure seen on slides in intelligence briefings.

Mughniyah had also kidnapped and murdered U.S. Marine Lt.Col. Rich Higgins, a Garrett contemporary, and William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, and according to several informed authorities, personally tortured Buckley until he died.

In 1985, Mughniyah added to his bag of terrorist tactics, orchestrating the hijacking a TWA flight in the eastern Mediterranean. This operation produced one of the most brutal images of pre-9/11 times when the body of 2d Class Petty Officer, Navy diver Robert Stethem, was dumped from the airliner onto the tarmac at the Beirut airport. Mughniyah and his band of thugs had beaten Stetham for hours before deciding to shoot him and dump his remains in front of the dozens of assembled cameras.

For the ensuing two decades, Mughniyah operated from the darkest shadows of Mid-east terrorism, using plastic surgery to alter his appearance so that the few photographs that did exist, were rendered useless to the US teams on constant alert to launch snatch & grab operations should "actionable intelligence" be obtained.

Until 9/11/01 and the rise to cosmic celebrity of Osama Bin Laden, Imad Mughniyah was America's number one terrorist target. He had killed more Americans by an order of magnitude than any other terrorist. Launching his attacks from the slums of South Beirut, or the terrorist training camps in the Bekka Valley of Lebanon, or the offices of the international branch of Iranian "wet" operations in Tehran, Mughniyah's success in producing lengthy lists of dead and wounded Americans was unequalled: no other terrorist was even close.

So how then did these two Marine infantry officers and a Navy SEAL platoon commander, cross paths with one of the world's most elusive terrorist?

EXERCISE RUGGED NAUTILUS

The summer of 1996 was a time fraught with fraught for the American counter-terrorist community. The Summer Olympics was to open in Atlanta on July 19. The presidential conventions for both the national parties would take place in August. Late June had seen the attack at Khobar Towers where Mughniyah added almost a score of new victims, this time members of the US Air Force.

Things really got tense when, on July 17, TWA Flight 800 fell from the sky in the waters south of Long Island, minutes after taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport. For days there was little doubt that terrorists had killed the 230 ill-fated victims on the Boeing 747. (A year later, in a July 10, 1997, hearing, the Subcommittee on Aviation of the Transportation Committee of the House of Representatives, stated, "A missile, a bomb and a mechanical failure have emerged as possible causes.")

Even before the attack on Khobar Towers and the loss of TWA 800, the Clinton national security apparatus ordered US military commanders to pre-position additional Special Operations forces in the Persian Gulf as a contingency in case of a terrorist attack on the Atlanta Olympics. The cover and deception plan involved hiding the movement of additional forces under the guise of a routine training exercise, in this case EXERCISE RUGGED NAUTILUS.

Central Command (CENTCOM) already had a robust counter-terrorist capability in theater in the form of a US Navy Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) carrying the 13th MEU (SOC) [Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable)] with an attached SEAL platoon. (The ARG was generally referred to as the TARAWA ARG after the flagship, the USS TARARA (LHA-1)).

A second SEAL platoon and a detachment of Special Boat Squadron assets were quietly shipped into the Persian Gulf. By mid-July, nearly 4,000 Marines and sailors were loaded and locked (not counting the Navy Carrier Battle Group also on station in the Gulf).

GET READY

On July 21 the USS RUSHMORE (LSD-47), with the ARG SEAL platoon, had received a close-hold mission from the Commander Fifth Fleet involving a Kuwaiti merchant ship, the Ibn Tufail, and a possible High Value Target (HVT) that might be aboard. That possible HVT was Imad Mughniyah.

Just after hours after the other ships of the ARG pulled into Manama, Bahrain for a long-scheduled liberty call, national intelligence assets reported that Imad Mughniyah was aboard the Ibn Tufail, and that ship had just left port at Doha, Qatar, 85 statute miles to the southeast. Mughniyah was traveling under a false identity and with a very small security detachment, only about a half-dozen bodyguards. The tactical situation appeared to be near perfect for capturing or killing the number one terrorist on America's most-wanted list.

The operation was code-named GOLDEN OX RETURNS.

There was also a special bonus factor in the case of Mughniyah; he was currently under indictment. This was a hugely important point in the Clinton administration's counter-terrorism policy, a policy that emphasized the legalistic approach to dealing with terrorists (and one that was proven totally bankrupt and ineffectual on 9/11).

Garrett, received his warning order and immediately initiated the rapid-planning process that he and his staff had practiced until it seemed like second nature.

The initial focus of the Commander, 13th MEU (SOC), was not totally on Imad Mughniyah. First, the Marine colonel had to engage in some bureaucratic arm-wrestling with an on-scene SEAL commander, with a CIA Chief Of Station and even the head of an FBI detachment that was in place to escort back to the US any high-value captives. Each one of these individuals thought he should be the boss, and his agency should be the controlling activity for the operation to snatch or kill Mughniyah. And of course, each saw Garrett and his MEU (SOC) of 2000-plus trained killers as a great subordinate element that could be safely trusted with doing the required "manual labor" while they and their agency took the credit back in Washington.

(Years later, a retired senior FBI official familiar with the circumstances involving the detachment sent to the Persian Gulf, was asked about the capability of this group to have commanded the operation to kill or capture Mughniyah. He laughed, and said, "They were f---ing guards." But these Louie Freeh-trained Potomac Princelings cost time and effort from Garrett that he would have preferred to spend on other matters.)

After a down-to-brass-tacks conference call among all the various claimants, the Acting CINC at CENTCOM rightly gave Garrett primary responsibility for developing the tactical plan and commanding the forces that would kill or capture Mughniyah on board the Ibn Tufail. (The actual CINC, Army General J. Binford Peay III, was in Washington, DC, testifying before Congress on the Khobar Towers bombing. His Deputy CINC, Marine General Richard I. "Butch" Neal, was the Acting CINC at the Tampa, Florida, headquarters.)

GET SET

The newly assigned mission was one of eight Special Operations Missions that Garrett and his MEU (SOC) had practiced with the sailors of their ARG, and was called a VBSS (Visit, Board, Search and Seizure), or also, a MIO (Maritime Intercept Operation). Garrett was confident that his men would be up to the task, partly because they had successfully conducted such an operation on a previous deployment to the Persian Gulf.

On Christmas Day, 1994, Garrett's MEU had successfully taken down a Syrian flagged motor vessel for violating United Nations sanctions against Iraq. In July 1996 the physical target would again be a ship, but the importance of the mission was beyond comparison.

Garrett later gave a brief overview of how he saw his tactical scheme. "So it's the element of surprise, of combined arms, of massing everything that you have in a sequential or phased manner, to try to get the advantage and maintain it."

"Simultaneous to that, ideally you have a surface up attack from boats or craft in the water to go up the side of the ship." (The two SEAL platoons would be using this mode of attack.)

And along with the element of surprise would go an effort to disturb and distract the targets' attention. USMC Harrier jump jets would scream over the Ibn Tufail at extremely low level. Some USMC helos would have Force Recon Teams fast-rope onto open areas of the ship while other Marine choppers hovered nearby with Marine snipers covering pre-selected sectors of the ship.

Garrett says that he had all these elements ready and in place. Success was not in doubt, if Garrett and his forces were ordered to execute the take down.

As Garrett's staff kicked into high gear for the rapid planning cycle that would culminate with the assault to seize the Ibn Tufail, the ARG recalled sailors and Marines from liberty ashore in Manama. The ARG weighed anchor so quickly that a few hands were left stranded ashore as the ships sailed northeast to round the Qatar peninsula and begin their just-over-the-horizon shadowing of the Ibn Tufail.

US national intelligence had only suspicions two days earlier that a HVT was aboard the Kuwaiti flagged merchant ship, but additional intelligence had removed doubts -- the case was now considered actionable.

The TARAWA ARG sailed to close the distance to the Ibn Tufail and proceeded to shadow the Kuwaiti freighter as it sailed southeasterly towards its next port of call, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. US national intelligence had determined that Mughniyah planned to debark at that port. As the Navy ships maintained surveillance, Garrett's men and others assigned to the operation rehearsed and drilled their takedown tactics and procedures: helos flew their planned flight profiles, Marines fast-roped onto small deck areas, SEALs and their surface assault boats rehearsed their boarding protocols, and the staff intelligence analysts pored over intelligence reports flooding the satellite channels between the ships and shore-based intelligence centers.

Tom Short put it this way, "I'd never seen the kind of intelligence we had during this mission. I mean, in less than 48 hours we had blueprints to the ship, the layout of the ship, pictures of the ship. Who was the crew, what they were carrying, what was their schedule? I mean it was just amazing to me the amount of intelligence that we had."

While Garrett was certainly paying attention to the intelligence picture, he was also focused on the clock. "Every minute counts. Time is of the essence. Every minute's golden. And so for 24 hours, we just planned around the clock," he recalled.

To augment the TARARA ARG, an Aegis cruiser, the USS Shiloh, was detached from the Carrier Battle Group then operating in the Persian Gulf. The Shiloh would serve as the "shouldering ship," that could crowd the target Ibn Tufail if necessary to force it to steer the course that best suited the tactical needs of the US forces.

None of the amphibious ships that could be spared for "shouldering" duty had the required speed to keep up with, or perhaps even overtake, the Ibn Tufail. Use of the shouldering ship also allowed Garrett's Sniper Platoon to place four Marine sniper teams at battle stations on the cruiser to cover any hostile targets that showed themselves above deck.

Bill McSwain commanded the Sniper Platoon, "I had four sniper teams on the ship with me, arranged from bow to stern in different positions. And in addition, because this was such a critical mission, we actually put snipers in helicopters."

By nightfall of July 24, the Americans knew they were just hours away from taking down Imad Mughniyah.

"We almost felt like we were dogs on a leash ready to go," says McSwain.

[Next week -- Part 2 -- to be posted May 23.]

SFTT President Roger Charles is an Annapolis graduate, a retired USMC Lt. Col. who commanded an infantry platoon in I Corps during the Vietnam War, is the winner of the prestigious Peabody Award for news coverage, and was a protégée's of the late Col. David H. Hackworth. Rog can be contacted at sfttpres@aol.com. Please send comments to DWFeedback@yahoo.com.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

05-23-2006

From the Editor:

Imad Mughniyah -- Master Bastard Of Terrorists (Part 2)


By Roger Charles

Imad Mughniyah - Master Bastard Of Terrorists (Part 1)

GO

There was one final briefing on the flagship of the admiral to whom Garrett reported. This was known as the "Confirmation Brief" – all the players would be asked by the admiral if they were ready, if they had any last minute concerns. It would be one of those classic, "speak now, or forever hold your peace," moments. Each principal participant or his trusted agent would brief his understanding of the overall mission, and his part in that mission, using simple charts.

The Confirmation Brief took about one hour, and at its end as participants departed to man their battle stations, the word from Washington, relayed through Gen. Neal in CENTCOM HQ was still, "All systems, GO." All that remained was for the tactical assault forces -- two SEAL platoons and a Force Recon Platoon of Marines -- to marry up with their transport helos and fast assault boats, and begin movement to the objective. Backing them up were several hundred Marine grunts in the rifle companies of Garrett's 1s Battalion, 4th Marines, that were prepared to conduct a detailed search of the Ibn Tufail from bow to stern.

Garrett, independent of McSwain, later described the situation at this point in these terms. "... we're ready. We've finished the planning, and for the commander, you're sort of holding this leashed team of – of killer hounds, just waitin' for the command to let 'em go. And that's where we were at that point."

Only minutes after that movement to the objective began, Imad Mughniyah and his guards would be facing "trigger time." While Garrett's saw his official mission as bringing Mughniyah to justice, the Arab terrorist's own actions would determine whether this translated into "kill" or "capture" onboard the Ibn Tufail.

ABORT!

Then one word from the Clinton White House caused all the planning, all the adrenaline, and all the hoped for payback -- for thousands of American sailors and Marines – to come crashing down.

The operation was called off.

For Tom 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."

The Navy SEAL leader said that he got the word that the operation had been canceled when he returned to the amphibious ship carrying his platoon immediately following the final Confirmation Briefing. When Short left the admiral's conference room for the 20-minute flight back to join his SEAL platoon, he was confident that after years of training, he and his men were finally going to be allowed to "pull the trigger" and execute a counter-terrorist take down of a world-class terrorist. (Short admits that had time permitted, the US would have flown in the Navy's SEAL Team Six, the Navy equivalent of the Army's Delta Force. But, time and tide wait for no man, and the US National Command Authority had to use forces that were on-hand, on-scene.)

As Short stepped off the chopper onto the flight deck of his team's host ship, his Leading Chief Petty Officer gave him the word – the operation had been called off.

Lt. Short did not believe the message could be true. The SEAL platoon commander explained that he had just left the admiral's Confirmation Brief and "all systems were, GO!" The chief informed his platoon leader that while Short had been in transit, word had come down the chain of command that Washington had canceled the operation.

Short later said that one hour from the time his chopper landed on the deck of his host ship, he would have either been on the bridge of the Ibn Tufail, in control of the merchantman, or he would have been dead. There would have been no in-between.

So, what happened to cause this literally last-minute cancellation?

Colonel John Garrett says, "The explanation that I recall was they couldn't verify that the target was still on board the vessel," Garrett believed that at the time. Now, he's not so certain.

And for some other men involved in the planning and support for the strike, that explanation wasn't enough. To this day, they blame President Clinton for not going through with the mission.

(Both Tom Short and the SEAL Platoon Commander of the other platoon, Lt. J.D. Denny resigned their commissions and entered civilian life. The debacle of the Ibn Tufail and Imad Mughniyah played a large part in both men's decisions.)

Nancy Soderberg, who was President Clinton's deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs was the only senior official willing to comment on the case, and she defended his decision in a 60 Minutes II interview, "This is a man who President Clinton authorized numerous operations to get. This is not the only one we tried to do. And since we're still trying to get him. I think its better not to get into too many details... It was just simply that when the final, go, no-go, decision comes, you need to make sure that the information is there to justify moving. And in this case, unfortunately, it was not. No one wants to conduct an operation that you know in advance is going to be a failure if the target's not in your cross hairs. In this case, I think what it demonstrates is the commitment of President Clinton to do everything possible to get Mughniyah."

If there had been even a remote possibility that Mughniyah was on that vessel "President Clinton would have gone. No question about it," she says in the CBS interview.

But Soderberg did not address the critical issue. The intel was good enough to justify the extraordinary measures that were undertaken – pulling an Amphibious Ready Group and its embarked Marine Expeditionary Unit of over 2,000 Marines and attached Navy corpsmen, plus over one thousand ships' crew -- out of a planned liberty port.

So, what information changed to say that that Imad Mughniyah was no longer in Bill Clinton's cross hairs?

Soderberg was not asked about the intel that had confirmed Mughniyah was on board the Ibn Tufail – his fingerprints!

In the 1985 hijacking and the murder of Navy diver Robert Stetham, Mughniyah had made a fundamental mistake. He'd left behind his fingerprints, and US intelligence agents had pulled these prints and filed them for future use. This proved to be an especially wise precaution in Mughniyah's case since he later had several sessions of plastic surgery to keep hostile counter-terrorist agencies from having a current idea of his visage.

The SEAL teams assigned to take down the Ibn Tufail did in fact have a photo that had been faxed in by satellite phone. It was the "best copy available," but the fingerprints were the "actionable intel." (The latest intel from a very credible source is that Mughniyah has also had his fingerprints altered. According to this same source, Mughniyah was recently identified as being in the entourage of the President of Iran during a visit to Syria.)

When the word first came into US intelligence channels that Mughniyah was aboard the Ibn Tufail, a crash effort ensued to obtain confirming evidence that the suspected target was in fact the number one most-wanted terrorist on the US list. The tradecraft that produced confirmation that Mughniyah was on board the Ibn Tufail rightly remains a tightly held story, but the troops on-scene knew that their target was riding a merchant ship that would be in international waters, and would be subject to being stopped and searched as part of a United Nations authorized sanctions against Iraq.

Soderberg was not asked two obvious questions. First, since the US Navy and Marines were routinely inspecting merchant ships in this area, what would have been the downside of allowing the operation against Mughniyah to proceed? Worst-case scenario – the target was not on the ship, and the US says that the report of the Ibn Tufail carrying proscribed Iraqi cargo -- pick one: dates, figs, oil, etc.-- was mistaken. The ship continues its journey. No harm, no foul.

Second, how did Imad Mughniyah get off the Ibn Tufail without being noticed while on a ship, at sea, under the microscope of every technical surveillance sensor the US government possessed?

But for many of the men who wanted to catch or kill Mughniyah, standing down was another frustrating sign that the Clinton administration lacked the political courage to put American servicemen at risk in the fight against terrorism. The troops were willing but several believed that William Jefferson Clinton did not want a maritime version of the Mogadishu debacle, not at a time when the 1996 presidential election was heading into the home stretch.

Asked how he saw this operation's potential, had it been allowed to go forward, Garrett said it was very important to the Marines. "I think it was critically important. I think this could have been one of those life-changing events that had it been successful, would have been, certainly for me, would have eclipsed anything that I had done in my career before, including Desert Storm." He also saw Mughniyah's bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983 as the Marine Corps' own 9/11, and as with 9/11, the chief perpetrator has not been brought to justice.

Bill McSwain wrote this entry in his diary just hours after the operation was called off.

"We were so close we could taste it. Maybe we'll get another shot at this guy, but probably not. I think I just missed the biggest chance I'll ever get. Why couldn't it have turned out differently?"

What would it have meant the last few years if Mughniyah had been out of commission?"

"I think you could go a long way toward unraveling or even preventing a September 11th, by getting a person like this," says former CIA spook Bob Baer.

Tom Short also questions how history might have been different. He told CBS, "9-11 happens. And I remember walking into the kitchen that morning, turning on the TV, and staring at that plane, flying into the World Trade Center. And at that instant, I thought 'is this guy involved? Did he have a hand in the planning? What would have happened if we had gotten him?'"

While that question can never be answered with complete assurance, there is one question that can be answered with near absolute certainty: "Does Bill Clinton ever wonder if this is the day that Imad Mughniyah kills more Americans?"

SFTT President Roger Charles is an Annapolis graduate, a retired USMC Lt. Col. who commanded an infantry platoon in I Corps during the Vietnam War, is the winner of the prestigious Peabody Award for news coverage, and was a protégée's of the late Col. David H. Hackworth. Rog can be contacted at sfttpres@aol.com. Please send comments to DWFeedback@yahoo.com.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Overdue justice seen in terrorist’s death
By Colneth Smiley Jr. | Friday, February 15, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Local Coverage

A Hezbollah terrorist’s violent death was overdue justice, said the Westwood mother of a Marine who was among his victims.

“Twenty-four years and four months since the bombing, and I feel justice is finally being served,” said Christine Devlin. “He got what he deserved.”

Lance Cpl. Michael Devlin was among 241 Marines killed in 1983 when a truck bomb sent by Imad Mughniyeh destroyed their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, where they were on a peacekeeping mission. Mughniyeh was killed Tuesday by a car bomb in Syria. Hezbollah blames Israel.

Nine of the slain Marines were from Massachusetts. Devlin’s family plans a rememberence ceremony for him and the other fallen Marines the Sunday before Oct. 23, the 25th anniversary of the fatal blast.

“We’ll all remember Michael as a smiling happy kid, when he was 21, 22. He was fun, like most kids are,” Christine Devlin.

The FBI has domestic terror squads on alert for threats against U.S. synagogues and other potential Jewish targets. They say there have been no specific threats but Hezbollah officials are threatening retaliatory attacks. In addition to the 1983 Beirut bombing, Mughniyeh was accused of plotting numerous other deadly attacks on U.S. and Israeli targets.

Mughniyeh’s killing has highlighted the role of Syria as a safe haven for Hezbollah, Hamas, Iraqi insurgents and other terrorist groups. President Bush stepped up pressure on Syria again yesterday, ordering new sanctions to punish officials in Damascus for alleged efforts to undermine stability in Iraq and meddle in Lebanon’s sovereignty and democracy.

Ellie