From my friend Ben Chitty. dailykos/story/2013/10/27/1251119/-Hoaxes-101-Losing-241-at-Beirut-in-1983-Didn-t-Happen-No-More?detail=email DailyKos - Reagan Losing 241 at Beirut in 1983 Didnt Happen… October 23rd, 1983. Ronald Reagan was President of the United States. What stood out then, at least on television, was the toll of 241 dead at Marine BLT Barracks at Beirut Airport. Yet on the 30th Anniversary last week, in 2013, nothing was done to commemorate those losses. Not a word on network news or the commentary shows. The total number of deaths from four truck bombs there was 398. And it was carried out to get revenge for months of the U.S. Navy shelling Arab villages. Corporate media made no mention of the Beirut, Lebanon invasion -- despite that the CBS program 60 Minutes is taking time tonight to replay the Benghazi attack and street riot that killed 4 on September 11, 2012. No comparisons allowed. Earlier on, NBC had Reagans Secretary of State, George Shultz, on Meet the Press. He claimed, quite fantastically, that Ronald Reagan was undefeated in his foreign military adventures. Shultz stated as well that the Grenada invasion on 25-October-1983 was the first use of the American military overseas since Vietnam. That Grenada sideshow was landed 2 days after the Marine BLT disaster. Corporate media goes all in for Pearl Harbor Day when December 7th rolls around. That happened when a Democrat was in the White House. The PR spin is typical for corporations and Republicans: forget what it is convenient to forget. Tease the rightie flounders with gross lies and empty promises. Care for nothing but your own advancement. Lie about the dead, ye superpatriots. IOKIYAR. And when Lebanon 1983 is mentioned, for such as resume material, the bombings are blamed on Hezbollah. That is beyond absurd. In 1983 there was no Hezbollah -- getting revenge with these bombings is what let the Revolutionary Guard bring in 1,500 picked troops and get Hezbollah up and running as an effective military force. More of what you will not learn from corporate media -- what happened in Lebanon, how and why those guys died -- is covered below the orange muffin. Lets restate the obvious: Hezbollah wasnt formed until 1985. At that point seeing Iran put its troops inside Lebanon was a major defeat for American military and diplomatic interests. Hezbollah was set up as a client to Iran with strategic directions to broaden the battlefield of the Iran-Iraq War. Most of Hezbollahs soldiers, today, are Sunni Muslims from the areas south and east of Beirut. The leadership and the Beirut area militias are Shia. Basically Hezbollah has organized the whole of southern Lebanon. The one and only way that Shia Iran got an in to carry out this operation including absorbing Sunni areas was by leveraging the credit they got for the 1983 revenge bombings. Thank you, Ronnie Reagan. Hezbollah and the continuing influence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in Lebanon have to be assessed as continuing pieces of Reagans legacy. Invading Lebanon gave the Iranians an opportunity they could never have generated on their own. Where else could they have killed 63 + 241 + 64 + 30 and mostly Americans without inviting a Shock-and-Awe devastation dropped on Teheran ??? 63 -- victims at the embassy 18-April-1983 241 - victims at the Marine barracks 23-October-1983 64 -- victims at the French barracks 23-October-1983 30 -- victims at Tyre for the Israelis 3-November-1983 398 total Note that the first truck bomb hit in April. Then there is a six-month gap before our Marines and the French were hit. Dept. of State changed everything about security when they relocated; Marines and the French were sitting ducks. Theres a lot to be learned about the bombings, coming in part from Iranian sources. We can skirt the details of the killings. Bombing is brutal. The result does not resemble what you see in movies. President Reagan created this revenge scenario when he ordered use of dozens of 5-inch naval guns to level Arab villages above Beirut. He was advised to do this to silence portable 81mm mortars. In subsequent analysis, those mortars were photographed mounted in the beds of pickup trucks. They were moved around, avoiding the naval guns. Reagan knew nothing about these weapon systems, reacting in a rage that the Arab militias attacked his Maronist Christian allies. Eventually Reagan went on to shelling with the big guns of battleship New Jersey. You can imagine what that did ashore. Photos of the victims, including children, ran to torn up bodies and body parts. Houses were shattered by the dozens. You think the pics from Abu Ghraib lit up the victims countrymen ??? Those pics from Lebanon changed everything. Everything in the Middle East. What had been a United Nations Peacekeeping operation went over the Dark Side, slaughtering innocents by the hundreds. Youre not a Peacekeeper when you lob 300 16-inch shells a day at villages from battleship New Jersey. Youre no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave. The Iranians used liquid-butane-and-PETN by the ton to take revenge. It counted twice: for the naval shellings and to punish Reagan for support for Saddam Hussein during the ongoing Iran-Iraq War. That type of bomb creates a thermobaric shock wave that rivals a small nuke. It powders concrete. It kills human beings at up to a 1-mile distance. Reagan solved his immediate political problem after the disaster by invading Grenada, plus having removal of a benign polyp during a colonoscopy headlined as a cancer scare. Reagan and his team were very, very good at PR. Add it all up. The man got 398 people killed by the truck bombs. And another 1,500 killed between U.S. and French soldiers who were shot by snipers and Arab civilians and maybe a couple dozen militiamen and two women that the U.S. was trying to kill. Imagine a Democrat doing that. Roughly 10 to 20 times the body count for non-Al-Qaeda killed by the Bush and Obama drones. Ronald Reagan had decided that he wanted to tell his domestic Christian political allies that he had taken sides during that round of the Lebanese civil wars. They did vote for him. Reagan came out of this mess, all finished and done by Christmas of 1983, with the public seeing him as the one feel sorry for. Poor Ronnie had a cancer scare. Between 1980 and today Reagan has gone forward to being perceived as a combo of Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. The broadest of hoaxes has been created around him. It is a wonder. The line Tear down this wall! is credited with powers like Jehovah parting the Red Sea. Thing is, Reagan never did one thing substantive to bring down Communism. His one action against the Soviet Union was to supply Afghan rebels, which led directly to formation of Usama bin Ladens field army. Pope John Paul II was The Man for the heavy lifting that freed Eastern Europe. You could think from the tales of his hoax that Reagan had won a war -- any war, not Operation Urgent Fury aimed at Grenadian police and a Cuban construction crew -- and belongs up on Mt. Rushmore. Simple fact: in Lebanon, Reagan surrendered. It was the best way forward, but it was still a surrender. He got into a fix where he had to run away. He ran out from Lebanon right after the bombings. He turned tail. U.S. forces were withdrawn -- except for the Navy ships that kept on pounding villages. The Cult of Personality for Reagan moved forward without pause, certain that media would never breathe a word about what was happening. And now the American dead from 1983 in Lebanon are dishonored. Forgotten. Put out of the corporate media/GOP approved history of our modern era. Never to be mentioned again. All of this ignominy is necessary to serve the structured political hoax theyve built to glorify Ronald Reagan. Such are todays Republican Party and their allies. God bless the souls of all the dead from that misadventure in 1983. We searched through the network stories. Nothing for on-channel coverage; at best blog posts. NY Times and WaPo buried it. No comparison anywhere in corporate MSM connecting Lebanon 1983 and Libya 2012. Forgetting Lebanon 1983 seems despicable. All this thank you for your service and support the troops is followed by PR silence where ignoring military deaths is politically useful.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 02:26:08 +0000