Terrorism expert Kenneth Timmerman is interviewed at FrontPage mag on the significance of the recent assassination of Imad Mugniyeh. In the course of the interview we learn something of who this man was and why his death leaves the earth a safer place. Here are some highlights from the interview:
Before 9/11, Mugniyeh was the world's most wanted terrorist, for the simple reason that he had killed more Americans than anyone else. The CIA has said he was behind the April 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63 people. Later that year, he orchestrated the bombing of a U.S. military barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. Marines. The very next year, he kidnapped, tortured, and murdered the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, and carried out another attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut. In 1985, he hijacked TWA flight 847 in a famous standoff in Beirut, where he and his accomplices brutally murdered U.S. Navy diver Robbie Stethem and threw his body out onto the tarmac. He kidnapped reporter Terry Anderson and others in Lebanon, then moved to Argentina in the 1990s, car-bombing the Israeli embassy there in 1992 and the AMIA Jewish center in 1994. And that's just his more famous attacks.
There is absolutely no doubt that Mugniyeh and his masters in Iran were directly and materially involved in the 9/11 plot.
First, there is the evidence discovered very late in the day by the 9/11 Commission, which I describe in detail in Countdown to Crisis. What is astonishing is that this information has not been widely publicized. I spoke again just yesterday with one of the top investigators involved in reviewing the highly-classified U.S. intelligence reports on Mugniyeh's involvement in convoying 9/11 hijackers in and out of Iran prior to 9/11. He was astonished when I told him that few people were yet aware of this. "That's like saying you didn't know that Jesse James was a crook," he said.
The Iranians were terrified on the day of 9/11 and for the next month that the United States would "connect the dots" and discover their involvement to the 9/11 plot, as I reported in Countdown to Crisis.
Senior Iranian government officials were making desperate phone calls to relatives in the United States, asking them to rent apartments for family members so they could get out of Tehran before what they assumed would be a massive retaliatory U.S. military strike.
Of course, as we know now, that U.S. retaliatory strike never occurred - because the CIA and other U.S. government agencies succeeded in burying the information they had collected (or the case of our technical agencies, that they had siphoned up).
I believe when Americans realize the full extent of the Iranian government involvement in the 9/11 plot, they will demand action from their president - no matter what party affiliation that president may have.
You can read the rest of the interview at the link.
RLC
