Word: amale
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There were some indications that the interviews were carefully stage-managed. Jimmy Dell Palmer in captivity was pictured playfully waving a pistol in front of an Amal guard. After he was freed last Wednesday, in advance of his comrades, he said he had argued against being photographed in that pose but yielded to persistent demands from his captors...
...happened on Saturday morning in the schoolyard near the Beirut airport, where the hostages and their luggage were assembled for what was expected to be an imminent trip to Damascus. It looked like a rather shaggy adult-education class being called to order, except for the gun-toting Amal guards watching from rooftops. In his now familiar crisp tones, Allyn Conwell called out the names of his 38 fellow American hostages, only 31 of whom answered "here" or "present." Three of those absent were not a cause of alarm. They were the crewmen of the TWA jet, who had been...
Throughout the week, events had seemed to grow increasingly surreal as the hostages, whose freedom seemed so tantalizingly out of reach, were continually shown on television eating, talking and even driving themselves around Beirut with their captors. For days, Amal guards brought small groups of hostages before television camera crews for interviews that were replayed incessantly in the U.S. Though some of the hostages confessed to depression and anxiety, others, presumably to reassure their watching families, mugged and shouted "Hi, Mom!" as if they had been filmed at a picnic. White House officials protested that television was playing into...
Other hostages told TV interviewers that they were being treated well by the Amal militiamen who had taken them away from the original hijackers, and their appearance did not contradict those assertions. Three hostages were interviewed by ABC's Charles Glass at the end of lunch in what looked like a pleasant seaside cafe near Beirut. Conwell, who lives in Muscat, Oman, went so far as to assert that "many in our group have a profound sympathy for the cause" of their Amal captors, namely freedom for 745 Lebanese held in an Israeli prison...
Then came a seemingly offhand bombshell. Said Berri: "We are prepared to hand the kidnaped persons over to a Western embassy, Swiss or French, whichever they (U.S. officials) choose." Alternatively, he said, Amal might "send the airplane with all the hostages to Damascus." Berri attached one giant condition: Syrian President Assad, or whoever else took custody of the Americans, would have to pledge not to set them free until all Lebanese prisoners in Atlit had been released by Israel. In Washington, White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan was awakened at about 3:30 a.m. by a call from...