US Embassy in Syria Attacked

9 Comments

1. 

   Londonbear on September 12, 2006 at 7:38 am

   To orient yourselves, here is a googlearth image of the embassy (no ambassador, only a Charge d’Affairs at the moment). The burned-out or exploded car you may see being lifted by a crane in the video was somewhere in the area I marked with green. Not shown in the picture are the security railings along the edge of the road or what looked like a new security wall on the other side of the sidewalk. I think the unexploded gas cylinder and pipe bomb combinations found in a white van were in the tree-lined street that runs along the fron of the embassy. The raw footage shown on the BBC made it look like it was stopped opposite the entrance to the embassy just above the word “Damascus” and the pin.

   

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     Steven D on September 12, 2006 at 7:59 am

     Thanks Londonbear.  It sounds like the embassy was fortunate the attack’s outcome wasn’t any worse.

2. 

   BooMan on September 12, 2006 at 8:38 am

   how convenient.

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     supersoling on September 12, 2006 at 9:36 am

     My thoughts exactly. It’s pretty fucked up when the first thing I wonder about in a situation like this, is how the hell Bush could set off a carbomb in front of his own embassy.

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       BooMan on September 12, 2006 at 10:35 am

       before you jump to conclusions, the Syrians could have desired an opportunity to be seen as tough on terrorism and as protecting American assets.  And it could be exactly what it appears to be on the surface.

       However, I wish I had a source for this but it is in a book and I am not at home…

       I believe Bob Baer discusses in one of his books (See No Evil??) having an agent explode a bomb in the part of a US compound where it would not hurt anybody.  And then there is this:

       NARRATOR: So William Casey, the director of the CIA, improvised.

       BOB WOODWARD: Casey had lunch with Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, one of the most powerful figures even today in Washington. And they went for a stroll in the garden and they said, “We have to go off the books.” And they agreed that the Saudis would put up the money to hire some professionals to go and try to car-bomb Sheik Fadlallah.

       And it was so off the books, there’s no evidence that Reagan knew about it or Weinberger or Schultz. It was Casey on his own, saying, “I’m going to solve the big problem by essentially getting tougher or as tough as the terrorists in using their weapon, the car bomb.”

       Which resulted in this:

       At least 45 people have died and 175 have been injured in a car bomb explosion in Beirut, Lebanon.

       The bomb went off outside a block of flats and close to a mosque as worshippers were gathering for Friday night prayers in a densely populated Shia Muslim suburb.

       It is the worst attack in the Lebanese capital since November 1983 when 61 people were killed in a suicide car bomb attack in the southern port of Tyre.

       The bomb blew a huge crater in the street and destroyed two seven-storey blocks of flats, a mosque and a cinema. Many of the dead were passers-by.

       The blast brought gunmen running on to the streets firing guns into the air to clear the roads for ambulances.

       Radio stations broadcast appeals for blood donors as fire fighters and civil defence workers tried to remove bodies from under the rubble.

       Fleets of ambulances jammed the entrance to west Beirut’s main hospital. It was soon packed with wounded and dead.

       The bomb went off near the home of a leading fundamentalist Shia Muslim cleric, Sheikh Muhammad Husain Fadlallah and it is thought he may have been the target – although he was not hurt in the attack.

       Sheikh Fadlallah later accused Israel and its “internal allies” of being behind the explosion and he gave a warning to “all those who are playing with fire” that their hands will be “burned by the flames”.

       The blast comes at a particularly sensitive time as the Israelis are trying to complete their withdrawal from Lebanon.

       Anti-American feeling is also running high. In Shia minds, the US is linked with Israel and its occupation of southern Lebanon.

       Which led to this:

       The Education Minister, Mr Salim Hoss, accused Israel of being behind the blast.

       “”We have no doubt Israel is behind this ugly crime,” Mr Hoss said.

       We was wrong.  So were these guys.

       Lebanese Moslem leaders and Sheik Fadlallah, who was not hurt, blamed Israel for the explosion. Prime Minister Rashid Karami also blamed Israel for an explosion on Monday

       That didn’t prevent this:

       A Lebanese suicide bomber yesterday killed 12 Israeli soldiers only a few yards inside the frontier with Israel at Metulla. At least 14 other Israelies were wounded, some critically.

       The Islamic Jihad organisation said one of its men carried out the bombing. An anonymous caller told a Western news agency in Beirut: ‘The car bomb was originally prepared to blow up the Israeli village of Metulla.

       ‘A tactical mistake by one of our colleagues forced us to blow it up near an Israeli military post .. but in the near future, the whole world will see that we can get to the heart of Israel and destroy the whole myth of the superiority of the Zionist military machine. This operation by our late martyr hero, Hazem, is only a link in a chain of operations that we are preparing.’

       A few days later, they got it right.

       The decision to evacuate some American personnel from Beirut comes at a time when anti-American sentiment has noticeably increased in Lebanon and other Arab countries.

       The immediate cause of the new hostility was the United States veto in the Security Council and President Reagan’s apparently cool response to appeals by moderate Arab leaders for a new American initiative in the Middle East.

       Fewer than 250 Americans are left here outside of the diplomatic corps. They have chosen to stay despite advice from their Government to leave and past anti-American actions such as the car-bomb attack on the American Embassy and headquarters of United States Marines here in 1983. A total of 260 American servicemen and diplomats died in those incidents.

       Nabih Berri, the leader of Amal, Lebanon’s mainstream Shiite movement, has called the veto the United States trademark in the Security Council. Two senior Shiite clerics urged the Government here and those in Arab countries to break off all relations with Washington.

       Relations with the United States no longer serve any purpose, Sheik Mohammed Mahdi Chamsedding, the spiritual head of Lebanon’s one million Shiites, said.

       The Shiites’ supreme religious judge here, Sheik Abndul Amir Qabalan, said cutting ties with the United States was the minimum required from Lebanon, the Arabs and Moslems at large in retaliation for the United States attitude.

       In Damascus, Syria, Dr. George Habash, Secretary General of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, also called on Arabs to sever links with the United States.

       Shiite fundamentalists have blamed the United States for a car-bomb explosion that killed more than 70 people in a Shiite suburb of Beirut last Friday. The charge has come from Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah and Sheik Ibrahim al Amin, leaders of the Party of God.

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         Omir the Storyteller on September 12, 2006 at 10:43 am

         I’m afraid that was my first thought — that the Cheney crime cabal masterminded this to trump up the “war effort” with only about seven weeks to go.

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         supersoling on September 12, 2006 at 11:13 am

         I made no conclusions. Only lamenting that I trust this govt. so little that my first thought wouldn’t be that “terrorists” carried out the bombing. Like you said, “how convenient”. Too many coincidenses that feed Bush’s purposes have happened in the last five years. It’s the same scepticism I have when I see no airplane parts in photos of the Pentagon, or an empty hole in Shanksville, or WTC 5, or is it 7, falling straight down just like it was a controlled demolition, that conveniently serves the purposes of the lease holder. Too many coincidences and no more belief in my govt.
         That’s the biggest loss of all. That these days, things arent, or rarely are, what they appear to be.

3. 

   boran2 on September 12, 2006 at 9:10 am

   Yes, we truly are safer now.

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     Steven D on September 12, 2006 at 9:59 am

     The Daily Show had a great skit last night on the schizophrenic nature of the Bush/Rove spin.  We’re safer — but not safe.  It was hilarious.  I hope Crooks and Liars gets the video up.