Word: libya
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Colonel Muammar Gaddafi suffered the worst defeat of his 18-year rule of Libya five months ago when his troops were driven out of northern Chad. Last week Chadian President Hissene Habre sought to double the Libyans' humiliation by sending his army to capture the Aouzou Strip, a disputed border region. Though the foray did not produce the "total defeat" of Libyan forces claimed by Chad, it resulted in the fall of the town of Aouzou, the strip's administrative center...
...Marines deployed in Beirut turned out to be sitting ducks in an ill-protected barracks; 241 Americans were killed by a truck bomb. Despite the valor of those who fought in Grenada in 1983, the mission was beset by examples of military ineptitude and interservice rivalries. In Libya three years later, after Navy carriers could not provide enough bombers, Air Force F-111s had to fly all the way from their bases in Britain, and two pilots were lost; their laser-guided bombs were not capable of conducting the intended "surgical strike," and the French embassy...
After hearing Oliver North's testimony, Newsweek decided yes. North had justified the Administration's widespread deception of Congress by claiming that members often leaked sensitive information. When pressed for examples, he cited stories before the 1986 U.S. raid on Libya and ones detailing the 1985 interception of an Egyptian plane carrying the hijackers of the Achille Lauro. That prompted Newsweek to disclose one of the sources for its October 1985 cover story on the Achille Lauro. "Details of the interception," it noted, "were leaked by none other than North himself...
...major leak cited by North occurred, by his account, on April 14, 1986, when two Senators went directly from a White House briefing to waiting microphones and told the nation that the President would discuss an impending U.S. attack on Libya that night. That, claimed North, gave Libya time to get its antiaircraft defenses set and led to the death of two American airmen shot down in their bomber...
North's charge sounded plausible -- until Senator Daniel Inouye neatly shredded it. One of the two Senators, it turned out, had said "No comment" when asked by TV reporters about a possible Libya raid. The other had merely advised people to tune in the President. Inouye cited a series of press stories, all based on Administration sources, that had been predicting such a strike for more than a week. So widespread were the Pentagon tips that dozens of correspondents had traveled to Tripoli to await the air strike. Moreover, the Pentagon has never established whether the F-111 bomber...