Word: terrorist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that wrath be channeled effectively against terrorists? At his White House news conference three nights earlier, Reagan had confessed that in trying to figure out a way to free the American hostages in Beirut, "I'm as frustrated as anyone. I've pounded a few walls myself, when I'm alone, about this." A rescue operation looks impossible. Retaliation? If he were to order it, said Reagan, "I would probably be sentencing a number of Americans to death," presumably from terrorists' revenge. Besides, he said, terrorists are difficult to isolate, and if "you just aim in the general direction...
...Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies. "We are in the middle of a big shock wave that is not over yet, and it will be followed by smaller shock waves." One reason, he says, is that when fanatics "see the amount of prime time devoted to terrorist actions, when they realize the level of frustration exposed by the media, and when they analyze the public impact of their deeds," they are emboldened to go and do likewise...
...this presents the Reagan Administration with not one but a series of puzzles. Security certainly can be tightened, but the U.S. must not let fear of terrorism turn it into a police state. Better intelligence is urgently needed, but terrorist groups, to put it mildly, are not easy to penetrate. Retaliation must be considered, but, says former CIA Director Richard Helms, anyone advocating it "ought to be condemned to pick the targets and specify the force that will be used to take out those targets." When those kinds of questions are raised, the response is often an embarrassed silence...
...like a nightmarish rerun of the Iranian hostage drama, with a surreal twist. Once again American hostages were paraded before the cameras by their terrorist captors. Only this time they were not blindfolded, as the American embassy officials had been in Tehran, or made to grovel by bug-eyed radicals shouting "Death to America!" Rather, the prisoners, some unshaven, all uneasy, but combed and neat, were graciously ushered out to meet the press...
Acting as a kind of terrorist talk-show host was Ali Hamdan, a well-groomed representative of the Lebanese Amal, the mainstream Shi'ite faction that had in effect hijacked the hostages from their original hijackers, the two brutal gunmen who had seized TWA's Flight 847 and murdered Navy Diver Robert Stethem. The only glitch in this presentation occurred when reporters and cameramen got into a shoving match as they jockeyed for position. Quickly, the Shi'ite guards hustled their prizes from the crowded room in the Beirut airport, waving pistols and cuffing a few reporters for good measure...