Jonah, what characteristically sharp insight from CBS News, no?
Why do I think William Francis Buckley, Robert Stethem and William Higgins would have preferred to be “mortarboarded”? As I recounted in this 2006 article, in March 1984, after a series of bombings that killed hundreds of Americans,
… Hezbollah operatives kidnapped William Francis Buckley, the CIA’s station chief in Beirut. He was whisked to Damascus and onto Tehran where he became one of the hostages whose detention led to the Iran/Contra affair. Under [top Hezbo honcho, the late Imad] Mugniyah’s direction, Buckley was tortured for 15 months, dying of a heart attack under that duress.
Hezbollah hijackers seized a Kuwait Airlines plane in December 1984, murdering four of the passengers, including two Americans. Six months later, Hezbollah operatives hijacked TWA Flight 847 after it left Greece. The jihadists discovered that one of their hostages was a U.S. Navy diver named Robert Stethem. They beat him severely and then shot him to death before dumping his body onto the tarmac of Beirut airport. In early 1988, Hezbollah kidnapped and ultimately murdered Colonel William Higgins, a U.S. Marine serving in Lebanon.