Hezbollah History Lesson Andrew McCarthy
It’s hopeless, I know, but I still think the progressive Democrats fretting over collateral damage from Israel’s highly discriminating and proportionate “grim beeper” operation could benefit from a history lesson about Hezbollah’s barbaric treatment of Americans. I’ll have more on that over the weekend, but for starters, I’d recommend this 2015 piece by Matthew Levitt, an excellent analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It’s about the kidnapping, torture, and murder of William Buckley, the CIA’s station chief in Lebanon — i.e., the chief sent to set up a new station after Hezbollah, then led by Imad Mugniyah, bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Here’s a bit of it:
Buckley was tortured, reportedly by both Lebanese and Iranian interrogators. Another hostage, David Jacobsen, later recounted that Buckley occupied a cell separated from his own by a thin wall. “It was apparent that he was very sick. I could hear him retching between coughs.” Another hostage held with the two men recalled Buckley hallucinating. Once, in the bathroom, Buckley apparently announced, “I’ll have my hot cakes with blueberry syrup now.”
Hezbollah reportedly sent three different videotapes of Buckley being tortured to the CIA, each more harrowing than the next. These would become part of CIA lore, passed down from hardened case officers to new recruits, and the agency would not soon forget what Hezbollah did to one of their own.
By some accounts Buckley was moved through the Beqa Valley and transferred to Iran; others say he was buried in an unmarked grave in Lebanon. Mughniyeh’s Islamic Jihad Organization announced it had killed Buckley in October 1985, but fellow hostages would later reveal he had died months earlier as a result of the torture he endured, possibly at the hands of Imad Mughniyeh himself. According to former hostage David Jacobsen, when Buckley died in captivity, reportedly from drowning in his own lung fluids as a result of torture, it “really shook up our kidnappers.”
Years after Mugniyah was assassinated in 2008 (the tail end of the Bush-43 administration), it was revealed that he’d been killed in a joint CIA-Mossad intelligence operation. Prior to 9/11, he had more American blood on his hand than any jihadist — and lots of Israeli blood, too. He’d been a key planner in Hezbollah’s infamous 1983 attack on a military barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Marines.
Another planner of that attack was Fuad Shukr, on whom our government had offered a reward of $5 million for relevant information. Yet, when the IDF killed Shukr on July 30, it was rewarded by the Biden-Harris administration with a lecture about the dangers of — all together now — “escalation.” Turns out Bibi Netanyahu had better be ready for another harangue: As Haley reports, the IDF has now taken out Ibrahim Aqil, along with 20 other terrorists who may be quite high-ranking; our government had offered a $7 million reward for relevant information on Aquil for his role in the bombings of the Marine barracks and the U.S. embassy in 1983.
So one government, at least, is eliminating anti-American, mass-murdering terrorists who had eluded capture for decades, while also fighting to get back hostages, including four Americans, abducted by Hamas, yet another terrorist organization designated as such under American law for decades.
It’s just not our government.
[Author’s note: This post has been corrected to reflect that Ibrahim Aqil was complicit in Hezbollah’s bombings of both the Marine barracks and the U.S. embassy in 1983.]
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