The Post-Mortem Goes On

Marine sentries who had not been allowed to insert ammunition in their weapons three weeks ago now stand guard with fully loaded guns. Some of those who had been based in Beirut were being billeted on American ships and ferried ashore by helicopters. Others were hard at work building new fortifications. Most guard posts were being reinforced and rearmed. Six-foot-high mounds of dirt, rows of tar-filled steel drums, sandbags and concertina wire blocked off the entrance to the Marine compound. Ironically, the little-used route through the parking lot that had been followed by a suicide bomber on Oct. 23, killing more than 230 U.S. servicemen, became the only approach to the headquarters. Heaps of dirt were spread around the lot to force approaching traffic to slow down.

All these measures simply underscored the continuing questions about whether the headquarters security had been adequate in the first place. Why hadn't Marine commanders taken precautions earlier, particularly after the car bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut last April? Why were the Marines on guard duty not carrying loaded weapons? And why were so many Marines quartered in a single building, concentrating them as a target in an area prone to terrorist attacks? These were some of the questions that were raised on Capitol Hill last week as both

the Senate and House Armed Services committees opened investigations. Their main witness:

Marine Commandant General Paul X. Kelley, who had just returned from a fact-finding trip to Lebanon.

Kelley insisted that "security was adequate for what any responsible and prudent commander should have expected."

But committee members were not persuaded by Kelley's assertion that despite the embassy attack, "no one anticipated" that a terrorist using a five-ton truck would be able to crash through Marine defenses. As Maine's Senator William Cohen put it, "It's not a leap of logic to see if they bomb you with a car, they can bomb you with a truck."

Asked Senator Gary Hart of Colorado: "Have we always attempted to defend against future threats based on precedents from the past? Are we still operating under the delusion that our enemies will not be imaginative and inventive?"

Kelley explained that Marines can load their rifles in "two seconds" and "in my professional judgment, it would have been impossible to stop the truck with small-arms fire." Retorted Kentucky's Representative Larry Hopkins: "Maybe the M-16 would not have stopped the truck. We'll never know. But one thing we do know is that an empty M-16 couldn't have stopped the truck." In fact, during last week's almost identical attack on an Israeli military headquarters in southern Lebanon, an Israeli guard did shoot the driver, causing the truck to explode sooner than it otherwise might have--thus probably causing fewer casualties.

Representative Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma asked Kelley why there were so many Marines in one building, considering that "in the Middle East, terrorism is just as much a function of their use of power as our use of the M-l tank." Kelley defended the arrangement, saying that the four-story concrete structure had been chosen because it had withstood the Israeli siege last year. But Representative Sonny Montgomery of Mississippi, who led an eleven-member House contingent that traveled to Beirut a few days after the blast, said it had been immediately clear to his group that the setup was wrong. "There were too many Marines in too small an area. Why didn't they use the parking lot for security? Why didn't they have a tank ditch? Was that a political decision?" Kelley also dismissed a Central Intelligence Agency report that had been sent to him three days before the attack, warning of a possible attempt on the Marines, as one of "those broad, vague, general statements they hide behind."

Both the Senate and the House will continue their investigations into the tragedy. The Pentagon also announced last week that it will convene a board of inquiry to look into "all the circumstances" of the Beirut bombing. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.