Word: gaddafis
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After the Security Council met in the Oval Office on Wednesday, April 9, a joint security-intelligence team prepared a list of five targets. First on the list was the Bab al Azizia army compound, which serves as Gaddafi's command center and residence. "We hit Gaddafi's barracks because it's the nerve center for his command structure and headquarters of his loyalist guard," says a top national security aide. There is little doubt that Azizia was also targeted in the hope that the Colonel would be very much at home and killed or injured in the attack. Using...
Next on the hit list was the military section of the Tripoli International Airport, base of Libya's fleet of nine Il-76s, which have been used in terrorist operations for supply and transport. A third target was the Benghazi army barracks, which Gaddafi uses as an alternative command post. Then came barracks at the naval port of Sidi Bilal, near Tripoli, a commando training facility. Finally, security officials recommended a strike at the Benina airfield, where Libya's MiG-23 interceptors are based, as a precaution against counterattack...
...then Libyan radio was claiming many casualties, including the death of one of Gaddafi's eight children and the injury of two others. Dr. Mohamed Muafa, who identified himself as the Gaddafi family's physician, said he had found all three children in the wreckage of the colonel's home an hour after the attack. Washington officials were frankly surprised there were not more casualties in Gaddafi's compound. Of the five bombers assigned to hit it, four dropped 16 laser-guided 2,000-lb. Paveways. The bombs cratered the compound, blew out windows and caved in a wall...
Tripoli also claimed that it had knocked as many as a dozen U.S. aircraft out of the skies, and that surviving pilots were being hunted down by local citizens "like mad dogs." Authorities made no attempt to prove either claim, but few Libyans expected Gaddafi to let matters rest where they stood. Nor did those on the front line of the U.S. side seem to think that last week's raid put an end to the contest of wills between Gaddafi and Washington. On the day after the raid, TIME Correspondent Sam Allis noticed that someone had scrawled a message...
...warplanes and drop some 60 tons of bombs on Libya was intricate and constrained by a host of political and diplomatic as well as military considerations. It required U.S. airmen to fly through heavy flak in the dead of night and strike with flawless precision. The primary target: Colonel Gaddafi's headquarters. The unstated hope: that the Libyan leader would be asleep there when the bombs fell...