1980 Through 1989

• In the 1980s, Richard Perle was convicted on a misdemeanor charge of lying to Congress. It's rarely—if ever—mentioned. IZ (D*n right, rarely mentioned—this is the only mention I found in Google.)
• New series of science textbooks for grade school—Stem Science. And I always felt that's exactly what they did.
• 1980: 7 min to midnight—back where we started. BAS
• 1980: Sa Carneiro, PM of Portugal, and Amaro da Costa, defense minister, die in Lisbon plane crash. The latter had discovered documentation of Portugese officers helping to traffic arms to Iran. BK
• 1980: St. Regis Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation sues Reynolds Metals (`Reynolds Wrap') and Alcoa for fluorine poisoning; five years of litigation bankrupt the tribe, they settle for k$650 for the damage to their cattle. F
• 1980: Hopscotch, in which a disgruntled CIA agent (Matthau) escapes his pursuers by making them think he's flying off in a plane which is actually under his remote control, and fakes his death by blowing it up in plain view. (There's a nasty hole in the plot, as to how he gets away from the plane with that helicopter circling around, but…)

• One of the most famous documented cases of hearing voices was that of Dennis Sweeny, the student activist who shot and killed his mentor Allard Lowenstein. Lowenstein, who marched in the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi, had campaigned for Robert Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson, and ran the National Student Association before the CIA took over. Lowenstein, who was also friends with CIA propagandist William F. Buckley, had attempted to prove that a great conspiracy was responsible for the deaths of Martin Luther King and the Kennedys. (At the time he was assassinated, he was helping Ted Kennedy win the 1980 presidential election.)

  One fine day, Sweeny calmly walked into the middle of Rockefeller Center and pumped seven bullets into his mentor. He then sat down, lit a cigarette, and waited for the police to arrive. Sweeny claimed that the CIA, with Lowenstein's help, had implanted a telemetric chip in his head 15 years earlier, and had made his life an unbearable torment. Voices were transmitted through his dental work, he said, and he attempted to silence them by filing down his false teeth. Sweeny blamed CIA controllers for his uncle's heart attack and the assassination of San Francisco mayor George Moscone.

  Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk met their deaths at the hands the infamous Twinkie assassin—former City Supervisor Dan White. White earned the curious title due to his attorney's novel defense—that his client was under the influence of a heavy dose of sugar at the time of the murders. More likely, White was under the influence of a heavy dose of hypnosis.

  Like McVeigh, White had been in the military, serving a tour of duty in Vietnam. After leaving the police department in 1972, White took an extended vacation since known as White's missing year.

  He broke all contact with friends and family. He kept no records of the trip, purchased no travel tickets, did not use a credit card. He later accounted for his mystery year by explaining that he'd worked a stint as a security guard in Alaska.

  White subsequently moved back to San Francisco, where he joined the Fire Department. Like McVeigh, White's work record was untarnished, though like the enigmatic soldier, he was known to erupt in embarrassing temper tantrums. As Constantine writes in The Good Soldier:

  While campaigning for the Board of Supervisors, he spoke as if he was programmed, according to local labor leader Stan Smith. During Board sessions, he was known to slip into spells of silence punctuated by goose-stepping walks around the Supervisors' chambers.

  One of the more recent cases of murder by suggestion was the assassination of Naval Commander Edward J. Higgins. Higgins was shot five times in the Pentagon parking lot by Carl Campbell, who claimed that the CIA had implanted a microchip in him that controlled his mind.

  To those who believe that such electronically-manipulated scenarios are the stuff of fantasy, they should take note that no less than three support groups currently exist in the US to deal with the trauma of military and intelligence-agency brainwashing. OKCBPT

• A 1980 study by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that 80% of all radiation monitoring devices tested failed to come within 50% accuracy. Conducted by the University of Michigan, the study covered 59 processing firms and involved a sample of about 90% of the radiation-dosimetry industry. By mixing in control badges with those coming from work sites, the Michigan researchers found that a large part of the dosimetry work being done at American nuclear sites was unreliable at best. When test badges were exposed to levels of radiation corresponding to a major nuclear accident, the extreme doses went undetected.[89] The response by the Health Physics Society, which sets monitoring standards, however, was not to improve the technology—but rather to relax the dosimetry standards, making it easier for the industry to pass future tests. KOO

• Zinn A People's History of the US. (I hear Zinn flew in the Dresden firebombing. I wonder if he and Vonnegut have ever met?)
• 1980s: US quietly builds G$200 of military bases in Saudi Arabia to get ready for the Gulf War. The bin Ladens doubtless got a lot of the contracts. [ENC citing Frontline]
• 1980 Jan: &rad;R5.5 earthquake causes tritium leak at Lawrence Livermore Labs. L
• Mar 14: Rep. Allard Lowenstein killed by lone nut disgrunted client. He had been for ten years pushing for a reïnvestigation of the RFK assassination on the ballistic discrepancies. PG · PS
• 1980 Jun 3: Flaky 46¢ chip in NORAD's kaputeys fakes up a Soviet missile attack. NF
• Aug:

  Here are two comments not to be found in any American public-school book. Thomas Jefferson: The day will come then the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the barin of Jupiter. John Adams (in a letter to Jefferson): Twenty time, in the course of my late reading, have I been on the point of breakingout. This would be the bes to fall possible worlds, if there was no religion in it. But since the Bank approves of most religions (Slaves, obey thy masters is an injunction it finds irresistable), superstition continues to flourish. On the other hand, if we were to tax the various denominations, a good many religions would simply wither away, on the ground that they had ceased to be profitable to their managers.

  During the 1960 presidential cmapaign, Nixon referred to Kennedy's Catholicism six times in practically a single breath; he then said, piously, that he did not think religion ought to play any part in any political election—unless, maybe, the candidate had no religion (and Nixon shuddered ever so slightly). As the First Criminal knew only too well, religion is the most important force not only in American politics but in world politics, too. Currently, the 9th-century Imam at Qom is threatening an Islamic holy war against Satan America. Currently, the 5th-century-BC PM of Israel is claiming two parcels of real estate because an ancient text says that Jews once lived there. Currently, the 11th-century Polish pope is conducting a series of tours in order to increase his personal authority and to shore up a church whose past excesses caused so much protest that a rival Protestant church came into being—and it, in turn, hates… [Vidal United States p944–5]

• In August 1980, a bomb went off at Bologna station, killing 84 passengers and wounding 200. It took undercover agents two years to discover that it was not, as most people suspected, the work of the left-wing Red Brigade, but of a right-wing group known as the Ordine Nuovo, or New Order, which had links across Europe and even into South America…

  Ordine Nuovo, it was found, had developed a political theory which was a chilling foretaste of the terrorism of the 21st century. It came to be known as the strategy of tension and its aim was to carry out acts of terrorism which could be blamed, not on right-wing extremists, but on radical left-wing groups. The idea was that by sending intelligence agencies off on a false trail, panic and confusion would be created, to the point where the army might have to step in to take control. S

  (Does this article link the CIA to the bombing?)
• Aug 6:

  All but two paragraphs of the nine-thousand-word Defense Nuclear Agency report issued August 6, 1980, skirted the specific health problems among US veterans of Japan atomic bomb cleanup. As had been government policy before, the DNA report…still espoused the US Government's theoretical conclusion that no appreciable health risks were involved.

  The report's few sentences commenting on actual subsequent health ills among Nagasaki cleanup Marines illustrate how far down the road of misinformation the Pentagon had gone.

  One specific health risk deserves mention because it has received some recent publicity. This concerns a type of bone marrow cancer known as multiple myeloma. Conceding that four veterans of the Nagasaki occupation have been diagnosed as having multiple myeloma, the report claimed, This does not appear to represent an abnormal incidence of this disease. The following statistics from the National Cancer Institute are pertinent. If you start with 10,000 males age 25, in 1945 (which approximates the Nagasaki Marines); then today, in 1980, about 7.7 deaths from multiple myeloma should have already occurred, based on normal statistics. The report concluded, then, that the four multiple myeloma cases that are known are less than the number that would have been expected for a normal, non-radiation-exposed group of this age and size.

  In those few sentences the Pentagon had thoroughly distorted the situation. Use of the ten thousand Marines figure was misleading in the extreme, grossly inflating the statistical data base against which the multiple myeloma cases would be compared. By the Defense Department's own account the vast majority of those ten thousand Marine occupation troops remained several miles from ground zero in Nagasaki. But the five—not four—cases of multiple myeloma were all among the approximately one thousand Marines billeted in the immediate central area, within a mile of the hypocenter in late September 1945. In effect the Pentagon's DNA report was multiplying the epidemiological data base ten-fold by including the Marines stationed at the 6th Regiment's Oura Barracks three miles to the southwest and the 2nd Regiment's Kamigo Barracks more than four miles to the south of the hypocenter.

  With the correct data base of one thousand, according to medical incidence tables cited by all sources in the dispute, the occurrence of multiple myeloma among the five Marine veterans was between 6½ and 10 times higher than normal. And for all we know, Harry Coppola, Harold Joseph Ralph, Alvin Lasky, Richard Bonebrake, and George Proctor were not the only ones among the Marines at the blast core area that first occupation week who later developed multiple myeloma. The five of them represented the minimum, not the maximum of actual incidences of the rare bone-marrow disease. KOO

• By the summer of 1980… reactors were operating at roughly 65% of full capacity; originally the industry had promised 80%. And with just seventy plants on line, atomic power was producing a net of just 9% of the US electricity supply, and less than 2% of all US energy. After 35 years of research and development, $40 billion in taxpayer subsidies, and more than $100 billion in utility investments, commercial reactors were providing American consumers with less usable energy than firewood. KOO

• 1980 Sep 19: &rad;Repairman doing routine maintenance in a Titan II silo drops a wrench socket which breaks open a pressurized fuel tank at the bottom of the shaft. The missile complex and surrounding areas are evacuated. After 8½ hr the fuel vapours blow off the 740-ton silo door and catapult the warhead 600 feet into the air, injuring 21 and killing another. The silo will be gravelled in and operations transferred to a similar installation at Rock Kansas. L
• Yes, Minister debuts on BBC2, later followed by Yes, Prime Minister. YM Anyone who thinks he lives in a democracy should be made to watch these over and over, Clockwork Orange style, until he wises up. Margaret Thatcher: `Its closely observed portrayal of what goes on in the corridors of power has given me hours of pure joy.'
• 1980 Sep 21: &rad;Two canisters of radioactive material fall off a truck on NJ Rt 17. The driver, en route from PA to Toronto, doesn't notice until he reaches Albany NY. L
• 1980 Sep 30: FDA's Public Board of Inquiry (PBOI) votes unanimously to reject the use of aspartame until additional studies on its potential to cause brain tumours could be done. CP (The aspartame `fact' site diligently mentions the FDA has approved it for 23 a but not that it had rejected it for 16.)
• Oct: Another kafuffle over the authenticity of Anne Frank's Diary: claims from German forensics that some was written in biro. It ends up, at least officially, that they didn't know what they were talking about—couldn't even point out a single passage they thought was in ballpoint. (For myself: there was a lot of tragedy under Hitler. The Diary, authentic or forged, gets its push by Zionists needing support for their mideastern Reich.)
• Oct:

  Were the US in less trouble, this election would be treated the way it deserves to be treated—like the Grammy Awards: those who are amused by such trivia will tune in; the rest will not. But the next president—even though he will simply be a continuation of the previous president (clones was the apt word used to describe Reagan and Carter by clone Kennedy) will have to face 1) A nation whose per-capita income has dropped to ninth in the world 2) A working population whose real discretionary income (money you get to spend out of what you earn) has declined 18% since 1973 3) An industrial plant with the lowest productivity growth rate in the Western world—yes, we've sunk below England 4) Double-digit inflation and high unemployment that, according to the latest Nobel prize person for economics, will go on into the foreseeable future 5) A federal budget of some G$600, of which 75% can never be cut back (service on the national debt, Social Security, congressionally mandated programs, entitlements) 6) A mindlessly wasteful military establishment whose clients in Congress and in the press can always be counted on to yell, the Russians are coming when it is appropriations time on the Hill. [Vidal United States p953]

1981

• 4 min to midnight. BAS
• Escape from New York begins with an airplane (Air Force 1) crashing into a south-Manhattan skyscraper. 911R
• First cases of AIDS are confirmed in homosexual men in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, triggering speculation that AIDS may have been introduced via the Hepatitis B vaccine HNN

• The evidence of voter intimidation in Florida reminded me of the 1981 gubernatorial race in New Jersey.

  Sponsored by the national and state Republican parties, the National Ballot Security Task Force was comprised of off-duty deputy sheriffs and local policeman who monitored polling places in predominantly African-American and Hispanic precincts. They wore arm bands that identified them as members of this voter-suppression effort. They also posted signs warning that the National Ballot Security Task Force was patrolling the area and that it was a crime to violate election laws.

  This intimidation led to a narrow victory for the Republican candidate. Later, a judge instructed the state and national Republican parties to refrain from practices that target specific ethnic or racial populations.

  We saw in Florida in 2000 a kinder, gentler form of the National Ballot Security Task Force. It's still as prevalent—and wrong—as it was in New Jersey in 1981. SB

  The GOP is still using BSTFs CJ even though they are outlawed.
• 1981: `Ames' strain of anthrax isolated from a Texan bovine. G
• 1981 Jan 20: Ronald Wilson Reagan (Ronnie Raygun) anointed Prez. The Iran hostages are freed almost simultaneously, and Raygun soaks up the credit, although officially it took months of work by Carter and a Canadian diplomat; unofficially it's likely to have been a GHWB-arranged deal dubbed `October Surprise' to prevent their being freed before the elections, which would surely reëlect Carter. GBUB
• 1981 Jan 21: Searle reäpplies for FDA aspartame approval; CEO Rumsfeld vows to get it approved this year (after 16 of failure). CP
• Feb 5:

  It is taken for granted by both romantics and realists that the US is the greatest country on earth as well as in the history of the world, with a government that is the envy of the lesser breeds just as the life-style of its citizens is regarded with a grinding of teeth by the huddled masses of old Europe—while Africa, mainland Asia, South America are not even in the running. Actually, none of the hundred or so new countries that have been organised since WW2 has imitated our form of government—though, to a nation, the local dictator like to style himself the president. As for being the greatest nation on earth, the US' hegemony of the known world lasted exactly five years: '45-'50. As for being envied by the less fortunate (in a LA Times poll of 1980 Oct 1, 71% of the guilded states' citizens thought that the US had the highest living standard in the world today) the US has fallen to 9th place in per-capita income while living standards are far higher for the average citizen in more than 8 countries. [Vidal United States p957]

  (Actually, I think Vidal was wrong. The Soviets tested their Bomb 1949 Aug 29, which is four years. He may have something different in mind.)
• 1981 Feb 11: &rad;Sequoyah I Auxiliary Unit Operator at his first day on the job opens a valve and sprays 110 000 gallons of radioactive coolant on eight men working in containment. [GSP quoting IEER] L
• 1981 Mar: &rad;Radioactive-gas leak at Salem 1. L
• 1981 Mar 18: Sec'y of State Haig and Att'y Gen'l W'm French Smith called away from dinner at the Lion d'Or to prevent the DC police blotter mentioning a traffic accident involving GHWB and his girlfriend. [NB citing the Kitty Kelly bio of Nancy Reagan, while qualifying that he does not consider the book generally reliable.]
• 1981 Mar 30: Scott Hinckley is informed by the US DoEnergy that they suspect pricing irregularities by his family's Vanderbilt Energy Co, and plan a fine of M$2. About an hour after the meeting, Scott's brother John Warnock Jr. comes within an inch of making their father's good friend George the new President. [Blumberg Afternoon of March 30th: a contemporary historical novel, see NB] [MB citing Wall St Journal Apr 2] Barrington Parker will be selected by a highly unorthodox method to preside the trial, and the whole thing wraps up as a lone-nut case with pining-for-a-celebrity spritzer. UPI's report that Scott is set to sup with Neil Bush tomorrow is read by NBC's John Chancellor, looking amazed. The date is cancelled and the link buried. While the AP engaged in extensive speculation for several days on a possible Hinckley–Richardson conspiracy, based on flimsy evidence that turned out to have no basis whatsoever, it refused [to mention the Neil–Scott friendship]. NB Neil M. Bush several times publicly confirms the Bush-Hinckley connection. GHWB himself was in Texas, making a nat'l historic site of the hotel in which JFK spent his last night. Here was a sinister symbolism! GBUB (The limousine with Reagan left the scene 5 min ahead of the ambulance with Brady—yet arrived at the hospital 15 min after the ambulance. We're supposed to believe the SS driver got lost. In Washington. X The deranged drifter with the hots for Jodie Foster theory doesn't quite explain that little detail.) (Hinckley and Bush may even be kin, from a Samuel Hinckley and Sarah Poole. CJ Of course, this is of no more significance than Bush's descent from British kings. But the Bushes are the ones that like to bring it up.) Pro-Bush Free Republic had a raft of source articles on the Bush-Hinckley connexion on 2003 Nov 19. FR JWH Sr was a top (at the legal limit) contributor to GHWB's campaigns, esp. against Reagan; and apparently Bush's Zapata had bailed out Vanderbilt in the '60s. JR
• Apr:

  In April, 1981, the FBI received an application by the DoD Top Secret security clearance for Dr. Stephen Bryen. Richard Perle, who had just been nominated as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, was proposing Bryen as his Deputy Assistant Secretary! Within six months, with Perle pushing hard, Bryen received both Top Secret-SCI (sensitive compartmented information) and Top Secret-NATO/COSMIC clearances. [This despite Bryen's requested resignation from the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations C'tee after his prints were found on classified documents he'd claimed in writing never to have posessed, documents he was caught sharing with Zvi Rafiah, Mossad's Washington station chief.] CP

  May 13: Attempted assassination of John Paul II. [de Rosa Vicars of Christ 1989 p21]

  Jun: &rad;3000-gallon radioactive water leak from Salem 2. L

  Jun:

  In 1980 the voters of Washington State overwhelmingly approved a referendum to ban all further shipments of radioactive waste into the state. And Ronald Reagan—whose campaign platform included the strengthening of states' rights—instructed the federal Justice Department to overturn the act and force the state to continue accepting radioactive wastes against its will. In June 1981 the federal district court in Seattle ruled against the state. KOO

  Jun 7: Israel destroys Iraq's Osirak nuclear research facility F with US-made aircraft and direct US assistance. This helps to radicalise Iraq. [Rep. Paul Findley]

  One hesitates to raise puckish questions during a funerary rite, but perhaps we might be forgiven if we pause in the midst of Col. Ramon's hagiography just long enough to burn a requiem candle to the memory of the French scientist and the two other people Ramon killed when he bombed the Iraqi reactor in 1981. Back then, Col. Ramon's bombing was infamous rather than `famed.' Even the NY Times characterized it as `a sneak attack…an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression.' The celebrated Israeli scientist-astronaut is thus guilty of the murder of a scientist, but the life of the French scientist and the status of his survivors is, under the circumstances, not worth the faintest mention. [H re Columbia]

  Iraq's nuclear reactor was in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which Iraq was a charter signatory, and which Israel had never signed. Dr. Sigvard Eklund, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, stated to the UN Security Council on 19 June 1981 that the Israelis had acted on the basis of faulty intelligence and really had no justification at all for what they had done. Dr. Eklund goes on and says In fulfilling its responsibilities the Agency has inspected the Iraqi reactors and has not found evidence of any activity not in accordance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

  The President of the UN Security Council, Mr. Porfirio Muñoz Ledo criticized the action and attitude of Israel in no uncertain terms: The reasons on which the Government of Israel bases its contention are as unacceptable as the act of aggression it committed. It is inadmissible to invoke the right to self-defense when no armed attack has taken place. The concept of preventive war, which for many years served as justification for the abuses of powerful States, since it left it to their discretion to define what constituted a threat to them, was definitively abolished by the Charter of the UN.

  …the Israeli misrepresentation has been kept alive in the minds of the American people. MM

  Oct: Just after the Diablo Blockade, a 25-year-old PGE engineer discovers that the seismic plans of the G$2.1 reactors were reversed. EN (Wasn't a Diablo the plant featured in China Syndrome?)

  Dec 4: Regan signs EO 12333, renewing the ban on assassinations, or conspiracy to commit assassinations, `as part of a broader package which gave virtually complete control of the National Security apparatus' to VP GHWB. FTW

  The Critical Mass Energy Project of Public Citizen reports that there were 4060 mishaps and 140 serious events at nuclear power plants in 1981, up from 3804 mishaps and 104 serious events the previous year. L

  (?): `Raygun' declares war on terrorism.

  ?: V. First the aliens pretend to need our help, promising a technology exchange. Then they stage an anti-alien conspiracy among scientists, which give an excuse to delay the technology transfer, enables a roundup of scientists, and turns the public against scientists and their possibly dissenting views. A couple more staged events end in martial law for our own protection. (There are explicit comparisons with the Nazis, indeed the aliens' logo resembles a swastika and the human collaborators wear brown uniforms. The aliens themselves are reptilians in latex appliances; I wonder if this is inspired by or originated the ideas of shape-shifting reptiloids being the real rulers of this prison planet. The techniques of mass manipulation become quite familiar post 9-11.)

1982

• &rad;International Nutronics in Dover NJ, which used radiation baths to purify gems, chemicals, food, and medical supplies, has a pump malfunction, siphoning bath water onto the floor, eventually draining into Dover's sewers. The plant is a loss. The NRC isn't informed for 10 months later—by a whistleblower, not the company. In 1986, the company and one of its top executives are convicted by a federal jury of conspiracy and fraud. L
• 1982: Water Chemicals Codex published from Washington DC shows all fluoride used in public water supplies is Pb-contaminated. F (That's beside the fact fluorides leach Pb from pipe and solder joints.)
• 1982: Reagan quietly loans PGE G$2.5 EPA money to help rebuild the Diablo Canyon reactors for the 3rd time since 1963. EN
• 1982: US creates a law authorising (demanding?) detention and quarantine of anyone having extraterrestrial contact; defined as a condition of having either (a) entered the atmosphere of, or landed upon, some non-terrestrial celestial body, or (b) touched directly or been in close proximity to (or been exposed indirectly to) any person, property, animal or other form of life or matter who or which has been extra-terrestrially exposed by virtue of [(a)] The law is in force until NASA has it repealed 1991. Many wonder if it's a badly-worded attempt to protect us from astronauts exposed to space viruses, or deliberately vague so as to pass under that cover while actually intended to silence UFO witnesses. S
• 1982: &rad;During labor negotiations at the Salem plant in NJ, someone intentionally trips a steam generator feedwater pump. To a small degree, this event imitates the trip which led to the TMI accident three years ago. TMIA
• Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan features a retinal scan for obtaining access to top-secret material. In just over 20 years it will be used in a little British school—Sunderland Venerable Bede Church of England Aided School—to obtain access to library books and lunch. R · SPI
• Despite the eventual takeover of the HSCA by the PCG TA123, it was necessary to the patch the crack left by the accreditation of a 4th gunshot at Dealy Plaza. The NAS' Ramsey panel finds the grout c1981: using a certain synchrony on the police audio records to show the 4th pop came at the wrong time. But later a deeper study finds another synchrony which vindicates the HSCA. G. Robert Blakey, former chief counsel to the [HSCA], said the [Ramsey] panel's study always bothered him because it dismissed all four putative shots as random noise—even though the three soundbursts from the book depository matched up precisely with film of the assassination and other evidence such as the echo patterns in Dealey Plaza and the speed of Kennedy's motorcade. [WP citing Science and Justice c2001]
• 1982: Philip Habib, Reagan's Special Middle East Envoy: `Sharon was a killer obsessed with hatred of Palestinians. I had promised Arafat that his people would not get any harm. Sharon, however, ignored this commitment entirely. Sharon's word is worth nil.' X · MN
• 1982 Jan 25: &rad;Steam generator pipe breaks at Robert E. Ginna near Rochester NY. 15000 gallons of radioactive coolant spill on the floor, and radioactive steam escapes. L
• 1982 Feb: &rad;A study by CDC scientist indicates that up to 95% of smokers' cancers could be due to Po-210 from commercial fertilizers used on tobacco. A 1½-pack-a-day smoker receives the equivalent of 300 chest X-rays a year. EN
• 1982 Feb: &rad;16 Salem workers drenched in 23000 gallons of radioactive water L
• 1982 Feb 11: W'm Smith and W'm Casey complete arrangements relieving CIA agents, contractors, and employees of having to report their drug trafficking. Cocaine imports increase through 80 Mg in '83 to 600 Mg in '89. FTW
• 1982 Mar 14: US starts a war in Nicaragua. FTW
• 1982 Mar 16: Adler Berriman (Barry) Seal starts getting planes from W'm Casey to transport weapons southward and drugs northward. FTW
• 1982 May: Ariel Sharon hopes to drive all Palestinians from Gaza and West Bank into Jordan. (NY Times, '82 May 17; found in Chomsky Reader&warn;)
• 1982: Tremendous explosion of Siberian NG pipeline, ultimately caused by US-sabotaged software. The CIA had added a timebomb that would throw the pumps and valves into a frenzy, and covertly sold it to the Soviets. It was part of a Reagan-approved plan to ruin the Soviet economy. T citing Reed At the Abyss: an insider's history of the Cold War (As if the nuclear-arms race hadn't done enough damage. And by 2000 the US wonders why the world's governments are leery of buying US-made software and opting for source-code access.)
• 1982 Aug 8: Menachem Begin at Israeli Nat'l Defense College: `In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.' [ABBC citing NY Times Aug 21] WR
• 1982 Sep: &rad; Radioactive-gas leak at Salem 1. L
• 1982 Sep 5: Disappearance of 12-a-old Johnny Gosch, most likely into the Lawrence King ring. JG
• 1982 Sep 16–18: Sharon's massacres of civilians at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut during Israel's invasion of Lebanon. BA · HD quoting Reuters]
• 1982 Dec: Ariel Sharon: `You can call me anything you like. Call me a monster or a murderer…Better a live Judeo-Nazi than a dead saint…Even if you prove to me that the present war in Lebanon is a dirty immoral war, I don't care…We shall start another war, kill and destroy more and more, until they will have had enough…Let them tremble, let them call us a mad state. Let them understand that we are a wild country, dangerous to our surroundings, not normal, that we might go crazy if one of our children is murdered, just one! If anyone even raises his hand against us we'll take away half his land and burn the other half, including the oil. We might use nuclear arms…Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn them, to have everyone hate us…And I don't mind if after the job is done you put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal…What you don't understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it.' X (Another quote I'd dearly like to authenticate.)
• 1982 Dec 8: Norman Mayer demands an end to nuclear weapons by taking the Washington Monument hostage. Police call his bluff and kill him (he had no explosives). F
• The Critical Mass Energy Project of Public Citizen reports 84322 power-plant workers were exposed to radiation in 1982, up from 82183 the previous year. L

1983

• Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: a reappraisal
• National Soft Drink Association: Aspartame is inherently, markedly and uniquely unstable in aqueous media. [PL, 7F citing Senate record 1985 May 7]
• &rad;M$800 accident at Pickering. EN
• DoE confirms 1200 tons of Hg had been released over the years from the Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Components Plant at Oak Ridge TN. L
• The Meaning of Life Pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cause there's buggerall down here on Earth. (Title sequence appears to make a reference to DNA's Meaning of Liff, also released this year.)
• Salem bin Laden dies in plane crash. He was GWB's business partner in Arbusto and Osama's eldest brother JR and married to a Brit, Caroline Carey. BW PBS claims 1988:

  Like his father in 1968, Salem died in a 1988 air crash…in Texas. He was flying a BAC 1-11 which had been bought in July 1977 by Prince Mohammed Ben Fahd. The plane's flight plans had long been at the center of a number of investigations. According to one of the plane's American pilots, it had been used in October 1980 during secret Paris meetings between US and Iranian emissaries [`October Surprise']. Nothing was ever proven, but Salem bin Laden's accidental death revived some speculation that he might have been `eliminated' as an embarrassing witness. In fact, an inquiry was held to determine the exact circumstances of the accident. The conclusions were never divulged. PBS

  (Note PBS is either lax or careful to call it `accidental' even though `conclusions were never divulged.' PBS also added a note that it wasn't a BAC1-11, but a `light aircraft.')
• 1983 Jan 15–16: &rad;1 Gg radioactive water dumped into the Tennesee by Brown's Ferry. L
• 1983 Mar 30: EPA confirms fluoridation is a handy way to dispose of industrial waste: `By recovering by-product fluosilicic acid from fertilizer manufacturing, water and air pollution are minimized, and water utilities have a low-cost source of fluoride available to them.' F (So, the stuff ceases to be water pollution once filtered through humans?)
• Apr: US embassy in Beirut bombed. [Economist 2001 Sep 15–21 p 18]
• Dr. Johannes Köppl of the German defense ministry warns via Newsweek and elsewhere that Z. Brzezinski and the Council on Foreign Relations are part of an effort to impose a global dictatorship. FTW
• Oct 23: US Marine barracks in Beirut attacked by truck bomb. Minutes later a car bomb targets a nearby French base. [PS citing ZM, X] &rad;This incident prompts the NRC to have Sandia study the truck-bomb threat to nuclear plants. Sandia concludes there is great danger at many plants of meltdown by destruction of reactor control mechanisms, or radioactive-gas leaks from destruction of gas-aging tanks. But in its great tradition, the NRC engages in coverups rather than corrective action. They won't even require vehicular barriers for another decade. TMIA (Meanwhile the Whitehouse and WTC and other `important' or high-profile buildings get anti-vehicle bollards.)
• Oct 25: US invades Grenada to rescue from a new leftist government a handful of American students who said they didn't need rescue. BI The media were locked out of this war in a manner unprecedented even in the US.

  Gen. John W. Vessey, Jr., chairman of the JCS, explained his rationale: We didn't bring the media with us to Grenada because of the need for surprise in this operation. We were going in there quickly, and we needed surprise in order to have it be successful. This explanation soon was exposed as false when it became known that two days before the operation, Radio Havana had broadcast news about an imminent US invasion of Grenada. TWT

• Nov: FDA under Arthur Hull Hayes approves aspartame for soft drinks. Under aspersions for taking `corporate gifts' Hayes leaves the FDA and becomes chief medical advisor to Searle's PR firm. Rumsfeld gets a M$12 bonus. S · JR
• Nov 26: Reagan signs National Security Decision Directive 114, mandating US support for the Saddam Hussein particularly against Iran. [PS citing AT]
• Dec 20: Donald Rumsfeld meets Saddam Hussein as special envoy. Returns with news Saddam `was not interested in making mischief in the world.' Reagan–Bush pour money and material into Iraq's weapons programs. [MSNBC citing Newsweek 2002 Sep 23] [TMTM citing NY Times]

1984

• 3 min to midnight. BAS
• Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore, jumps ship to Atari. Commodore, on the thin edge, buys into the Amiga, designed by former Atari engineers. WP (Wierd.)
• Netanyahu begins 4 a as Israeli ambassador to UN. L
• [1986?] CDC investigates complaints about aspartame, finds (among other effects) suicidal tendencies, liver impairment, cardiac arrest, and death. The report summarises the effects as `mild.' DW · DW · DW
• &rad;Forbes publishes stinging report on the nuclear industry, calling it the biggest financial disaster in US history. EN (So much for `electricity too cheap to meter.')
• Israelis set up a `Trojan' radio relay in Libya and send fake messages to make it look like Kadaffy/Gadaphi/Qadhafi is planning an imminent offensive. The French and Spanish find the apparent sudden change in Libyan behaviour suspicious and keep out. The bloodthirsty US is gung-ho. [X and Y both draw on Ostrovsky's books]
• A Nightmare on Elm Street, first of seven films not about the JFK assassination.
• &rad; OK teenager shoots frog with 9 legs near Rabbit Hill Farm in Muskogee Co., home of Kerr-McGee's Sequoyah Fuels. People have shot rabbits that have two hearts. And some folks report seeing a two-headed blackbird flying about. But not Lisa Girty, who was born without eyes or eye sockets. ZN Marked tentative until I found: I met a young boy who showed me a frog he had caught—the frog had nine legs. It was in a bottle of formaldehyde. I wanted to take it for some tissue and bone analysis but it was his prize possession and he would not part with it…Kerr Magee [sic] had applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to call their waste an experimental fertilizer…The young boy had found his nine-legged frog on the hill which served as the experimental plot. Hunters had found a rabbit with two hearts… [R quoting Bertell Gulf War Syndrome, Depleted Uranium and the Dangers of Low-Level Radiation]
• March: Rummy visits Saddam again, this time to pass along assurance that the US' noises against Iraq's use of chemweaps are just for show. SMH
• Mar 16: Kidnapping of CIA Beirut(?) station chief W'm Francis Buckley, later killed. [PS citing X] (He doesn't seem to have any relation to W'm Frank Buckley Jr., the conservative mouthpiece. Damn confusing.)
• 17 cultists executed and skinned in Brownsville TX. W was the 18th member of the group and his teethmarks are found on one of the victims; the local prosecutor pursued W for six months despite pressure from Herbert the Pervert to forget the whole thing. When asked about this in the 2000 campaign W said all you want to talk about is something that may or may not have happened 16 years ago? I'm sorry, but I find that offensive. C&D, RMN, (Others remember that a pen from W's oil company was used as an eye-gouging tool and his footprints matched. Mention of the massacre is hard to find; what usually turns up seems to be a 1989 killing or massacre. Or maybe it's the 1989 Kilroy killing that exposes the 1984 massacre?)
• Mar 24: Rumsfeld visits Iraq again, apparently offering secret Israeli support, which Aziz refuses point blank out of hand, figuring he'd be instantly put to death if he even read the damn memo. Meanwhile Iraq is using nerve-agent-laced mustard gas on Iranians. [PS citing CN, RL, GWU]
• Mar: US blocks UNSC resolution condemning Iraq's use of chemweaps, then substitutes a general condemnation that names no names. [PS citing GWU]
• April: Nicaragua files with the World Court a charge that the US was mining its harbours and attacking its territory. The same day, Reagan declares May 1 shall be `Law Day 1984,' for without law, there can be only `chaos and disorder.' Yet the day before he declared that the US shall ignore the World Court. (compare 1907–1922) [Chomsky Reader p 124] (Far as I can tell the case drags on until Sep '91)
• Apr 9: Mushroom cloud erupts about 180 mi east of Japan. Nuclear explosion suspected but there was no flash, no radioactivity, and no shockwave. Investigation finds no known natural or artificial explanation. SF A tremendous gas bubble from the ocean floor? A (Wouldn't there be a shockwave?) Was it a Soviet EMG test/demo? C
• Apr 17: British policewoman at protest outside Libyan embassy dies of single-bullet wound. British trade with Libya deteriorates and the decision to provide logistical support for the US raid on Libya is boosted. Which is exactly why the US shot her:

  According to irrefutable evidence uncovered recently by investigative journalists, Fletcher was killed by USA agents hiding in a building next to the Libyan embassy in London. The evidence proves that British and American intelligence agents cooperated to kill Fletcher to help demonise and criminalise Libyans and impose UN embargo against Libyans. Tory MP Teddy Taylor is helping to expose the criminal scandal and murderers. AM

  Her wound is the evidence. It indicates a lower-energy tumbling projectile inconsistent with the Libyan weapon. It also has a downward track too steep to have been fired from the embassy, and when coupled with video of the incident, indicates a direction other than the embassy. The track is consistent with the US and British surveillance post on the upper floors of the building next-door. The demonstrators themselves had CIA links. DBL (I'm missing why the US wanted to pick on Libya so: The demonisation of the rogue state Libya has long played an important part of US policy in the Middle East. Libyan leader Colonel Gadhaffi's anti-imperialist rhetoric, his regime's support for the Palestinians and opposition to Israel all drew the ire of the US, which designated Libya a terrorist nation in 1979. WSWS)
• Apr 23: Robert Gallo introduces the world to the HIV theory of AIDS. TMH

  In 1984, National Cancer Institute virologist Robert Gallo held a press conference, with Margaret Heckler, then the Secretary of Health and Human Services, at his side. Gallo announced that he had found the probable cause of AIDS in a retrovirus he was then calling HTLV-III (and which had already been isolated a year earlier at the Pasteur Institute in France).

  With that announcement, Gallo had publicly leapfrogged straight across the scientific process—across peer-review and analysis, across the very checks and balances of science. He made no attempt to demonstrate his claim—in fact, only half of his sample patients had any trace of HIV—but fed it straight to the global media, which broadcast it without hesitation. What made the move toward the viral cause of AIDS irreversible was the fact that the federal government supported it, if it didn't engineer it. Now a new standard of brash, unscientific science was set, and all others took their lead from it.

  Since then, the media have painted a false picture to suggest that virtually every scientist and doctor in the world supports the HIV hypothesis of AIDS…What distinguishes [the dissenters]? By and large, [they] are not dependent on grants from the National Institutes of Health for their livelihood. The signatories who are Nobel laureates are immune from bureaucratic intimidation. Many of the academic members of the group who publicly support Duesberg are emeritus professors, whose careers can't be terminated. Younger academics, on the other hand, who have seen the establishment mercilessly punish and excommunicate someone of Duesberg's stature have clearly gotten the message: They keep their mouths shut and bow down before the golden calf of HIV.

  Serge Lang, the legendary Yale mathematician and member of the National Academy of Sciences, has had so many letters to editors concerning the HIV scandal refused publication that he started sending checks along with his letters—the equivalent of buying space in which to speak. (Some editors were sufficiently embarrassed by this tactic that they published Lang's letters and returned his checks.)

  There are countless more stories of censorship, intimidation, and financial and professional manipulation. But the discordant data still sits there, indestructible and unresolved. [TMH emphasis added—that is a key point of scientific method that is being lost; facts are facts, they must not be dismissed no matter how inconvenient or uncomfortable. History students most desperately need to relearn this simple principle.]

• May: GWB admits he was avoiding Vietnam: I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes. [WND citing Houston Chronicle] (Also notable that he knew what Canada was.)
• Peters From Time Immemorial: a grand piece of fakery attempting to resurrect Meir's ridiculous Palestinians never existed. FPP · WP
• May 21: Bedini's press release. KN

• In June 1984, an official in the Denver regional office of the Department of Education circulated a report castigating the University of Denver for using global education materials in teacher training courses. The materials committed the arch sin of describing world events and issues as often ambiguous, in contrast to the accepted moral absolutes that ought to be applied. The Reagan official described the moral absolutes as truths that are true for anybody, anywhere, at anytime, and noted that students need to be taught a healthy skepticism about tolerance for different points of view. His report castigated the redistributionist ethic in global education materials that encouraged students to think about how food and other resources could be distributed more equitably among nations. According to the report, a countervailing network of organizations was needed to produce objective curriculum materials that would echo Secretary Bennett's description of America as the last best hope on Earth. The correct global education would teach children patriotic love of country and commitment to this nation's leadership responsibility. TWT

• June 18: Alan Berg, Rush Limbaugh's liberal talk show rival machine gunned to death by Robert J. Matthews, leader of a Christian Identity splinter group. MP
• July: Water-treatment fault at Grand Rapids MI raises fluoride to 8ppm for a month. G
• Jul 17: Washington Post exposes Barry Seal. FL (But not his CIA connexion. ININ)
• Jul 26: Snuff film made at the Grove? [LP quoting Decamp Franklin Coverup quoting Paul Bonacci]

  Another huge luminous hemisphere in the Pacific (see Apr 9), no shock, no radar image. C

• Oct: A syndicated newspaper column by Jack Anderson reveals that FEMA had `quietly drafted alarming standby legislation that would, upon the declaration of a national emergency, suspend the Constitution, effectively eliminate private property, abolish free enterprise, and generally clamp Americans in a totalitarian vise.' IR
• Nov 5:

  In assessing the newsworthiness of the US government's urgent claims of a shipment of MIGs to Nicaragua on November 5, 1984, the media do not stop to ponder the bias that is inherent in the priority assigned to government-supplied raw material, or the possibility that the government might be manipulating the news, imposing its own agenda, and deliberately diverting attention from other material. TWT

• Nov 26: Iraq and US resume formal diplomatic relations. [PS citing GWU, TNA]
• Union Carbide gasses Bhopal, killing 14000. SMH
• 1984 Dec: &rad;Fernald's 1050-acre U fuel production complex 32 km northwest of Cincinnati OH temporarily shut down after DoE disclosed that excessive amounts of radioactive materials had been released through ventilating systems. Subsequent reports reveal that in 30 years 230 Mg of radioactive material had leaked into the Greater Miami River valley, 39 Mg of U dust had been released into the atmosphere, 83 Mg had been discharged into surface water, and 5500 Mg of radioactive and other hazardous substances had been released into pits and swamps and thence into groundwater. 337 Mg of UhexaF was completely unaccounted for. In 1988 nearby residents sued and were granted a M$73 settlement by the government. The plant was not permanently shut down until 1989. L
• &rad;At Portland's Trojan an operator listens to a basketball game while a tank of radioactive water overflows in the next building. [S citing Gale et al Final Warning 1988]
• (undated)

  The final report of the Grace Commission, convened under President Ronald Reagan, quietly admitted that none of the funds they [IRS?] collect from federal income taxes goes to pay for any federal government services. The Grace Commission found that those funds were being used to pay for interest on the federal debt, and income transfer payments to beneficiaries of entitlement programs like federal pension plans. SL

• That Orwell's 1984 seems not to have come true is vaguely celebrated—as if he'd actually meant the title as a specific prophesy. (To that end, September Eleventh would've been much closer to the mark.) But Huxley's Brave New World is practically forgotten although reality has come far closer to its model. [DO quoting Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death] (Similarly, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was also half-wrong. There's no need to burn books—which just attracts attention—when most are just rubbish (fiction), and when there are so many books people leave the decision of what to read to others—eg the NY Times, book-of-the-month clubs, and Oprah get-with-the-program Winfrey. Where Bradbury was right, is that we must again network amongst ourselves, rather than with, say, the boob tube.)

1985

• JCS chair Thomas Moorer: I've never seen a President—I don't care who he is—stand up to the Israelis. It just boggles the mind. They always get what they want. If the American people understood what a grip these people have on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens don't have any idea what goes on. WRH · JR
• Monsanto purchases aspartame rights from Searle CP, has the FDA commissioner replaced, and gets aspartame approved (1981)—even though the FDA had asked Justice to prosecute Searle for fraud and deceit in hiding tests that showed 92 adverse effects of aspartame including cancers. ACA (fixme: something's amiss here in the years.)
• 1985: &rad;First major newspaper articles are published about the health troubles of people living downwind of Hanford. TCH
• 1985: It is found that HTLV and VISNA, a lethal sheep virus, are very similar, indicating a close taxonomic and evolutionary relationship. [HNN citing Science 227:173–177]
• WNET runs docco Hungry for profit; loses sponsorship of Gulf+Western which labelled the pgm virulently anti-business if not anti-American. London Economist certain WNET (and other PBSs?) will not repeat such mistakes. TWT
• William R. Greer dies of cancer. He was JFK's driver in Dallas, may have been a shooter. DP · AC · AF
• 1985: W'm Casey masterminds the car-bombing of a Beirut church, killing 80 people, the target not among them. NC [and Frontline IIRC] But of course that wasn't terrorism, Casey isn't a terrorist, the US is not harbouring terrorists, etc.…oh dearie me no. (Casey was Nixon's SEC chair FTW)
• 1985: GWB and bro' JEB allegedly videoed picking up cocaine at a FL airport in a DEA sting set up by Barry Seal. FTW (SSN also refers to FTW, claiming Ruppert got it from the author of Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA, Terry Reed, who worked with Seal. This video was supposed to be Seal's insurance. Sounds more like it's what got him shot to s*t. IV w/Reed)
• Robert Becker The Body Electric

  Some radar can find a fly a kilometer away or track a human at 25 miles, and several researchers have suggested that focused EMR beams of such accuracy could bend the mind much like electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) through wires. We know of ESB's potential for mindcontrol largely through the work of Jos Delgado. One signal provoked a cat to lick its fur, then continue compulsively licking the floor and bars of its cage. A signal designed to stimulate a portion of a monkey's thalamus, a major midbrain center for integrating muscle movements, triggered a complex reaction: The monkey walked to one side of the cage, then the other, then climbed to the rear ceiling, then back down. The animal performed this same activity as many times as it was stimulated with the signal, up to sixty times an hour, but not blindly—the creature still was able to avoid obstacles and threats from the dominant male while carrying out the electrical imperative. Another type of signal has made monkeys turn their heads, or smile, no matter what else they were doing, up to twenty thousand times in two weeks. As Delgado concluded, The animals looked like electronic toys…

  Naturally, since this information was voluntarily released via the Freedom of Information Act, it must be taken with a pillar of salt. The results haven't been made public, so the work may have been inconclusive, and the plans may have been released to convince the Soviets and our own public that American mind-control capabilities are greater than they actually are. On the other hand, the actualities may be so far ahead of this research plan that it was tame enough to release in satisfying FOIA requirements. [S quoting ch15 Maxwell's Silver Hammer]

• 1985: Neil Bush, 30, becomes director of Silverado BS&L Assoc. The average age of thrift directors is 57; ±1% under 35. `The latest estimate for the cost of the bailout' is G$600, 40× the foreign-aid budget. NB
• Mar: Tom Weller Science Made Stupid (Hint to the New York School System: this is not a textbook.)
• Mar: Charles Higham American Swastika: Nazi collaborators in our midst from 1933 to the present day&warn; (This should be a textbook, but I shan't hold my breath.)
• Mar 7: Gonzalez's Volcker- and FOMC-impeachment bills. Lost, presumed dead in c'tee. NLF (I wonder if this is what my father was trying to get me to write into the school paper?)
• Mar 13: Massive solar flare and aurora take out 21½ GW of Québec Hydro. [AS citing The 23rd Cycle: learning to live with a stormy star]
• Apr 19: FBI raids the Arkansas hideout of the Covenant Sword and Arm of the Lord. VV
• Jun 9: &rad;Coolant loss at Oak Harbour OH. F (Davis Besse? NRC)
• Jul: Israelis board Hamdallah sailing from Lebanon to Cyprus, kidnap Na'il Amin Fatayir, imprison him for 18 months for involvement in a banned organisation, release him to return home to Nablus, then deport him for having entered the country illegally—via kidnapping. NI
• July: Enron born of the merger of Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth of Omaha. NYSSCPA
• Jul 5: Oliver North makes a note that M$14 of funding for Iran-Contra weapons came from drugs. FTW
• Jul: GAO concludes the War on Drugs is a fraud. `…no benefits from the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System, directed by George Bush. In fact, the overall effect was to encourage supply…' CTRL
• Aug 1: Dr. M. Adrian Gross, senior FDA toxicologist: `beyond a shadow of a doubt, aspartame causes brain tumors…therefore, by allowing aspartame to be placed on the market, the FDA has violated the Delaney Amendment' prohibiting carcinogenic additives/residues in food. [MPC citing Congressional Record 1985 pg ±1835] (The Aspartame `fact' site's search fails on Gross, as of 2002 Aug 19. Imagine my surprise.)
• Sep 1: Korean Air 007, several hundred km off course and over sensitive Soviet airspace, is shot down. Much hubbub is made about the Evil Empire (compare '88 Jul 3). Rep. Larry McDonald (D-GA), a `severe critic' of `the power elites' contemplating a run for the Presidency, was aboard. FTW · CNN He had recently been given tapes of taps of J. E. Hoover's phone implicating Hoover, Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, LBJ, GHWB, etc in the killing of JFK. [JFKMS citing Stich Defrauding America 1998]

  It was Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC)—another archconservative ideologue who is anti-union, antigovernment, anti-Communist and an opponent of an international treaty on genocide—who arranged the invitation for McDonald to attend the celebration that would commemorate the 30th anniversary of the official US entry into the Korean War. Instead of traveling together, however, Helms and McDonald arrived in Anchorage, Alaska—the first stop of the journey to South Korea—on separate planes. The fact that McDonald was the only person in the 36-member American delegation to fly alone seems strange. After refueling, the Boeing 747 carrying Helms arrived at its destination safely. But McDonald—and his fellow passengers on Flight 007—were not so fortunate…

  One of the many mysteries of Flight 007 is the total lack of conversation between its pilots and US, Korean and Japanese listening posts. This is known as maintaining radio silence. Furthermore, 007 left Kennedy Airport in New York with both a defective radio and a defective navigational system. When the pilot who flew the first segment debarked in Anchorage, he assumed the plane's malfunctioning parts would be repaired. But this didn't happen. MB

  His private intel op Western Goals is being exposed in an LAPD intelligence scandal linked to massive domestic spying and the CIA. SNZ
• Oct 1 (circa): Israelis bomb Tunis, killing 20 locals and 55 Palestinians.

  US journals had little interest, the victims being Arabs and the killers US clients. Secretary Shultz was definitely interested, however. The US had cooperated in the massacre by refusing to warn its ally Tunisia that the bombers were on their way, and Shultz telephoned Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a noted terrorist himself from the early 1940s, to inform him that the US administration `had considerable sympathy for the Israeli action,' the press reported. Shultz drew back from this public approbation when the UN Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an `act of armed aggression' (the US abstaining). Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was welcomed to Washington a few days later as a man of peace, while the press solemnly discussed his consultations with President Reagan on `the evil scourge of terrorism' and what can be done to counter it.

  …The bombing of Tunis…was in retaliation for a terrorist murder of three Israelis in Cyprus by a group which, as Israel conceded, had probable connections to Damascus but none to Tunis, which was selected as a target rather than Damascus because it was defenseless; the Reagan administration selected Libyan cities as a bombing target a few months later in part for the same reason. The bombing of Tunis, with its many civilian casualties, was described by Secretary Shultz as `a legitimate response' to `terrorist attacks,' to general approbation. The terrorist murders in Cyprus were, in turn, justified by their perpetrators as retaliation for the Israeli hijackings over the preceding decade. Had this plea even been heard, it would have been dismissed with scorn. NI

• Oct 4: Israel and US taking roasting at UNSC over Tunis.

  [Ononaiye, for the African Group:] The Israeli air raid on Tunisia vividly demonstrates the impulsive readiness of the Government in Tel Aviv to resort to brutal force in pursuit of its goals, regardless of whether such a measure contradicts all known standards of behaviour for civilized States and is in conflict with the principles of the Charter…

  Since 1948, when the State was established, Israel has unleashed a combination of violence, terror and naked force not only against the Palestinians but also against its Arab neighbours under the pretext that those States provided refuge to individuals and groups opposed to its existence. For several years the systematic annexations of Arab lands and the resettlement of Israelis in those lands have continued unabated in spite of international condemnation of such activities as is evident in several resolutions of the General Assembly and the Security Council…

  We note with regret and disappointment that the Israeli Government has been able to persist in its defiance of world opinion and treat the decisions and resolutions of this Council and the General Assembly with utter disregard because of the unlimited political, diplomatic, economic and military support it receives from a member of this Council. Especially worthy of mention is the continuous supply of weapons of aggression that a founding Member of our Organization and a permanent member of this Council makes available to Israel on a scale far in excess of its security needs. The African Group is appalled at the open support given to the Israelis by President Reagan, support which, according to the Christian Science Monitor of 3 October 1985, surprised and pleased the Israelis. Through this open support the US Government has demonstrated unmitigated though predictable prejudice in support of Israel's unjustified behaviour without compassion and feelings for the innocent lives lost in the course of the air attack…

  [Ott, for GDR:] It was with indignation and repugnance that the German Democratic Republic has received the news of the criminal raid by the Israeli air force on the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Tunis. The people and the Government of the German Democratic Republic most strongly condemn this serious act of aggression by Israel, directed not only against the Palestinian people but also against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of an Arab State, the Republic of Tunisia.

  My delegation would like to express its condolences and sympathy to the Government of Tunisia and to the Palestine Liberation Organization and, through them, to the families of the Tunisian and Palestinian victims who were killed in the criminal Israeli raid…

  There can be no doubt as to who bears the responsibility for the tense situation in the Middle East and for the denial to the Palestinian people of its legitimate rights. It is the ruling Israeli circles and their imperialist backers who oppose a comprehensive, just and durable solution to the question of the Middle East and Palestine.

  The acts of aggression and State terrorism committed by these forces against sovereign Member States of the UN and against the Palestinian people enjoy the sympathy and unqualified support of the main imperialist Power. Is it not characteristic that this criminal Israeli raid against Tunis—denounced immediately all over the world—should have found approval only in Washington?…

  [Chamorro Moro for Nicaragua:] The facts we are examining today make clear, once again, who the terrorists are and who is defending them, who the true members of that Country Club of Terrorism—the Washington/Tel Aviv/Pretoria terrorist axis—are…

  [Zarif for Afghanistan:] It is more than clear, however, that Israel's blatant defiance of UN resolutions could not have resisted the pressure of world public opinion had it not been for the unlimited political, economic and military support rendered to it by US imperialism.

  Because it is pouring billions of dollars' worth of sophisticated weapons into the Israeli war machine, it is in fact the US itself that has been engaged in a protracted war against the Palestinian and other Arab nations. It is precisely such unconditional assistance by the US that has enabled Israel to invade first one Arab country and then another, to continue its illegal hold on the Palestinian and Arab territories it has occupied since 1967, and to escalate its repressive actions in the occupied territories against defenceless populations.

  The US once again demonstrated its culpability in the Israeli actions by making an effort—albeit futile—to legitimize the recent Israeli aggression. It is indeed the support for Israel by the US that constitutes the stumbling block on the way to the achievement of a just, comprehensive and lasting solution to the Middle East problem. Not only has Israel's intransigence rendered fruitless the efforts by the international community to bring peace to that war-torn region of the world, but Israel has put up additional barriers which have made the achievement of such a peace much more complicated…

  [Terzi for PLO:] I should now like to recall the role of the Government of the US in all of this. In June 1982 in this Chamber, the representative of the US—perhaps it was a Freudian slip, I do not know—took a negative attitude towards a draft resolution and vetoed it. Why did he do that? That draft resolution called for the cessation of fighting in Beirut, for the deployment of some observers there to see that the cease-fire would hold, and the representative of the Government of the US vetoed it. Why? He made it very clear. He said it was because it did not include the element of the elimination of Palestinian armed elements. That meant the elimination of human beings, and that is a exactly the aim of the Israelis. They are supported by the US not only through the supply of arms and armaments and warplanes, as Mr. Kaddeumi mentioned—those were American planes and they were donated to Israel. Israel did not buy them. The bombs were donated by the US to Israel in order to strike the area. That is the joint aim of the American Administration and Israel, namely, to eliminate the Palestinian armed elements.

  Now in the US there is a little place called Woodridge. The press reported that for six weeks a Jewish Defence League paramilitary training camp was in operation in that area. I sometimes wonder whether the US has ever heard about that place. The information appeared in the press. In August 1981 they trained for six weeks, and no one complained. They had gone unnoticed in that Woodridge camp, despite frequent target practice with high-powered weapons. And let me go further. In that report, a certain Jolovitz said that the JDL owned the camp, which is the former Pleasure Hill House resort. It became a centre to train those criminals. He said it also owned another 62-acre property nearby, but would not reveal its location. It is there, he said, that moonlighting members of the US Army's Special Forces and an Israeli commando instruct the youths in military tactics.

  Now, this is the collusion and training of those criminals who go to my home town, deprive my people of the right to live in peace and then follow them all the way—more than 2000 miles away—and kill them, using American-supplied planes and American-supplied bombs…

  We have information that during the seven hours which the operation required the US Sixth Fleet had full knowledge of and supplied radar co-ordination. In addition the US Sixth Fleet jammed the Egyptian radars to prevent monitoring of the operation.

  We have information that the feeder planes took off from some US bases in the Mediterranean.

  We have information that the photos of the location and its exact details were handed over from US satellites to Israel…

  The collusion between the US and Israel is therefore very clear… UN

• Oct 7–8: Just as US and Israel need distraction and sympathy, extremists hijack Achille Lauro and demand release of 50 of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. They order the ship to Syria; Syria bars them; they kill Leon Klinghoffer and dump him overboard to show they're serious; Syria still balks; before they can kill again PLF HQ forbids them to; Egypt (unaware of the murder) gives them an escape in exchange for the hostages. [FAS citing Naval Aviation News 1997 Jan–Feb]

  The outrage over hijacking does not extend to Israeli hijackings that have been carried out in international waters for many years, including civilian ferries travelling from Cyprus to Lebanon, with large numbers of people kidnapped [see July], over 100 kept in Israeli prisons without trial, and many killed, some by Israeli gunners while they tried to stay afloat after their ship was sunk, according to survivors interviewed in prison. NI

  Mohammed Abbas, leader of the hijackers, apologises for it all in '96 Apr. The US rejects his apology. CNN (Which is no surprise; the surprise is that the US generally accepts Israeli apologies, the few times they even offer one for the few times the US even notices their crimes.) There is mention the PLO settles with the Klinghoffers circa 1997 Aug 11 SO but CNN has removed the source article. (I'd like to know exactly what the settlement was; I've yet to hear of Israel ever making reparations.)
• Oct: Soviets begin to claim US engineered HIV. Prof. Jacob Segal of Humbolt University, East Berlin, argues that the AIDS virus is `the product of an abortive experiment carried out at a laboratory to develop biological warfare means.' State Dep't runs a denial campaign, flawed by denials of facts in previously-released gov't docs. APFN
• 1985 Nov 21: Israeli `super spy who did horrendous, deadly damage to the US' Jonathan Pollard arrested. CL [this is a note to myself to look at this some more sometime] FR · EZ
• 1985 Nov: &rad; Serious problem at San Onofre. NRC
• Dec 12: 258 US marines killed in takeoff from Gander Newfoundland. Mysterious power loss and claims of a glow around the craft make some think of a Soviet EMG weapon demo. C
• 1985 Dec 26: &rad; Loose wire at Rancho Seco leaves reactor out of control. Eventually a hard shutdown is accomplished—cold water dumped into the hot vessel, another of several done to this reactor over the years. Such thermal stress can severely weaken the or destroy the vessel. The accident is covered up until Chernobyl. RB Overcooling incident NRC
• 1985: Annual US Dental costs have more than doubled since '79, from G$13.6 to G$27.1, far faster than inflation can explain. F
• The Reagan admin authorises at least 40 shipments of weapons-specific biological agents to Iraq from the American Type Culture Collection, while fighting `tooth and nail' legislation prohibiting such shenanigans. It became clear they knew `full well Iraq was going to develop biological weapons and use them against Iran, and yet they did it anyway.' FB
• Furthermore, the Reagan administration supplied strategists, tacticians, analysts to Iraq even while condemning Iraq in the media for using chemical weapons. NYT (Ignore the article's claim Iraq gassed the Kurds, the evidence points to Iran. perhaps, perhaps not)

1986

• Olaf Palme assassinated. He had recently said no to Oliver North's scheme of falsifying end-user certificates (for the Iran-Contra weapons?) BK

• Groups like Schlafly's have not been able to gain control of many schools, but they have exerted enough influence to intimidate teachers and school officials. One measure of their clout was the resurgence of censorship of school materials following the 1980 presidential election. Hundreds of school districts excluded books from school libraries or went through protracted, bitter fights over censorship demands. According to the American Library Association, 52 books were banned in various schools across the US during 1986 alone. A sample of titles included The Diary of Anne Frank (sexually offensive passages), Cujo, by Stephen King (profanity and strong sexual content), The Color Purple, by Alice Walker (troubling ideas about race relations), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou (preaches bitterness and hatred against whites), The Living Bible, by William C. Bower (perverted commentary on the King James Version), To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (undermining of race relations). TWT

• &rad;NRC revokes the license of a NJ Radiation Technology (RTI) plant for repeated worker-safety violations. RTI was cited 32 times for various violations, including putting radioactive waste in the regular trash. The most serious violation was bypassing a safety device to prevent entry to the irradiation chamber during operation, resulting in a worker receiving a near-lethal dose. L
• The Hitcher gets reviews like massacre about every 15 minutes and gizzard-slitting depravity. It is one of a couple dozen R-rated slasher movies financed by Silver Screen Management, on the board of which is one GWB. He will later claim to have been tough on Hollywood violence. AA · TS SSM seems to be connected to Disney's expansion into R films, too. A
• 1986: &rad;DoE makes public 19000 pages of Hanford historical documents, including reports on radioactive releases. The federal CDCs begin to consider studying the radiological doses and thyroid disease of people living near Hanford. TCH
• 1986: Wilson & Lauritsen Death Rush: poppers & AIDS

  …one of the very first works to use Koch's postulates to argue against the AIDS virus theory. Koch's postulates are the standard rules in microbiology used to determine whether a particular microbe causes a particular disease. The postulates are: 1) The microorganism must be found in all cases of the disease. 2) It must be isolated from the host and grown in pure culture. 3) It must reproduce the original disease when introduced into a susceptible host. 4) It must be found in the experimental host so infected, and the growth of symptoms in the newly infected host must correlate to growth in the numbers of the microbe present in the system. HIV does not meet Koch's postulates as the cause of AIDS because at least 4621 documented cases exist of AIDS with no trace of HIV exposure. TMH

  (These sound like rules for a bacterial pathogen; on the other hand #1 feels pretty elemental to making a causative link, and HIV seems to fail it.)

• The Bangui definition…has proven useful, McCormick added, in determining the extent of the AIDS pandemic in Africa, especially in areas where no testing is available. Here are the major components of the definition: prolonged fevers (for a month or more), weight loss of 10% or greater, and prolonged diarrhea. No HIV test, of course. What this meant was that many traditional African diseases, pandemic in poverty-stricken areas with tropical climate, open latrines and contaminated drinking water, could now be called something else with no fear of contradiction…

  The obvious problem was pointed out by Charles Gilks in the British Medical Journal in 1991. Persistent diarrhea with weight loss can be associated with ordinary enteric parasites and bacteria, as well as with opportunistic infection, he wrote. In countries where the incidence of tuberculosis is high, as it is in Africa, substantial numbers of people reported as having AIDS may in fact not have AIDS…

  [So] CDC added TB to its list of AIDS-defining diseases in 1993… AAW

• 1986: According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (83:4007–4011), HIV and VISNA are highly similar and share all structural elements, except for a small segment which is nearly identical to HTLV. This leads to speculation that HTLV and VISNA may have been linked to produce a new retrovirus to which no natural immunity exists. HNN

  Prof. Jakob Segal, the author of the theory, says that structural analysis using genome mapping proves that HIV is more similar to Visna than to any other retrovirus. The portion (about 3%) of the HIV genome which does not correspond structurally to Visna corresponds exactly to part of the HTLV-I genome. This similarity, says Segal, cannot be explained by a natural process of evolution and mutation. It can only have resulted from an artificial combination of the two viruses. He notes that the symptoms of AIDS are consistent with the complementary effects of two different viruses. AIDS patients who do not die of the consequences of immune deficiency show the same damage to the brain, lungs, intestines, and kidneys that occurs in sheep affected with Visna.

  Combining Visna with HTLV-I would allow the virus to enter not only the macrophages of the inner organs but also the T4 lymphocytes and thus cause immune deficiency, which is exactly what AIDS does. As further evidence that HIV is a construct of Visna and HTLV-I, Segal cites studies which show that the reverse transcription process in HIV has two discrete points of peak activity which correspond, respectively, to those of Visna and HTLV-I. AIDS is thus, according to Segal, essentially a variety of Visna. This has important implications for research, since a cure or vaccine might be found sooner by studying Visna in sheep than by concentrating, as at present, on monkeys. The theory of the African origin of AIDS, that it developed in African monkeys and was transferred to man, has been abandoned by most researchers. All of the known varieties of SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) are structurally so dissimilar to HIV (much less similar than HIV and Visna) that a common origin is out of the question.

  Furthermore, even if such a development by natural mutation were possible, it would not explain the sudden outbreak of AIDS in the early 1980s, since monkeys and men have been living together in Africa since the beginning of human history. The `Africa Legend,' as it is called in a 1988 West German (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) television documentary, is further debunked by the epidemiological history of AIDS. There is no solid evidence of AIDS in Africa before 1983. The earliest documented cases of AIDS date from 1979 in New York. In addition to the WDR documentary and occasional mention in magazines like Stern and Spiegel, Segal's work has been published in West Germany (AIDS-Erreger aus dem Gen-Labor? [AIDS-Virus from the Gene Laboratory?], Kuno Kruse, ed., Berlin: Simon & Leutner, 1987) and India (with Lilli Segal, The Origin of AIDS, Trichur, India: Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad, 1989). He has also been conducting lecture tours in West Germany. Scientific journals, Segal says, have refused to publish or discuss his theory. This is difficult to understand.

  If he is wrong, he should certainly be refuted. The cornerstone of the theory is that HIV is a combination of Visna and HTLV-I. Segal claims that any trained laboratory technician could produce AIDS from these components, today, in less than two weeks. If this is true, it should be demonstrable by experiment. The next question is, if it is possible to produce HIV from Visna and HTLV-I now, was it also possible in 1977, when Segal claims the AIDS virus was created? He says it was, by use of the less precise `shotgun' method of gene manipulation available then, though it would have taken longer—about six months. If this is true, it should also be demonstrable. The final question would be: Was it produced in a laboratory? Segal believes he has shown that it was, but he goes further than that. He also believes he knows who produced it and why. Segal quotes from a document presented by a Pentagon official named Donald MacArthur on June 9, 1969, to a Congressional committee, in which $10 million is requested to develop, over the next 5 to 10 years, a new, contagious microörganism which would destroy the human immune system.

  Whether such research is categorized as `offensive' or `defensive' is immaterial: in order to defend oneself against apossible new virus, so the reasoning goes, one must first develop the virus. Since the Visna virus was already well known, Segal continues, the problem was to find a human retrovirus that would enable it to infect humans. Scrutiny of the technical literature, Segal says, reveals that Dr. Robert Gallo isolated such a virus, HTLV-I, by 1975, though it was not given this name until later. 1975 was also the year the virus section of Ft. Detrick (the US Army's center for biological warfare research in Frederick MD) was renamed the Frederick Cancer Research Facilities and placed under the supervision of the National Cancer Institute, Gallo's employer. It was there, in the P4 (high-security) laboratory at Ft. Detrick, according to Segal, where the AIDS virus was actually created, between the fall of 1977 and spring of 1978. Six months is precisely the time it would have taken, using the techniques available then, to create the AIDS virus from Visna and HTLV-I. Segal claims that the new virus was then tested on convicts who volunteered for the experiment in return for their release from prison.

  Failing to show any early symptoms of disease, the prisoners were released after six months. Some were homosexual, and went to New York, where the disease was first attested in 1979. The researchers had not counted on creating a disease with such a long incubation period. (One year is relatively short for AIDS, but would not be unusual if the infection was induced by high-dosage injections.) If the researchers had kept their human guinea pigs under observation for a longer time, they would have detected the disease and been able to contain it. In other words, Segal claims that AIDS is the result of a germ warfare research experiment gone awry. UPA

• 1986: A report to Congress reveals that the US Government's current generation of biological agents includes: modified viruses, naturally occurring toxins, and agents that are altered through genetic engineering to change immunological character and prevent treatment by all existing vaccines. HNN
• 1986: &rad;A truck carrying low-level radioactive material swerves to avoid a farm vehicle and goes off Snake River bridge on ID Rt 84, spilling its cargo. Officials report the release of radioactivity. L
• 1986 Jan 6: &rad;15-ton cylinder of UhexaF ruptures at a Kerr-McGee Gore OK nuclear-fuels facility, killing 1, injuring 130, and spewing radiation into the surrounding community. EN Gov't closes plant for more than a year and fines Kerr-McGee k$310, citing poorly trained workers, poorly maintained equipment, and a disregard for safety and the environment. L
• Jan 11 (written, but needs to move):

  In time we allowed Cuba the appearance of freedom while holding on to Puerto Rico. Then President W'm McKinley, after an in-depth talk with God, decided we should also keep the Philippines, in order, he said, to Christianise them. When reminded that the Filipinos were Roman Catholics, the president said, Exactly. We must Christianise them. Although Philippine nationalists had been our allies against Spain, we promptly betrayed them and their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo. As a result it took us several years to conquer the Philippines, and tens—some say hundreds—of thousands of Filipinos died that our empire might grow…

  Not everyone liked the new empire. After Manila, Mark Twain thought that the stars and bars of the American flag should be replaced by a skull and crossbones. He also said, We cannot maintain an empire in the Orient and maintain a republic in America. He was right, of course. But as he was only a writer who said funny things, he was ignored.

  The compulsively vigourous [Theodore] Roosevelt defended our war against the Philippine population, and he attack the likes of Twain. Every argument that can be made for the Filipinos could be made for the Apaches, he explained, with his lovely gift for analogy. And every word that can be said for Aguinaldo could be said for Sitting Bull…

  Despite the criticism of the few…the US was a world empire. And…for his pious meddling in the Russo-Japanese conflict our greatest apostle of war was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. One must never underestimate Scandinavian wit. [Vidal United States p1012]

  (See awards for Kissinger and Carter, and nominations for W. And why is a native of the Philippines, with a haitch n 3 pees, a Filipino, with one pee and an eph?)
• Jan 28: Challenger explodes 73 s into its flight. (Her next flight would've had 10 kg Pu aboard. GNN) Thought by some to be another Soviet weapon demo, partly because they withdrew their spy ships beforehand to leave this the first unwatched launch. C But bureaucracy is pegged as the official root cause, and the world is eventually subjected to the ISO9000 series of `quality' protocols (adaptations of British Standards (BSs—no joke) created to stop bombs going off during construction—but which had no concern about whether the bombs actually worked at all [, excerpting Seddon The Case Against ISO9000]) And in just over 17 a, NASA will prove that more paperwork is no cure for bureaucracy and budget cuts. (I was at BNR/Nortel during their spinup of ISO9000. None of us had any clue how it was actually going to improve the product.)
• 1986 Feb: Barry Seal, longtime CIA agent and biggest drug smuggler in American history, dies in a Baton Rouge hail of bullets with GH?WB's phone # in his wallet. Oliver North directed the shooters, and Seal's plane will become a favourite of GWB's. FTW · Barry & the Boys (Amazon&warn;) Frontline has a somewhat different version, that Seal was killed by the Ochoas just before the DEA could make a breakthrough. Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA is a little different again; Oliver North was Seal's boss, and Seal was killed because he'd kept proof of the Bush sons' capture in drug running—proof that he though was his insurance or neutralising material. HC
• Sutton, Best Enemy Money can Buy
• 1986 Apr 4/5: Berlin disco La Belle bombed, killing 3.
• 1986 Apr 14/15: US aircraft attack five `terrorist' locations, in Tripoli and Benghazi, killing at least 30 civilians including Qaddafi's young daughter. `The Reagan troika took a poll before, and found that 66% of Americans approved of killing babies.' Pretext is the disco bombing 10 days ago, flimsily attributed to a Libyan-trained group but actually linked to CIA and Mossad. AFP [DB citing P] [WSWS citing ZDF 1986 Aug 25]

  …This was a brilliantly staged media event, the first bombing in history scheduled for prime-time TV, for the precise moment when the networks open their national news programs. This convenient arrangement, which the media pretended not to comprehend, allowed anchor men to switch at once to Tripoli so that their viewers could watch the exciting events live. The next act of the superbly crafted TV drama was a series of news conferences and White House statements explaining that this was `self-defense against future attack' and a measured reaction to a disco bombing…

  Media suppression began from the first moment, when the journalists at the televised press conference loyally averted their eyes from evidence readily at hand that raised very serious doubts about the claims they were hearing, such as the report from Berlin, half an hour before the US attack on Libyan cities, that US and West German officials had no evidence of Libyan involvement in the disco bombing in Berlin, only `suspicions,' contrary to administration claims of certain knowledge ten days earlier; at the TV press conference, none of the intrepid members of the White House press corps asked how it could be that Washington had certain knowledge ten days earlier of what remained unknown to US and West German intelligence. Within weeks, it was published prominently in Germany—and in obscure publications here—that the West German police intelligence team investigating the bombing had no knowledge, and had never had any knowledge, of any `Libyan connection.'…Further evidence about US government lies was published abroad but silenced here apart from marginal publications. Thus, the dramatic stories of high administration officials about the alert called in West Berlin after the alleged Libyan `intercepts,' which failed by only fifteen minutes to save the victims at the bombed disco, were revealed to have been complete fabrication; no alert had been called, West Berlin police informed the BBC. It was finally conceded quietly that the charges of Libyan involvement had little if any substance, though they continue to be presented as fact… NI

  (As in a Schlesinger essay on CBC early in 2003 Feb.)
• Apr 16:

  `Terrorism is a war against ordinary citizens'; `the terrorists—and the other states that aid and abet them—serve as grim reminders that democracy is fragile and needs to be guarded with vigilance.' So George Shultz thundered at the very moment of the US terrorist attack against Libya. `Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table,' he added, also condemning those who advocate `utopian, legalistic means like outside mediation, the UN, and the World Court, while ignoring the power element of the equation.' The sentiments are not without precedent in modern history. NI

• 1986 Apr 26: &rad;`Fires and explosions result from an unauthorized experiment at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Kiev (Ukraine) USSR, left at least 31 people dead in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and spread over 100 MCi into the northern hemisphere (incl. at least 7 MCi I-131). (Later study refined the guess up to around 4.5 GCi were released. WISE Other estimates were 1–2 EBq, excluding noble gasses. NEA) An estimated 135000 people were evacuated from areas around Chernobyl, some of which were rendered uninhabitable for years. As a result of the radiation released into the atmosphere, tens of thousands of excess cancer deaths (as well as increased rates of birth defects) were expected in succeeding decades.' [GSP quoting IEER] EN
• 1986 May: &rad;Fire at the Browns Ferry reactor in AL destroys a cooling tower. EN
• Jul: Cyrus Hashemi dies suddenly of leukemia. He was an Iranian banker who worked with John Shaheen and, according to brother Jamshid Hashemi, arranged the October Surprise meeting. BK
• 1986 Jul 7: GWB is Born Again by Pat Robertson.
• Jul 10:

  Large temporal reductions in tooth decay, which cannot be attributed to fluoridation, have been observed in both unfluoridated and fluoridated areas of at least eight developed countries over the past thirty years. It is now time for a scientific re-examination of the alleged enormous benefits of fluoridation. [F quoting Diesendorf Mystery of Declining Tooth Decay Nature]

• 1986 Aug: Tom Clancy publishes his 2nd book, Red Storm Rising&warn;, in which a bankrupt USSR justifies an oil-grab invasion by faking up a terror attack on a prominent Kremlin building (ch. 10 of 43).
• 1986 Oct: Mossad baits Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu to Rome, whence he is kidnapped to Israel, charged with espionage and treason, and given 18 years' prison—for blowing the whistle on Israel's nuclear arsenal. G
• Oct 5: Nicaragua downs Eugene Hasenfus and his Iran-Contra supply plane; the plot begins to unravel. [PS citing FAS, CN]
• Oct 11: Reykjavik Reagan–Gorbachev summit. Reagan is apparently quite upset when he leaves. Take your pick: either the Soviets explain the 100%-effective electrogravitic Tesla-Maxwell SDI machinery they have C or they tell him what they really know about AIDS

  I wouldn't be surprised if he heard the truth about AIDS at that conference for the first time. In any case, Segal was told subsequently by East German and Soviet authorities that he could continue to publish and speak on the subject as long as he did not explicitly associate himself with the East German or Soviet governments. UPA

  (What puzzles me most about Beardon's spin, tho, is, if the Soviets really had all that power, wherefor did they seem to go totally to pieces c1990? If it's a bluff, it's a d@mn thorough one.)
• Oct 22:

  In Reykjavik, when pointing out the differences between our two systems, the President told me, and I quote: We recognise freedom of the press and the right to hear any point of view. But how do things stand in reality?

  Here is the latest fact.

  It has been brought to my attention that a public organisation of ours, the Novosti Press Agency, has published in English the text of my press conference in Reykjavik and of my speech on Soviet television and sent them out to may countries, including the US.

  Well, the fact is that the pamphlets with these texts have been detained at the US customshouse for several days now. They are being prevented from reaching the American reader. There's the right to hear any point of view for you!

  Or take, for example, the cinema. As I told the President when we were discussing humanitarian affairs, a great number of American films are shown on the Soviet screen. They give Soviet people an opportunity to become acquainted with both Americans' way of life and their way of thinking.

  In free America, on the other hand, Soviet films are practically not shown. The President avoided making any reply and, as usual in such cases, fell back on free enterprise which lets anyone do whatever he wants.

  I also told him about the publication of American books in this country as compared to that of our books in the US: the ratio is approximately 20:1.

  I put the question of radio information before the President as well. I said that in this field, too, we are on an unequal footing. You have surrounded the SU with a network of radio transmitters and broadcast round the clock everything you like in many languages of the SU from the territories of other countries. America, availing itself of the fact that we are not its close neighbour, has isolated itself from our radio information by using the medium-wave band—receivers in America are only of that kind. The President had nothing to say to that either.

  Then I suggested to him that we take the following approach: we stop jamming the Voice of America broadcasts and you give us an opportunity to conduct radio broadcasts directed at the US on your territory or somewhere nearby so that the broadcasts might reach the population of your country. The President promised to think about it.

  It appears that the US is becoming an increasingly closed society. People there are being isolated from objective information in a cunning and effective way. This is a dangerous process. [Gorbachev Once More on Reykjavik p14-15 Novosti Press Agency Publishing House Горбачёв Еще раэ о Рейкьявике]

1987

• Just before his death, James Jesus Angleton, the legendary chief of counterintelligence at the CIA, was a bitter man. He felt betrayed by the people he had worked for all his life. In the end, he had come to realize that they were never really interested in American ideals of freedom and democracy. They really only wanted absolute power.

  Angleton told author Joseph Trento that the reason he had gotten the counterintelligence job in the first place was by agreeing not to submit sixty of Allen Dulles' closest friends to a polygraph test concerning their business deals with the Nazis. In his end-of-life despair, Angleton assumed that he would see all his old companions again in hell. OLJ

• &rad;Pu found in sediments hundreds of feet downriver ID National Engineering Laboratory, an experimental reactor testing station and nuclear waste storage site. [L citing Idaho Falls Post Register] (Is IDNEL the place that had the explosion in '61?)
• Perot fired from looking for POWs because he did the job too well, finding things he was never meant to.

  Reagan appointed Reform Party founder and Texas billionaire Ross Perot to the President's Advisory Council on Foreign Intelligence. Reagan made Perot a special presidential investigator, looking into America's POW and MIAs from the Vietnam `War'.

  Ross took the job to heart and spent considerable time and money in pursuit of the quest. He was given special clearance and access. He asked questions and interviewed everyone he could find.

  Relations between Bush and Perot had gone downhill ever since the Vice-President had asked Ross Perot how his POW/MIA investigations were going.

  `Well, George, I go in looking for prisoners,' said Perot, `but I spend all my time discovering the government has been moving drugs around the world and is involved in illegal arms deals…I can't get at the prisoners because of the corruption among our own people.'

  This ended Perot's official access to the highly classified files as a one-man presidential investigator. `I have been instructed to cease and desist,' he had informed the families of missing men early in 1987. [CTRL citing Jensen-Stevenson Kiss The Boys Goodbye]

• 1987: Broadcasting Fairness Doctrine requiring some balance in reporting, abolished by FCC. [WoI p 46]
• 1987: Release of Wall Street. Michael Douglas uses his Loomis classmate Henry Kravis as inspiration for his totally amoral corporate-raider character Gordon Gekko. GBUB Or was it Eaglebrook? CPS
• 1987: DoE reports PCBs, heavy metals, and radioactive substances were all present in the groundwater beneath Oak Ridge's Y-12. Y-12 and the nearby K-25 and X-10 were found to have contaminated the atmosphere, soil, and streams in the area. L
• 1987: &rad;Eurotom's SuperPhoenix breeder in France spills 20 t of Na and is permanently shut down. The G$10 reactor operated for 278 days in 11 years. EN · S
• 1987: DoE agrees to conduct a dose-reconstruction study; Hanford's Reactor N is shut down. TCH
• 1987: Dr. Peter Duesberg suggests AIDS is not caused by a virus at all. This receives a storm of controversy whereas Segal's assertions went essentially unnoticed. UPA Some African countries even base their health policy of Duesberg's idea and refuse to purchase HIV medicines, such as those that block transfer from mother to fetus.
• 1987: Department of Defense admits that, despite a treaty banning research and development of biological agents, it continues to operate research facilities at 127 sites and universities around the nation. HNN
• 1987: To this point of the 20th century, some 34 000 000 soldiers and 169 000 000 civilians have died in various wars. In other words only about a fifth of war casualties have been `combatants.' GF
• 1987: Carlyle Group founded. FT
• Mar 5: Gonzalez' Reagan-impeachment bill. Lost, presumed dead in c'tee. NLF
• Mar: Husband of FBI operative Darlene Novinger murdered shortly after she goes public about Bush-Clinton drug ops. BK
• 1987 Apr: &rad;Clinton goes online at a cost of G$4, making its product some of the most expensive electricity in the midwest.
• 1987 May: Iraq hits USS Stark killing 37. Hussein apologises. BI (This speaks volumes about how favourably the US views Saddam at this time. The overt Vietnam war was fought on much less. I can think of only one comparable event and reaction: Israel's attack on Liberty.) M
• Gary Hart taunts the media with a put a tail on me, they do, and catch him on the Monkey Business with Donna Rice on his lap. Was he set up? *shrug* But he had to be destroyed; his behaviour on the Church C'tee proved he could not be put in a position to wreck The Machine, by, say, getting a real JFK investigation going. If he hadn't been taken out by this, another way would have been found. I think, after ±15 years, I finally understand that Bloom County cover.
• `5/11/87': Two WHO officials connect the AIDS outbreak in Africa to the 1977 vaccination program. [JR citing London Times]
• Aug 23: Kevin Ives and Don Henry found dead, supposedly of sleeping on railway track. Later it's determined that Kevin died from a crushed skull prior to being placed on the tracks, and Don had been stabbed in the back. They may have stumbled upon part of the Mena drug operation. [DK quoting WorldNetDaily?]
• Aug 27: GHWB: I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God. AMPP
• Oct 30: Texas City's Marathon refinery leaks HF, 700 need urgent medical treatment. Fred Miller of EPI: `The release was from the vapour space of a storage tank. If the same release had been of HF liquid thousands would likely have died in the ensuing gas cloud. It would have been our Bhopal.' [F quoting Smith The Secret War and the Fluoride Conspiracy]
• Dec:

  While Reagan was being extolled (in the US) for leading the world towards peace at the Washington summit, where the INF treaty was signed, the UN General Assembly, speaking for `the community of nations,' voted a series of disarmament resolutions. It voted 154 to 1, with no abstentions, opposing the buildup of weapons in outer space (Reagan's Star Wars) and 135 to 1 against developing new weapons of mass destruction. The Assembly voted 143 to 2 for a comprehensive test ban, and 137 to 3 for a halt to all nuclear test explosions. The US voted against each resolution, joined twice by France and once by Britain. None of this was reported in the Free Press, the `community of nations' being irrelevant when it fails to perceive the Truth.

  The US alone boycotted a UN disarmament conference in New York in 1987 to consider how reduction of armaments might release funds for economic development, particularly in the Third World. Shortly before, the US was alone at the General Assembly in opposing a South Atlantic `zone of peace' (voted 124–1). By that time, Gorbachev's proposal that the US join the unilateral test ban (largely suppressed in the US), his call for steps towards dismantling the pacts, removal of US and Soviet fleets from the Mediterranean, outlawing sea-launched cruise missiles, and other annoying actions had become an acute embarrassment, so much so that George Shultz was compelled to call upon him to `end public diplomacy,' drawing sober approval from media pundits. The White House complained that Gorbachev was behaving like a `drugstore cowboy' with his scattershot proposals, depressingly popular. On numerous other issues (among them: observance of international law, terrorism, South Africa, a Middle East political settlement) the US has been alone or in a small minority, and it is far in the lead in recent years in Security Council vetoes. The deviant behavior of the world community has elicited some anxious commentary in the media, which are naturally concerned over the failure of the community of nations to comprehend truths that are simple and uncontroversial, as is demonstrated, conclusively, by the fact that they are put forth by US power. This thoughtful concern over the deficiencies of the world community coexists, somewhat uneasily perhaps, with our earnest efforts to uplift and civilize the Evil Empire and bring it into the community of nations. DD

• Critical Mass Energy Project reports 2810 accidents in US commercial nuclear power plants in 1987, down slightly from the 2836 accidents in 1986. L

1988

• 6 min to midnight. BAS
• Herman & Chomsky Manufacturing Consent (excerpt) (The title is probably adapted from a phrase of Lippman's IIRC, presumably with manufacturing substituted as the next stage after engineering.)
• 1988: Mobil refinery at Torrance CA leaks HF, causing 41-hr fire and M$s damage. [F quoting Smith The Secret War and the Fluoride Conspiracy]
• 1988 Mar: Sun refinery leaks HF; prompt evacuation of Tulsa OK limits casualties to 36. [F quoting Smith The Secret War and the Fluoride Conspiracy]
• 1988: GWB somehow defuses rumours of his father's sexual indiscretions merely by telling Newsweek `the answer to the Big A question is N.O.' NB
• 1988 NRC lists 30 `significant unreported incidents' at Savannah River plant over as many years. As at Hanford, groundwater contamination resulted from pushing production past safe limits. L
• 1988: A panel of scientists is appointed to oversee the dose-reconstruction project. Congress provides money for the thyroid study. TCH
• 1988: Z. Brzezinski cochairs Bush National Security Advisory Task Force. FTW
• 1988: Netanyahu becomes Deputy Foreign Minister, and member of Knesset. L
• 1988: Kevin Ingram leaves Lehman Brothers for Goldman Sachs. FTW
• 1988 March: Iraqi Kurds get gassed; US and UK rejoice NC, Hussein gets the credit although the evidence favours Iran. JR [WRH quoting PC quoting Iraqi Power and US Security in the Middle East&warn;] (However, Chomsky does not find Pelletiere et al `convincing, to put it mildly'—I asked him, curious about why he kept saying Saddam did it; if not this instance, then others, `the al-Anfal slaughters, which were much worse,' in particular.) A former Iraqi with a brother a General in the Iraqi army points out that (like other regimes that need not be named) the Baäth prime their members and the media with good stories before carrying out nasties. In this instance they were totally blindsided—indicating they either did not consider it a nasty, or did not do it. Further, there are lots of Kurds unhappy with Saddam who have been trying to get US help, and would use whatever leverage they could. And the State Dep't refuses to share its `data' even with NATO. SSI [NYRB The authors' note is followed by another with four `proofs.' I'll point out that
  1. the State Dep't was using `US intelligence agencies' (they have at least a dozen SW²3), which have an established history of shady working such as supplying Saddam chemweap targeting info against Iran. (but there's a mention of sharing with the British... on the other hand again, the UK has its own history of gassing Kurds and aggression on Iraq. They may be underskeptical of US `evidence.' Who else, if anyone, has seen it and found it `compelling?')
  2. The only thing here that ties in Iraq is `a similar pattern of Iraqi attack.' What that pattern is, and how it distinguishes Iraq, is absent. And note the participation of the State Dep't.
  3. Again, what is mentioned indicates an attack but not who did it. And I question the political neutrality of PHR, given that the last time I checked their website (2002 March) it contained not a single peep about the US' favourite covert nuclear weapon, depleted uranium; also, I now notice (2002 April) there seem to be only three PHRs: UK, US, and Israel, countries with `well aligned' policies against Iraq.
  4. Gas-masked Iraqi troops burning bodies in a mountain pass is a long way from proof those troops gassed the people that became bodies. Why the masks? Maybe they were worried about the smoke bearing pathogens or gas and byproducts, or of another gas attack from Iran… Wanniski claims `the Iraq Defence Minist[ry] insisted…that it was neither logical nor feasible to use gas against small groups of Kurds in areas through which government forces had to pass.' WND (Burning biochem victims becomes the policy the Pentagon would adopt for GW2.)
  ] (Saïd Aburish says there is proof Hussein did it but does he provide it? And even if Hussein did do it…we always refer to it as `gassing his own people.' But what does that mean? Did North Americans look on the natives within `their' new colonies as their own people, or as pests to eliminate? Did the West ever look on the Kurds as `their' own people when the West held that area and Churchill was bombing and gassing them? As I understand it, Kurds are in a different tribe from Hussein. And `family and tribal connections are supreme [in Iraq society]. They come ahead of ideology. They come ahead of commitment to the nation state, they come ahead of all commitments.' [PBS] Thus IMO Hussein is unlikely to view the Kurds as `his own people,' just as the Spaniards didn't view the Aztecs infesting their new territory as their own people.

  So however despicable gassing is—and I think it's very despicable, as was trading smallpox blankets to the Indians and leaving upwards of 800 tonne of pulverised nuclear waste in Iraq and incinerating Japanese in the hundreds of thousands whether by blitzkrieg or nuclear fission—is it honesty or propaganda to describe the alleged incident as `Hussein gassing his own people?' Should it be held up by the West as the great example of how dangerous Hussein is, and a key justification for whatever further mass atrocity the West plans to commit on the Iraqis? Considering the heaps of thoroughly proven and confessed injustices heaped on the Kurds by Western powers, isn't it just a tad hypocritical to be willing the nuke the Iraqi populace (as Britain would threaten to do in 2002) on this little bit of might've-been??

  Finally, assuming Hussein actually did gas what he views as his own people, where's the logic in threatening him with more destruction of his own people?

  (In 2003 Gwynne Dyer made an interesting suggestion: The admin had the Pentagon blame it on Iran to whitewash its own involvement. Charlie Reese takes a pronged approach: The US blamed it on Iran first and then Iraq, and at least one must be a lie. CR Furthermore the 5th Estate commented that the US officially denounced the gassing, but squashed a Prevention of Genocide bill and upstepped trade with Iraq.)

• Apr 8: Montana Sec'y of State James Waltermire dies in crash near Helena. MP
• May 6: GHWB, at College of southern Idaho: For 7½ years I've worked alongside Reagan, and I'm proud to be his partner. We've had triumphs, we've made mistakes, we've had sex—uh, I mean setbacks. NF · S · B (Often reported with wrong date BN · MR)
• 1988 Jun 6: &rad;Radiation Sterilizers Inc reports a Cs-137 leak at their Decatur GA facility. 70 000 medical supply containers and milk cartons recalled. Ten employees were exposed, three of whom `had enough on them that they contaminated other surfaces' including materials in their homes and cars, according to Jim Setser at the GA Dep't of Natural Resources. L
• 1988 Jul: Keith Coney dies in motorcycle accident while being pursued by a car, taking with him what he knew of the Ives–Henry deaths ('87 Aug 23). [DK quoting WorldNetDaily?]
• 1988 Jul 3: The fancy Aegis gadgetry of the USS Vincennes shoots down Iranian airliner in Iranian air corridor. [CH quoting Washington Post] Reagan calls it a mistake with no connection to the Stark. 290 die. BI (I just thought—why should it be related to Stark? She was hit by Iraq, not Iran.)

  [In April 1990] the commander of the Vincennes, along with the officer in charge of anti-air warfare, was given the Legion of Merit award for `exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service' and for the `calm and professional atmosphere' under his command during the period of the destruction of the Iranian Airbus, with 290 people killed. `The tragedy isn't mentioned in the texts of the citations,' AP reported. The media apparently found nothing worthy of comment in any of this—though Iranian condemnations of the destruction of the airliner are occasionally noted and dismissed with derision as `boilerplate attacks on the US.' DD

  GHWB: `I will never apologize for the US of America—I don't care what the facts are.' TT (listing GHWB as president, which he wasn't, yet, officially.)

  One may imagine the reaction were Iran to go on from `boilerplate attacks on the US' to threats to retaliate with military strikes against US targets—perhaps taking its cue from a lead story in the Boston Globe by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv on how to deal with Saddam Hussein: A strategic strike at their oil fields or an air base might be in order—especially after US intelligence picked up signs that the Iraqi president rewarded the air force pilot who mistakenly attacked the USS Stark during the Gulf War [sic]. DD

  (Don't dare compare this with the downing of KAL007 in '85.)
• 1988 Aug: &rad;Coverup of serious accident at the Savannah River Weapons facility is the final straw in the collapse of the DoE's nuclear-weapons program. Incident after incident that have been thoroughly ignored by the media finally come out. Initial estimates for cleaning up the mess hit G$150. EN
• 1988 Aug: Pakistani jet crashes with the Pakistani president Mohammed Zia al-huk and the US ambassador to Pakistan aboard. The State Department and the Department of Defense convince the White House that the presence of the FBI would not `add any expertise to the team [already investigating the crash]' [Emerson and Duffy, 1990]. The investigation was mishandled, and the final findings were never publicly released. CH Same day as GHWB got the Republican nomination. BK
• 1988 Aug: Somewhere along here the Iran–Iraq war ends. The two plan to use their oil exports to fund reparations. But the day after the war ends Kuwait boosts its oil exports, lowering the price. [DEX]

  So I've read. My guess is this drove Iran and Iraq to export more, further lowering the price—globally. Including the price the US can ask on its oil.

  Which fits into the theory that soon-to-be-Prez oilman GHWB wants to start a Mideast war for his friends and relations in order to get that price up again. [CoT quoting WRH]

• 1988 Aug 9: Wall St. Journal runs `unusually long' article documenting the `unethical, illegal' things done by John E. `Jeb' Bush. NB
• Bush-Quayle advisors include several European fascist activists: Nazi collaborator Laszlo Pasztor, who had served as junior envoy in Berlin for the Arrow Cross regime in his native Hungary; Florian Goldau, who had been recruiter for the Romanian Iron Guard; Bohdan Fedorak, who had headed a Ukranian pro-Nazi group involved in wartime pogroms; and Croatian-born agitator Jerome Brentar, a fixture on the Holocaust denial circuit. [X citing Washington Jewish Week 1988 Sep 8]
• 1988 Sep 8: The end of the Iran–Iraq war also fits with the sudden and `dramatic' change of behaviour of the US to Iraq. Now that Iran has been punished and weakened by proxy for overthrowing the Shah, it's time to weaken Iraq. This day is the best marker for this turning point, as the day the US suddenly and without evidence accuses Saddam of gassing the Kurds. `The Bush administration has never presented any evidence whatsoever for its charges that Iraq used poison gas on its own citizens. Rather it has simply repeated the charges over and over in the press.' (see Göbbles quote) DEX
• Sep 22: IL state rep Douglas Huff found dead. He had been very vigourously promoting Robert and Ted Strecker's claims the US gov't engineered HIV. Ted Strecker was found shot to death in August. R23 · MP
• 1988 Oct: &rad;Rocky Flats CO Pu-bomb plant partially closes after two employees and a DoE inspector inhale radioactive dust. Subsequent investigations reveal safety violations including uncalibrated monitors and insufficient fire-response equipment, and leaching of radioactive contaminants into groundwater. L
• 1988 Oct 11: NY Times depicts GHWB in Pinocchio nose. NB
• Oct 12: In address from Berlin, LaRouche predicts Germany will reunify. BI

• There were little warning signs but few were paying attention when George Bush the poppy ran for president in 1988 and 1992. First during the campaign it surfaced that one of his campaign staffers was a distributor of pro-Nazi propaganda. Before the ink was dry on the individual's resignation, further revelations showed there were in fact a number of ex-Nazis on Bush's campaign staff including Laszlo Pastor and Yaroslav Stetsko. Pastor was a member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross during WWII and served as an envoy to Germany. The Arrow Cross was known to be excessively brutal even to their Nazi allies. Stetsko served as the prime minister of the short lived Ukrainian puppet government. During the short reign of this puppet regime over 100 000 Jews were slaughtered in Lvov. George Bush's insensitivity towards victims of the holocaust is underlined by his employment of Fred Malek, a well-known Nazi collaborator in both his presidential campaigns. SO

• Nov 2: Robert Morris releases, probably accidentally, the first successful network worm RFC gaining fame and a prison sentence. Morris is a grad student in computer science and had to know a few intricate ins and outs of the system to get the worm to work. In little more than a decade, when Microsoft is through `innovating' operating systems and forcing theirs down everyone's throats, any script kiddie with a Visual Basic for The Clinical Moron book could write a worm that could bring the planet's IT to its kness. X To put it simply, Morris' worm had to use flaws, whereas modern worms use `features.' (And who does Washington harass over this? Certainly not Microsoft—because a system that weak will not protect the user from Washington's prying eyes. Although, to be fair, not every attack on Winduhs has used features; several have used buffer overruns—one of the flaws Morris' worm exploited. Does M$ learn from the mistakes of the past? You decide.)
• Nov 4: Franklin Community Credit Union of Omaha closed by FBI and IRS. Director Lawrence E. King Jr, GHWB promoter and fundraiser. had skimmed some M$40 to finance a pædophile ring, the services of which there is strong suspicion GHWB enjoyed. S · GBUB
• Nov: &rad;One of Pres. Alzheimer's last acts is to sign an executive order overriding a MA ruling that blocks the Seabrook nuclear facility from operation. The reactor is started up soon afterwards without adaequate evacuation plans. EN
• Nov: Keith McKaskle stabbed 113 times, to death, taking with him what he knew of the Ives–Henry deaths ('87 Aug 23). He had told his family someone was out to kill him and told them `goodbye.' [DK quoting WorldNetDaily?] P McMaskle? BK
• Nov 23: EO 12656: A national emergency is any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the US. Policy for national security emergency preparedness shall be established by the President. This order includes federal takeover of all local law enforcement agencies, wage and price controls, prohibits you from moving assets in or out of the US, creates a draft, controls all travel in and out of the US, and much more. T
• 1988 Dec 5: US embassy in Helsinki receives warning that within a few weeks a PanAm flight from Frankfurt to NY would be bombed. The warning is forwarded to PanAm and other US embassies. S · G
• 1988 Dec: After 5 years and over M$100 legal fees spent by PGE, the CA PUC gives the utility a G$54 contract to operate Diablo Canyon. The media cover up the scale of the deal, calling it good for the public. EN
• 1988 Dec 21: Pan Am 103 (Franfurt-NY with a stop in Heathrow) explodes over Lockerbie. PA103 · LT · S Two of the dead are Charles M. McKee, ostensibly a military attaché for the CIA in Beirut, and Matthew Gannon, CIA Deputy Station Chief in Beirut, on the way to report on COREA, a rogue CIA unit based in Weisbaden, and it dealings with Monzer Al-Kassar, Syrian arms dealer and drug trafficker, part of Oliver North's web. BK Traficant asserted that the CIA knew the bomb was aboard, but did nothing in order to protect their drug route. FD Wads of US$, heroin, and a Hizbullah T-shirt were in the wreckage. G [WSWS reviewing Ashton & Ferguson Cover-up of Convenience: the hidden scandal of Lockerbie]

• Even the mass extinctions 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs and countless other species did not significantly affect flowering plants, according to Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. But these plant species are disappearing now, and people, not comets or volcanoes, are the angels of destruction. T

• (?): Tim Berners-Lee creates HTTP and HTML. Added to IP (see ...), a medium sufficiently cheap per-copy to enable wide dissemination of nondoctrinal information—the WWW—is born. (But finding the information is a major headache.) (On 2002 Dec 17 Who Wants to be a Millionaire asked what TBL is credited with; the friend `knew it wan't the WWW;' only 5% of the audience chose WWW. The contestant walked away. Maybe they believed Al Gore.)

1989

• 1989?: Harken sells subsidiary Aloha for M$12 to Harken insiders, who borrowed M$11 from Harken to do it. BW
• 1989: Kandu dies of a broken jaw after colliding with another orca in performance. She is the 15th of Sea World's 28 orcas to die since 1965. In the wild, orcas can live to 100. MH
• 1989: GHWB admin, esp Rumsfeld and Armitage, refuses to support UN resolution for investigating Iraq's human-rights crimes despite a scathing report from their own State Dep't. ICH
• Brazilian bishops call for democratisation of communications. Discussions of New World Information Order to diversify media access and encourage alternatives to the West-dominated global media system. A UNESCO inquiry into such possibilities (1985?) elicits an extremely hostile reaction in the US. The alleged concern was freedom of the press. NI (Yeah; too much of it. Poor US doesn't know what's around the corner—the WWW.)
• 1989: &rad;Fire at Spain's Vandellos I reactor. EN
• 1989 Jan: &rad;Scientists discover a fault under Savannah River through which contaminants reached the underground aquifer, a major source of drinking water for the southeast. Turtles in nearby ponds were found to contain radioactive Sr up to 1000× normal background level. L
• 1989 Jan: Gregory Collins dies from a gunshot blast to the face, taking with him what he knew of the Ives–Henry deaths ('87 Aug 23). [DK quoting WorldNetDaily?]
• 1989 Jan: GHWB anointed Bush I. Danforth Quayle, VP. Richard Cheney, Sec'y of Defense. James Baker, Sec'y of State. DEO
• `Hours' after Bush's installation, LaRouche is given a hasty trial and jailed. BI
• GHWB declares (or reäffirms) literal war on drugs. Wartime law is in effect; among other things, burden of proof shifts to the defense. In combination with the asset-forfeiture laws of 1978, several police districts will become notoriously wealthy merely by uttering `drug-related!' and grabbing whatever looks valuable.
• 1989: Basle Convention prohibiting international trade in toxic waste. [check this description] The US has yet to (ie will never) ratify it; since the US is one of the manufacturers of toxic waste (sometimes repackaging it as medicine!), this largely vetoes the Convention. BBC
• 1989 Mar: &rad;On the 10th anniversary eve of the TMI accident, Rancho Seco experiences another shutdown, all but sealing its fate. EN
• 1989 Apr: Jeff Rhodes' burned body is found in a trash dump. He had information on the Ives–Henry ('87 Aug 23) and McKaskle ('88 Nov) deaths. He had died of a gunshot wound to the head and his hands and feet had been partially sawn off. [DK quoting WorldNetDaily?]
• Apr 19: Faulty construction and overramming triggers premature explosion of powderbag aboard USS Iowa, killing 40; Navy blames it on alleged suicide pact of allegedly gay sailors.

  White female jogger beaten and raped in NYC Central Park. Five young black men are convicted for it, eventually exonerated by DNA evidence. Loony racist necrophilic conservative Ann Coulter blows her top, calling them `feral beasts,' `savages,' and `animals.' AC (I bet she'd've had an entirely different opinion of DNA if it'd've gone in her favour.) The DA nevertheless asks for their conviction to be dropped (2002 Dec 5). HN

• Apr: Jake Horton dies when the company jet explodes 10 min after takeoff. He was sr VP of Gulf Power, subsidiary of Southern, cohort of Enron, major Bush contributor. BK
• 1989 June: Owner of the G$6 Shoreham reactor sells it to NY for $1. The reactor was completed but never allowed to operate. EN
• 1989 Jun 4: 1000s die in Tiananmen Square when hardliners follow Nixon's advice on dealing with dissidents. BI `hundreds' CNN Maybe a dozen, maybe. The actual massacre was not in the square, but around it, after the students had left more-or-less voluntarily, when the people got a bit upset that the people's army had been sallied against the people. CSM
• Jun 14: Ronald Reagan dubbed Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath. RF
• Jun 29: Homosexual prostitution inquiry ensnares VIPs with Reagan, Bush—Call boys took midnight tour of White House [LP quoting Washington Times]
• Jul: Richard Winters, a suspect in the Ives–Henry deaths ('87 Aug 23), dies in a set-up robbery. P
• James Milan found decapitated. He had information on the Ives–Henry deaths ('87 Aug 23). Supposedly his small dog had eaten his head then thrown it in a trash bin several blocks away. [DK quoting WorldNetDaily?] The coroner called it natural causes. P
• Aug:

  I have been involved in television since the early 1950s, when it ceased to be a novelty and became the principal agent for the simultaneous marketing of consumer goods and of the National Security State opinion. Although I thought I knew quite a bit about the ins and outs of the medum, I now know quite a bit more, thanks to Ben H. Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly and Manufacturing Consent, a study of the political economy of the mass media, by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. These two studies demonstrate exactly how the few manipulate opinion. [Vidal United States p1032]

• Aug 7: TX Rep. George Mickey Leland, chair House Select Committee on Hunger, dies in plane crash during a trip to inspect relief efforts in Ethiopia. CNN · MP (This may be an actual accident.)
• Aug 9: Craig Spence hinted the [call-boy] tours [of the Whitehouse] were arranged by top-level persons, including Donald Gregg…Spence, according to friends, was also carrying out homosexual blackmail operations for the CIA. [JG quoting Washington Times]
• Aug 13: Rep. Larkin Smith (D-Miss) dies in private-plane crash. He was working with veterans of US Army Special Forces looking into the deaths of five Green Beret colonels, all of whom had been connected to a covert CIA drug operation known as Watchtower. CNN · SNZ · MP
• Despite accusing Iraq of gassing its own people, GHWB signs an EO mandating closer ties with Iraq, and sales of WMD technology. TMTM
• Enron moves to Houston TX, 30 days after Kenny Boy promised not to leave Omaha. PP
• East Germany and Berlin wall fall; GHWB is clearly displeased by this turn of events.

  [T]he leader of the western world look[ed] as though he had lost his last friend the day they brought him the news of the fall of the Berlin Wall…[His] stricken expression and lame words about an event that had the rest of mankind quickly singing hosannas were an awful letdown at a high moment in history.' [GBUB citing McGrory `Berlin and Bush's Emotional Wall' Washington Post Nov 14]

  A political cartoon pictures a snowman with a helmet and a rifle, melting under a bright sun while an anxious George Bush holds an umbrella over him to deflect its rays. The snowman is labeled Cold War, and the caption reads: Not permanent? What'll We Dooo?…the Cold War has served important functions for state managers. When a government stimulus was needed for a faltering economy or to foster new and costly technologies, state managers could conjure up Russian hordes on the march to induce the public to expand the subsidy to advanced industry via the Pentagon…Quite generally, the Evil Empire has been invoked when needed for domestic economic management and for controlling the world system. A replacement will not be easy to find. DD

• 1989 Sep: Prescott Bush Jr. makes an Asian tour, 10 days before GHWB (`That's my brother George'), to drum up business and sign an agreement with Aoki Corp to build an M$18 golf course in China. Prescott got a 1/3 stake at no cost. Later Aoki is accused before Sen. For. Rel. Subc'tee on terror and narcotics of M$4 in bribes to Manuel Noriega. NB re June's fracas in Tiananmen Sq., he says `We aren't a bunch of carrion birds coming to pick the carcass.' CNN
• 1989 Sep:

  I was living in Berkeley…when we had the Loma Prieta earthquake…many were injured and many more lost their homes. The Red Cross flew into town, schmoozed with the dignitaries, and were all over the news. They set up shelters but required documentation before you could get help. You had to prove that you were not homeless before the earthquake. They didn't want to make the mistake of helping any homeless people. Of course there were many people whose documentation had disappeared along with their homes. Moreover, homeless people, who typically slept in alleys and abandoned (condemmned) buildings were probably more at risk than the average citizen.

  The Salvation Army arrived in San Francisco without fanfare. They set up shelters and helped everyone who applied without asking for documentation. They were too busy to do photo ops.

  Meanwhile the Red Cross used the San Francisco disaster to raise millions of dollars earmarked for San Francisco earthquake aid. [After two weeks] they packed up to leave. They had spent only a small fraction of the [money] they had raised.

  The Mayor of San Francisco—I regret I can't remember his name, he was a good guy—found out about the unspent SF relief funds and asked for them. The Red Cross refused. [He] gave a press conference…in which he demanded the money. The RC gave in with poor grace and its chairman resigned, to be replaced by Elizabeth Dole.

  If you followed what happened with the contributions earmarked for New York City after 911, you'll know that the RC hasn't changed its spots. WRH reader

  (My mother was ince a Red Cross chapter president. She quit in disgust when the accounts showed some ¾ of the money went to `administration.' The Sally Ann is now her choice.)
• After four failed plebicites, fluoridationists finally find a way into Calgary. They make up a class activity of painting NaF on an eggshell and then drawing conclusions about the benefits of fluoridation, ignoring the differences in topical v systemic application esp side effects, whether an eggshell works the same way as teeth, the ethics of mass medication, and environmental effects. (eg the optimal concentration, over 99% of which goes down the sewer, is more than enough to kill salmon. F A couple large fluoridators on river, no more fishies there.) The teacher then signed a letter to City Hall asking for another plebiscite, which happened, and approved fluoridation. F
• Sep 30: Maxwell Thurman replaces Frederick Woerner as SOUTHCOM chief. The latter had been reluctant to carry out GHWB's illegal orders to attack Panama and grab Noriega, who knew, so to speak, where Bush's bodies were buried. Tomorrow JCS Chair Adm W'm Crowe, similarly balky, is replaced by the obedient ladder-climber Colin Powell. G · BA · BA
• Berlin wall falls on the 66th anniversay of the Beerhall Putsch. 666
• Oct: Auto collision kills Kathleen Sorenson, original complainant in the Franklin case. JG
• Nov 10: Craig Spence, fmr ABC reporter, Whitehouse pimp, blackmailer, general right-wingnut, found dead at Ritz-Carlton, Boston; declared suicide. [VF citing Washington Times Nov 13] MCF
• Nov 16: Six Jesuit priests, a co-worker, and her teenage daughter murdered in El Salvador. Congressional task force finds that those responsible were trained at the infamous Ft. Benning GA. OTV
• Nov 24: &rad; Meltdown at East Germany's largest reactor, Greifswald. EN · A
• 1989 Dec 20: US invades Panama. FL `A highly disturbing aspect of the Iraq and Panama devastations is that both instances may be cases where Bush was double-crossing his business partners. Noriega was a drug runner and overall thug, but Bush ran the CIA, which specialized in drug running as a way to fund covert operations. That is well known.' X

  Chomsky marks the Invasion of Panama as a historic event in that it was the first such military action not justified as a response to the Soviet threat. When the US invaded Grenada six years before, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could still say that if the Soviets were to attack Eastern Europe, Grenada might prevent US shipments of oil to help the cause in Europe. During the '80s, the attack on Nicaragua was justified by saying that if we didn't stop the commies in Nicaragua, they would soon be into Texas only a 2½-hour drive away. But by the time of the Panama Invasion, the old standby justification, fear of the evil empire, just wouldn't fly anymore…

  Protection of democracy was also put forth as a justification for the invasion citing Noriega's having stolen the 1989 election. But Noriega had stolen the 1984 election with considerably more violence, showing protesters he meant business by ordering troops to fire on them, killing two and injuring 40. But in 1984, Washington had approved heartily and Secretary of State George Schultz had been sent to Panama to publicly praise the election as initiating the process of democracy. Reagan had sent a congratulatory message to the victor seven hours before his victory had been certified… At the same time as the Panama Invasion, the US government was resuming its generous bank loans to Iraq while the State Department explained its goal of increasing US exports and put[ting] us in a better position to deal with Iraq regarding its human rights record. Iraqi atrocities at that time went unnoticed and unmentioned while the US government propped up his regime until a later episode when Saddam Hussein's turn came to fall from grace. DC

• Illinois issues awards to treatment plants that maintain the recommended concentration of fluoride. Of 1931 public water supplies, 1000 are fluoridators, and only 115 met the criteria. G citing Crete Record Sep 21] Over 80% of the fluoridation plants were faulty—one hopes, faulty on the low-dose side.