| Terrorism [message #71795] |
Mon, 15 March 2004 14:11  |
hareman
Messages: 340
Registered: May 2003
Karma:
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Terrorism is defined as: violence or the threat of violence, especially bombing, kidnapping, and assassination, carried out for political purposes.
I would also add: it is intended to create terror and to incite violence among the populace of a given target. IT MORE CLOSELY CONNECTED WITH AN IDEOLOGY THAN POLITICS. There are two areas of terrorism that we concern ourselves with. The three types that we as Americans have had to deal with in the past (pre 1980s), The Reagan Time period and shortly thereafter and the hyper modern terrorism that abounds today.
For the early area of terrorism how many of you can even give one incident here? We as Americans have a shameful past where this concerned and for the most part is overlooked by everyone except historians, the court system and law enforcement.
The Reagan era is another era that is a great embarrassment to how we dealt with terrorism. The Reagan administration viewed as a consequence of the global struggle with the Soviets. If you want to place a great deal of blame here is where it belongs. The military's first large scale operation was a horrible tragedy (can you say Desert One?) And before someone corrects me I fucking know that Carter was president. But this incident is what enabled Reagan to take the White house, that and the back channel negotiations that resulted in the result of the hostages. The end result of these negotiations was ... IRAN-CONTRA. A patently illegal operation that supported terrorism and traded arms for hostages. A trade that was in direct opposition to stated the policy at the time. OMG a politician lied to the public. This was during THE REAGAN PRESIDENCY. Many of what we in law enforcement see as a trend began with the actions of OUR OWN country under both political parties
And Yet, starting with the Reagan era we see mismanagement of too many incidents to be even looked at as anything but criminal.
Let's start with my own first hand knowledge:
Grenada, a goat situation from the word go. A country, in this case Cuba, takes over another. It probably wouldn't have been much of a big deal until the locals angry with Americans take over the medical school and the Cubans refuse to do anything about it. How we found out is nothing short of an intelligence failure. Hell, when we found out about the medical school The US had not one idea that there were Cubans there in the first place. I quote from an official who was involved with planning Grenada "what the fuck are all those Cubans doing there and why didn't we know about it?"
To confront the Cubans we sent a contingent of Marines, Army Rangers Air Force Special Ops and Navy Seals to deal with what was essentially 2 companies of Cuban troops. The mismanagement was atrocious. There was no support for Seals that held the Governors mansion for 24 hours …. The admiral in charge of the operations was retired after it was disclosed he shipped home 100 + Aks on the US tax payer. Army Rangers were landed in broad daylight so the helicopter pilots wouldn’t violate noise restrictions on neighboring Islands. I could go on but the that isn’t germane to why I am here
The next major incident was the bombing of the American Embassy over 240 men and women serving the country died in this incident. Did any of you know that it was preventable? A few months earlier a team of naval personnel had conducted a threat assessment of the embassy and had concluded an attack on was highly likely given the distrust of the locals. That report even described where and how the attack would take place. A procedure was outlined that would have saved the embassy but the report was given little credence by the embassy personnel. And so we lost those lives unnecessarily.
That is part of a lecture I gave in terrorism
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