Assignment:
Major Terrorist Incidents:
The Fort Hood Massacre
1. On November 9, 2009, U.S. Army Major Nidal Hassan carried out a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, Killing thirteen and wounding twenty-eight others. Hasan, a Muslin, was to be deployed in Afghanistan later that month. He had been in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American imam who encourage his followers to kill Americans.
Two Catastrophic Bombings in Beirut (1983)
2. On April 19, 1983, a delivery truck loaded with400 pounds of explosives sped past the guards in front of the U.S Embassy in Beirut and, as it reached the front portico of the building, blew up in a powerful explosive that destroyed the central part of the building. Sixty-three people, among them seventeen Americans, were killed and 120 others were injured. General John Vessey, The Chairman of the joint Chief of Staff, called the lethal attack on an American Diplomatic facility "an inexplicable aberration." As it turned out, the first Anti-American suicide bombing was only the beginning of a sustained terror campaign against Americans by fundamental Lebanese Shi'ite groups, namely the Hezbollah (Party of God) and the Lebanese Islamic Jihad, who were inspired by the Iranian revolution and actively supported by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and thus the Iranian leadership.
What these circles resented most of all were the presence or US Marines and other foreign forces n Lebanese territory even though the troops, together with their French and Italian counterparts, had come to restore law and order after Israel had invaded in the hunt for Palestinian Liberation organization (PLO) and had carried out the evacuation of PLO leader Yassir Arafat and his followers from Lebanon.
Far more devastating blows followed six months later, on October 23, 1983, when suicide bombers drove their explosive-laden trucks simultaneously into US Marine Corps and the French forces compound outside of Beirut. Two hundred and forty-one American Marines and fifty-eight French service men were killed. President Reagan called the Terrorist attacks "despicable" and expressed his "outrage." But while immediately after he learned of the carnage the president emphasized his determination to keep a force in Lebanon, four months later his administration decided to withdraw all marines from Lebanon. The terrorist had achieved their goal.