1990 Through 1999

1990

• 10 min to midnight. BAS
• EPA senior scientist W'm Marcus fired for exposing coverup of clear evidence of fluoride being carcinogenic. He sues for wrongful dismissal, wins, and is reïnstated with back pay, legal expenses, and k$50 damages. F
• Preliminary indications from the dose study show at least 13000 people could have been exposed to significant doses of iodine-131. Downwinders file massive lawsuit against the federal government and Hanford contractors. TCH
• More than 1500 six-month-old black and hispanic babies in Los Angeles are given an `experimental' measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the US. CDC later admits the parents were never informed that the vaccine was experimental. HNN
• `Don't Mess With Texas' starts life as the slogan of an anti-litter campaign—as if litter would make much difference. TX has the worst pollution record in the US, top in the belching of toxic chemicals and carcinogens into the air, top in chemical spills, top in ozone pollution, top in carbon-dioxide emissions, top for mercury emission, top in clean-water violations, top in the production of hazardous waste. Houston overtakes Los Angeles for the coveted title of `most polluted city' in the early '90s. G And for all this oil money, TX is at the bottom in social programs.
• US officials begin to meet with Iraqi opposition figures for the first time in 15 years. PBS
• State Department grants entry visa to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman although he's on a `watch list.' `One problem was that various documents had four versions of his name.' ND (Another problem is that `Abdul Rahman' seems to be the Arab/Muslim equivalent of `John.' When I heard of the 2001 Feb? beating death of Afghanistan's transport minister Abdul Rahman I knew the name meant something to me but a Google had dozens of unrelated matches. So let's not get into a variant of `they all look/sound alike;' `they' have John Smiths same as `we' do. Anyway, I think this is the one I was after.)
• Jan:

  Concerned about the reports of poison gas, Congress ends Iraq's sweetheart deal with the Export-Import Bank, but is overruled by President Bush, who says it is in America's national interest to continue aiding Iraq. Shortly after, a Voice of America broadcast terms Iraq a police state; James Baker directs Ambassador April Glaspie to personally apologize to Saddam Hussein, an apology echoed by GOP senator Robert Dole [in April]. [PS citing NA

  (Odd. I remember Glaspie's no opinion meeting w/Saddam being described as the only one she ever had.)
• Jan 15: Tiny bug in new switch software takes out AT&T's telephone network. It highlights the fragility of modern technology and the society that needs it to live; however the lesson is perverted into one of gotta get those hackers rather than maybe it'd be a good thing not to have such wide-reaching targets. HC
• Feb 25: &rad;British admit to high rate of leukemia among children of nuclear workers. NF
• Mar: The last of TMI's mangled core is sent to Idaho Falls for storage. EN
• Apr: GA's Vogtle reactor suffers a `station blackout' when a truck carrying nuclear fuel backs into a pole, cutting control power. Vogtle cost G$8.87 to build, 13× as much as expected. EN
• George Schultz pulls Bechtel out of Iraq. `I said something is going to go very wrong in Iraq and blow up and if Bechtel were there it would get blown up too. So I told them to get out.' [WB citing London Financial Times 1991 Feb 21 p3] (Keep in mind that, publicly, Saddam is a big US friend at this point.)
• Apr: Saddam offers to get rid of all his WMD if Israel would do the same. The US declines, since acknowledging Israel's nuclear arsenal would make the ±M$10/day in aid illegal. [ABBC; without clear citation but try Boston Globe, Reuters, London Financial Times on Apr 13, 14, 18]
• Apr: Robert Dole personally assures Hussein that a recent Voice of America broadcast critical of Iraq's human-rights record is not reflective of the administration's views; nor does the WH support Congress' noises about sanctions. [WB citing Murray Waas `Who Lost Kuwait? How the Bush Administration Bungled its Way to War in the Gulf' Village Voice 1991 Jan 22 p35]
• Apr 4: PA Sen. John Heinz (yes, of condiments) one of seven killed—incl two children on the ground—in midair collision with the helicopter trying to check that his craft's landing gear was down. CNN His wife Teresa eventually marries John Kerry.
• Apr 5: TX Sen. John Tower and 22 others die in commuter plane crash near Brunswick GA. CNN (Tower and Heinz were investigating Iran-Contra and had gone on GHWB's October Surprise trip to Paris. And they died in separate plane crashes within 48 hrs of each other.)
• May: West German tribunal shuts the nation's oldest reactor, operating unlicensed for 20 years. EN
• May: Gov't report shows vast amounts of Hg and cesium in sediments of a 39000-acre reservoir system around the Oak Ridge weapons plant. EN
• May 7–9: Operation Sundevil, or the Hacker Crackdown. The SS tries to put the fear o' God into computer nerds and/or demonise computer nerds in the public mind. At least one completely-aboveboard business, Steve Jackson Games, will take a near-lethal hit in the process (although it also gets some great publicity). J. P. Barlow will rank it as part of an `invisible, gradual, subtle conversion of the US into a police state' since the 1970s. [paraphrase of a post-9/11 comment cited in DB]
• May 13: &rad;Blind River refinery shuts down after leaking 178 kg U dust over 30 hr. NF
• May 21: &rad;All pumps fail in storage-basin cooling system during annual inspection of Westinghouse-built Ringhala-2. NF
• Jun: Jordan Kettleson found shot to death in the front seat of his pickup. He had information on the Ives–Henry deaths ('87 Aug 23). DM
• Jun 22: GWB made his own first megabucks by classic insider trading. `Bush had on four occasions filed late Form 4s involving Harken stock worth more than M$1. The tardiest—34 weeks late—was his Form-4 report disclosing that he had sold $848,560 of Harken stock on June 22, 1990, just weeks before the company filed a quarterly report revealing that it had lost M$23 during that period. Bush had sold his stock for $4/share. By the end of the year it was trading not much above $1.' PIO · BW He avoids prosecution via Daddy Herbert's string pulling. FTW

  Meanwhile:

  Finally, there is Neil's father. We will not rest until the cheats and the chiselers and the charlatans spend a large chunk of their lives behind the bars of a federal prison, President Bush said on June 22, 1990, in regard to the savings and loan fraud. Read his lips. Then stare at the fact that when FBI field offices requested 425 new agents to help investigate the 21,000 thrift fraud referrals sitting unaddressed in their files, the Bush administration approved only half those requests and reduced the funds Congress authorized to spend on prosecutions. You and I may not always agree with Bill Moyers, but he was on target when he said that George Bush is the most deeply unprincipled man in American poltics today… NB

• (older entry) GWB makes his own first megabuck by classic insider trading; he dumps his stock in Harken Energy just before Iraq moves on Kuwait, which collapses Harken's value. He'll avoid prosecution via Daddy Herbert's string pulling. FTW
• Jul: Science and Applications International Corporation report Kinetic Energy Penetrator Environment and Health Considerations as included in US Army report Kinetic Energy Penetrator Long Term Strategy Study Appendix D:

  Aerosol dU (Depleted Uranium) exposures to soldiers on the battlefield could be significant with potential radiological and toxicological effects…Under combat conditions, the most exposed individuals are probably ground troops that re-enter a battlefield following the exchange of armour-piercing munitions…We are simply highlighting the potential for levels of dU exposure to military personnel during combat that would be unacceptable during peacetime operations…[dU is] a low level alpha radiation emitter which is linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage…Short term effects of high doses can result in death, while long term effects of low doses have been linked to cancer…Our conclusion regarding the health and environmental acceptability of dU penetrators assume both controlled use and the presence of excellent health physics management practices. Combat conditions will lead to the uncontrolled release of dU…The conditions of the battlefield, and the long term health risks to natives and combat veterans may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of dU kinetic penetrators for military applications.

  `These documents state clearly and equivocally that the US army was well aware of the radioactive and toxic dangers of dU ammunition long before the first shots of the war were fired.' TT
• Jul 11: Gary Caradori and son die when their plane disintegrates over Aurora IL. He had been investigating for the Nebraska senate the pædophile ring connected to GHWB, and had just told Loran Schmit I got it, Loran. We've got 'em by the balls. His briefcase and the rear seats were absent from the wreckage. The NTSB never (as of 2003) formally states the cause. [S citing The Mystery of the Carefully Crafted Hoax p77–8.] (See also GBUB.) What he had may have been some of Rusty Nelson's photos. Officially, the disintegration was spontaneous; an eyewitness' testimony, broadcast then squelched, indicates there was explosive assistance. Robert Wadman, fmr police chief of Omaha accused by Alisha Owen of being a customer of the ring, just happened to be police chief of Aurora at the time. JG · PP
• Jul 15 (25?): Ambassador Glaspie tells Hussein that Washington has `no opinion on the Arab–Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait…we see the Iraqi point of view that the measures taken by the UAE and Kuwait are, in the final analysis, parallel to military aggression against Iraq.' [CHSS quoting, S&S citing NY Times Sep 22] We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late '60s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly. [M citing New York Times Sep 23] (It's not yet clear to me what Kuwait was doing `parallel to military aggression.' Was it driving down oil prices? Stealing Iraq's oil by slant drilling? DEO · TWT Something else?) (Blum dates this at Jul 25 WB citing New York Times 1990 Sep 23)

  Wow I just found out it may have been Bush's Zapata, a pioneer in Kuwaiti oil, that was doing that slant drilling. SOBs, 50M (Probably as one of its later forms, Pennzoil or Pennzoil/Texaco. B)

• Jul 19: Dick Cheney claims the US had committed during the Iran–Iraq war to come to Kuwait's aid if it were attacked. The Whitehouse jerked his leash, reserving comment on Iraq to itself and the State Dep't. [WB citing Murray Waas `Who Lost Kuwait? How the Bush Administration Bungled its Way to War in the Gulf' Village Voice 1991 Jan 22 p35 & New York Times 1990 Sep 23]
• Jul 24: Margaret Tutweiler for the State Dep't: `We do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.' Paul Williams repeats the precise words. But the party line is blocked from appearing in a mideast Voice of America broadcast. [WB citing New York Times 1990 Jul 25, Sep 17, & Sep 23]
• Jul 27: House and Senate vote for economic sanctions on Iraq for its human-rights problems. Whitehouse immediately reiterates its opposition. [WB citing New York Times 1990 Jul 28 p5]
• Jul 31:

  Kelly: We have no defense-treaty relationship with any Gulf country. That is clear…We have historically avoided taking a position on border disputes or on internal OPEC deliberations.

  Rep Lee Hamilton: [Would it be correct to say that if Iraq] charged across the border into Kuwait [we do] not have a treaty commitment which would obligate us to engage US forces?

  Kelly: That is correct. [WB citing `Developments in the Middle East' p14, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs]

• Aug: Increasing seismic activity near Chernobyl has experts worried about cracking of the sarcophagus. EN
• Aug 2: With pretty clear (if false) indications the Whitehouse didn't care, Iraq moves on Kuwait. DEO

  As the possibility of an invasion became clear to mid-level US intelligence and diplomatic officials, they recommended that the administration send a strong message to Saddam that there would be US retribution for any invasion. But those warnings were ignored by Secretary of State James Baker and the president. Since the invasion, highly classified US intelligence assessments have determined that Saddam took US statements of neutrality in the Iraq-Kuwait conflict as a green light for an invasion. One senior Iraqi military official, who has proved to be a valuable source of information for the CIA in the past, has told the agency that Saddam seemed to be sincerely surprised by the bellicose reaction of the Bush administration…the only possible explanation of the Bush administration's miscalculations in the days before the invasion is sheer incompetence on the part of the president and his men. SFBG

  (No, it is not the only explanation; the other is that GHWB wanted war, an idea borne out by the US' total rejection of the many diplomatic solutions offered by Iraq the next few months.)

  Statements…were made to cloak the fact that Bush was adamantly refusing to negotiate with Iraq, and preventing other nations from doing so. Bush's diplomatic posture was in effect an ultimatum to Iraq to get out of Kuwait, with the Iraqi departure to come before any discussions. Bush called this a refusal to reward aggression; it was in fact a refusal to negotiate in good faith, and made clear that Bush wanted war. His problem was that the US military buildup was taking longer than expected, GBUB

• Sep: Hydrogen explosion and fire at a Kazakhstan nuclear-fuel facility renders the eastern region an ecological disaster area due to beryllium fallout. EN
• Sep 2: British journalists question Glaspie about her greenlighting of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. I didn't think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait. TT (Which begs all kindsa questions. What in the world made you think that, since Iraq's been eying Kuwait for 60 years? How much of Kuwait would Iraq have been allowed to take? She doesn't answer these. There is no answer, other than Herbert the Pervert wanted a spiffy little war.)
• Sep 11: GHWB announces New World Order [MVT] while claiming Iraq was massing force to invade Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon refuses to present its evidence, and satellite photos confirm only massing American force. IW [WCT citing St. Petersburg Times '91 Jan 6. I figure its `September 18, 1991' is an error in the year.]
• Oct: Ostrovsky By Way of Deception Israel would call for Ostrovsky, a Canadian and former Mossad agent, to be murdered for his books. WR
• Auto collision seriously injures the sheriff's deputy first on the scene of the Caradori crash who'd noted kiddie porn all over the place—likely the smoking gun blackmail photos by Rusty Nelson. His wife is killed. JG
• Oct: 57% of residents around the Fukushima reactor vote to keep the plant shut down. (Reactor was shut in 1989 Feb by a serious accident.) Tokyo Electric reopens the facility anyway. EN
• Oct: &rad;The Union of Concerned Scientists releases report by MHB Associates on `inherently safe' reactors which concludes that there is no such thing. All designs studied had some potential of releasing radiation. EN (Nuclear advocates tend to define `inherently safe' as `can't run away' and ignore the reaction-products issues. UMR-ANS)

• [On Oct 5] an unlikely coalition of right-wing Republicans and liberal Democrats had revolted in the House of Representatives, scuttling the deficit-cutting budget plan crafted during four months of tortuous negotiations between the Administration and congressional leaders. Only a stopgap continuing resolution kept the government afloat while frenzied efforts to devise a new deal bogged down. The sticking point: Would Bush agree to a Democrat-backed rise in income tax rates for the affluent in exchange for his cherished cut in taxes on capital gains?

  For 24 hours, Bush had sown confusion by flipping and flopping on the issue like a beached bluefish. First he signaled that he would accept the swap. Then, under pressure from Republicans who argued that Bush's change of heart would only trigger further Democratic demands, his top aides announced that the deal was no longer acceptable…

  [D]uring the next 24 hours[,] Bush reversed himself twice more on the tax issue, completing a quadruple somersault that twisted members of his own party into knots, sent Democrats into orbit and helped cut more than 20 points from his approval ratings in the space of six weeks. That was the most precipitous dive in popularity, absent a major scandal, for any 20th century President…At that moment, many Americans concluded that in George Bush they had elected two Presidents: a highly capable captain of foreign policy and a dawdling, disengaged caretaker of domestic affairs. T

• Valentine The Phoenix Program
• Oct 10: `Nurse Nayirah' `testifies' to Congress about seeing Kuwaiti babies removed from incubators by Iraqi soldiers and left to die. No explanation why she didn't pick the babies up when the soldiers left. Ultimately this turns out to be a propagandum created by Hill & Knowlton; and `Nurse Nayirah' to be daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the US. CJR Nurses in the hospital's maternity ward attest they'd never seen Nayirah in their lives. G Amnesty Int'l investigates, and admits being duped. (They really should've known better. But perhaps this was their first grand exposure to US deceit.) Middle East Watch confirmed the fabrication. But the war was over by then. G (`Fool me twice—uh—' Hill & Knowlton's the same piece of work that kept smoking fashionable for the tobacco industry. R) Nayirah's inventor and coach was Lauri Fitz-Pegado, GL later Ass't Commerce Sec'y for Clinton. JW
• Nov:

  Worse than the butterfly ballot, some Democratic candidates watched votes alight, then flutter away. Democrat Al Williams saw 90 votes wander off his tally between election night and the following day, though no new counting had been done. At the same time, his opponent, Republican Tom Tangen, gained 32 votes. At one point several hundred ballots added to returns didn't result in any increase in the number of votes. But elsewhere, the number of votes added exceeded the number of additional ballots counted. A Republican candidate achieved an amazing surge in his absentee percentage for no apparent reason. And no one seemed to notice (until a determined Democratic candidate started demanding an answer) that the machines simply forgot to count 14,000 votes. SNZ

• Nov:

  Lauri Fitz-Pegado then put on a repeat performance in front of the US Security Council on November 27, 1990. In the testimony before Congress, they claimed they couldn't fully identify who the witness was because they wanted to protect her family that supposedly was still trapped in Kuwait. But, in fact, they were here on Embassy Row.

  In front of the UN, Lauri Fitz-Pegado abandoned that pretense and instead employed witnesses who testified using false names and occupations. The most important of these phony witnesses was a man who called himself Dr. Ebrahim. With Lauri Fitz-Pegado there in New York, he claimed to have personally buried 40 babies pulled from incubators by the Iraqis. Dr. Ebrahim told the Security Council that he was a surgeon. But after the war, when the scam was exposed as a total fraud, he admitted to being a dentist and had never buried any babies or seen any. More lies. FC

• Nov 30: UNSC passes Res 648 authorising use of force as a last resort to get Iraq out of Kuwait. Or does it?

  This piece of infamy was labelled resolution 648 and passed with twelve assenting votes against the no votes of Cuba and Yemen, with the People's Republic of China abstaining. (International jurists later pointed out that according to the text of the UN Charter, which requires the positive votes of all five permanent members to approve substantive resolutions, the resolution had not passed, and that in acting on it the UN had entered a phase of anarchy and lawlessness.) GBUB

  Then:

  Bush executed the cynical tactic that would ultimately paralyze his craven domestic opposition and clear the way to war: he made a fake offer of negotiations with Iraq:

  However, to go the extra mile for peace, I will issue an invitation to Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz to come to Washington at a mutually convenient time during the latter part of the week of Dec 10th to meet with me. And I'll invite ambassadors of several of our coalition partners in the gulf to join me in that meeting. In addition, I am asking Secretary Jim Baker to go to Baghdad to see Saddam Hussein, and I will suggest to Iraq's president that he receive the secretary of state at a mutually convenient time between Dec 15 and Jan 15 of next year.

  It was all a fiendish lie, even down to the offer of times and venues for the talks. When Iraq responded with proposals for the schedule of meetings, Bush welched and reneged. Iraq released the US internees, but Bush still wanted war. We've got to continue to keep the pressure on, was his reaction. Then came a full month of useless haggling, which was exactly what Bush wanted. GBUB

• Bush and Cheney order all US armed forces to take experimental medical vaccines for anthrax and botulin, in violation of the Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation. In later hearings, Sen. Jay Rockefeller will accuse Bush, Cheney, and Powell of committing a Nuremberg crime on their own troops. CP (Was Rockefeller trying to look unlike a plutocrat?)
• Time's Man of 1990: `the two George Bushes.' T (That was kinda prophetic.)
• A century of hunting finally turns up some oil in Bosnia, good quality, abt 50 Mt near Tuzla and 500 Mt near Samac. Could this be why the US suddenly feigns interest in Bosnian liberation? BA

1991

• Sen. John Tower and daughter Marian die in plane crash in Georgia. Chaired c'tee investigatin Iran-Contra. BK
• Roland DeWitte stumbles on a cyclic phase shift between his cesium-beam atomic clocks, with a period matching the sidereal day. A similar result had been found by Torr and Kolen in 1981, but their clocks were less precise. [SPR & citing US Natl Bur Std Spec Pub 617, 675 & RD] A group of Flinders University physicists seems willing to stake their careers on DeWitte's result: An analysis of various experiments demonstrates that absolute motion relative to space has been observed experimentally by Michelson and Morley, Miller, Illingworth, Jaseja et al, Torr and Kolen, and by DeWitte. The Dayton Miller and Roland DeWitte data also reveal the in-flow of space into matter which manifests as gravity…The Einstein assumptions…are shown to be falsified by the extensive experimental data. Contrary to the Einstein assumptions absolute motion is consistent with relativistic effects, which are caused by actual dynamical effects of absolute motion through the quantum foam, so that it is Lorentzian relativity that is seen to be essentially correct. S
• Bucky Fanning's 10-a ranch is seized by Arlington TX and handed over to the Texas Rangers (and GWB) for a ballpark. Or rather a little-used parking lot for a ballpark. NYDN
• Hellinger & Brooks The Democratic Façade

  On many occasions America's elites have demonstrated a distrust and disdain for democracy to the point where they have been willing to destroy it when it seemed inimical to their interests—that is, when it threatened their political hegemony and control over wealth-producing institutions…in its self-proclaimed sphere of influence, the Caribbean and Latin America, the US has repeatedly destroyed democracy and protected repressive regimes. Democracies based on mass participation have consistently been opposed, often violently, by US political and corporate elites. Conversely, political systems pasted over with a transparent patina of democracy have been both supported and sponsored. These ostensible democracies are often as far removed from popular influence as are the military dictatorships that they often replace, but they are enthusiastically embraced as democratic by US foreign policy elites. These cynical manipulations of democratic symbols can be used as a mirror that faithfully reflects the ideal of democracy embraced by America's elites. They tolerate democratic processes only if these processes pose no significant danger to their autonomy and political hegemony. TWT

  The same happens domestically, although the process is slightly more subtle.
• P. J. O'Rourke: It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money. AMPP (This should not be taken facetiously, even if was meant so.)
• Monika Jensen & William Stevenson Kiss The Boys Goodbye: how the US betrayed its own POWs in Vietnam&warn; (Monika was a 60 Minutes producer; they refused to run this story.)
• Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) crashes with debts of G£7. Deloitte & Touche does the liquidating. `The relationship between Britain's intelligence services and BCCI has long been debated, with speculation that MI6 used accounts at the secretive bank to pay sources and operatives around the world. It has also been claimed that the bank channelled funds in the '80s from the US and Saudi secret services to Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan.' G
• Netanyahu becomes Deputy Minister in the PM's Office. L (Whatever the * that is.)
• Edward Teller awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it. I

• In 1991, I interviewed Harold Seneker, then the editor of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, for an article in The Nation. I told him that I found Jews, 2.2% of the population, to be about 25% of the 400. He told me that he thought this a success story, both for American capitalism and for the Jews, and that he wanted to write a story on it. But Forbes wouldn't let him. The then publisher had gone thru the Hitler era, when talking about Jewish money was an anti-Semitic specialty. CR

• Sequoyah Fuels' Gore OK U processor shut down the year before when high concentrations of U are detected in water in a nearby construction pit. A gov't investigation revealed that the company had known for years that U was leaking into the ground at levels 35000× what federal law allows. Carol Couch, the plant's environmental manager, was cited for obstructing the investigation and knowingly giving Federal agents false information. L
• 17 min to midnight—best since 1947. BAS
• The US bribes the UN and member nations into approving the use of force as a last resort to get Iraq out of Kuwait. (The US then uses force as the only resort and invades Iraq.) Yemen doesn't play along and suffers the loss of a gigabuck in aid. (Cuba didn't play along either, but they weren't getting any aid to lose.)
• Martin Keating, brother of OK Gov. Frank K. (when?), allegedly writes Final Jihad&warn; but can't get it published. In it, a terrorist in Oklahoma City named Tom McVey plans to bomb a federal building. He's caught when a state trooper pulls him over for a broken taillight. NA · D · FK · FJ
• Condoleeza Rice has a highpower job at Chevron. (I can't sort out if it's manager in, manager of, director of, board member) VS · [TO mirroring InterPresse citing verite interdite?]
• Jan:

  The Times and its colleagues dutifully suppressed the opportunities for a negotiated Iraqi withdrawal that opened from mid-August, according to high-ranking US officials. On the eve of the January 15, 1991 bombing, the US population, by about 2 to 1, favored a diplomatic settlement along the lines of an Iraqi proposal that had been released by US officials, but were unaware of the existence of this proposal, and the instant US rejection of it, thanks to media discipline. The rascal multitude, once again, was kept in its proper place. At no time was the Administration called upon to present an argument for war rather than diplomacy—at least one that could not be refuted instantly by a literate teenager. [Y501]

• Jan 16: Gonzalez' Bush-impeachment bill. Lost, presumed dead in c'tee. NLF
• Jan 17: Shawn Boner dies, supposedly of Russian roulette. This prompts his brother Troy to recant his testimony re the Lawrence King crime ring. JG
• Jan 16–Feb 28: In correcting Iraq for having gotten a little too independant again, US–UK coalition massacres ±250000 Iraqi civilians and conscripts. PH US-led trade sanctions—a form of terrorism under the US Legal Code and illegal under the Geneva Conventions, WHO Charter, Universal Human Rights, and Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States [ISD]—block medicines, and thus `amount to germ warfare' and will kill ±200000 a year. PH The sanctions prevent repair of Iraq's water supplies, the deliberate destruction of which is another US war crime. By 2001 more will die of US sanctions than have died of WMD anywhere. MM The sanctions also amount to nuclear warfare: Southern Iraq is left peppered with up to 800 Mg of `depleted' uranium (aka nuclear waste), and blocked from obtaining the equipment to clean it up. WF · AK (In other words the US may have found a subtle way to use nuclear weapons. And, since some of these are children of US Gulf-War veterans, essentially, the US is using nuclear weapons on its own people. It's done it before: see 1952) Despite ample historical evidence of human life not mixing well with radioactive heavy metals, the British Defense Ministry insists on epidemiological heavydense that dU is dangerous. (C'mon you dipsh*t—it's people that are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, not technologies.) `DU projectiles are a threat to the lives of these and coming generations. The thoughtless accumulation of these dangerous weapons must be terminated immediately and their production completely forbidden. All mankind is obliged to Dr. Günther for his pioneer work in the Aufdeckang of this threat.'—Ramsey Clark, Att'y Gen'l for L. B. J. [in review of Uran-Geschosse BF] CoT `The US did nothing to discourage Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and then used that invasion to conjure a war where there was no war, aggressively rejecting any peaceful solutions including the last-minute virtual surrender of Iraq; the US then set its high-tech meat-grinder death machine on maximum kill, slaughtering 100,000+ people in a 45-day orgy of blood, and wound up bulldozing mounds of corpses into mass graves in the desert, in scenes reminiscent of Nazi death-camp footage.'—Ben Moss Actually, thousands bulldozed were not yet corpses; and the US would defend burying Iraqis alive, citing a loophole in the law. [JP quoting SF Chronicle] (I'm sure some would try this spin: Being natural U less U-234, dU is half as radioactive as nU and thus safer. [NWFAQ §6.2.1.4] What they hope you forget is that nU is relatively scarce; you rarely encounter it in 2-kg lumps and clusters. CBC described dU as `highly' radioactive.)
• Those few Americans who can make sense of history can't write while those who can write usually know nothing at all. For any sensible oligarch, this is a fine arrangement, and will never be altered as long as one American university stands, endowed. [Vidal Threepenny Review, in United States p1261]
• Jan 17: First time in history, one missile (Patriot) takes out another (Scud), over Riyadh. Or not. Turns out the Scud was a glitch in the Patriot's kaputey. Of some 45 Patriots fired in GW1, at most 4 may have hit something; but the US touts a 100% intercept rate. Mostly through a freaky definition of `intercept,' meaning `their paths crossed.' [`The Best Defense' Fifth Estate 2003 Feb 6 WSWS] (I think the best part was, the Scuds were their own countermeasures. They tended to come apart in flight and spiral; Patriot couldn't cope with that.)
• Feb:

  All this stopped in the last two centuries when the rulers decided to teach the workers to read and write so that they could handle machinery. Traditionalists thought this a dangerous experiment. If the common people knew too much, might they not overthrow their masters? But the modernists, like John Stuart Mill, won. And, in due course, the people—proudly literate—overthrew their masters. We got rid of the English while the French and the Russians—ardent readers—shredded their ancient monarchies. In fact, the French—who read and theorise the most—became so addicted to political experiment that in the two centuries since our own rather drab revolution they have exuberantly produced one Directoy, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations, and five republics. That's what happens when you take writing too seriously. Happily, Americans have never liked reading all that much. Politically ignorant, we keep sputtering along in our old Model T, looking wistfully every four years for a good mechanic. [Vidal United States p670]

  Now what do you suppose happens to reading when those brain-numbing TVs replace books in schools?
• Feb 13: USUK double bombing of Amiryia bomb shelter. First bomb ruptures the heating system, boiling the refugees like lobsters; the second leaves them in pieces. G (Topps made a set of Desert Storm trading cards (classed as Entertainment); the one at right rings a bell as being of this bombing.)
• Feb 23: 38-storey steel-frame 1 Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia takes fire, burns hot for 18 hours, but does not collapse. SGH (This has been pointed out as a reason the WTC should not have collapsed. But this building was not the skin-and-core pattern of the towers, had all its columns intact, and probably had its insulation was knocked loose.)

• McVeigh's moment of glory came when his platoon encountered a dug-in enemy machine-gun emplacement and came under fire. McVeigh brought his 25mm cannon to bear on the chest of an enemy soldier 1000 yards away, and took his head off with one shot. He followed up with a similar shot, which was followed by the raising of a white flag and the raising of more than 60 hands into the air.

  For his role in the battle, McVeigh was awarded an Army Commendation Medal which read in part: He inspired other members of his squad and platoon by destroying an enemy machine-gun emplacement, killing two Iraqi soldiers and forcing the surrender of 30 others from dug-in positions. McVeigh also earned a Commendation medal with an upgrade for valor, two Army Achievement medals, and the Bronze Star for flawless devotion to duty.

  This flawless devotion to duty resulted in McVeigh's unit being invited to provide personal security for General Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf. OKCBPT

• Feb 26–27: Saddam capitulates to UN Resolution 660 and recalls his troops. A massive convoy retreats along the road from Mutlaa to Basra. US planes destroy the vehicles at the head and tail of the convoy, forcing its human component to flee on foot; then spends several hours strafing, bombing, and incinerating said component. `The clear[ly] rapid incineration of the human being [pictured] suggests the use of napalm, phosphorus, or other incendiary bombs[;] anti-personnel weapons outlawed under the 1977 Geneva Protocols. This…massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates the Geneva Convention of 1949, common article 3.' [AST citing WCT]
• Mar: Shias in Southern Iraq launch a popular uprising against the Baghdad regime. Following the lead, the Kurds in the North also revolt. Within two weeks, 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces are free of government control. Once it is clear that the US will not support the rebellion* Saddam's forces crush the revolt throughout Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds flee into the mountains. In response to humanitarian pleas, US troops move into Northern Iraq in Operation Provide Comfort. No-fly zones are established over Kurdistan. PBS The zones are `unilateral' creations of US, UK, and France, nothing to do with any UN resolutions BBC · BBC and become a contentious issue for the next decade. The US and UK will continually use the zones as an excuse to bomb Iraq and whine about Iraq trying to defend itself.
  *This is mysterious, if Saddam is really sadamn evil as the US says, and if they really want him out as bad as they say. Why will they let a decade pass, a decade of Saddam crushing all resistance, a decade of the US breaking a string of promises to resistors, only then to decide it's really really time to move on Iraq?) Pilger has a creepier version:

  Bush, Blair and the normalizers now speak, almost with relish, of opening mass graves in Iraq. What they do not want you to know is that the largest mass graves are the result of a popular uprising that followed the 1991 Gulf war, in direct response to a call by [GHWB] to take matters into your own hands and force Saddam to step aside. So successful were the rebels initially that within days Saddam's rule had collapsed across the south. A new start for the people of Iraq seemed close at hand.

  Then Washington, the tyrant's old paramour who had supplied him with G$5 worth of conventional arms, chemical and biological weapons and industrial technology, intervened just in time. The rebels suddenly found themselves confronted with the US helping Saddam against them. US forces prevented them from reaching Iraqi arms depots. They denied them shelter, and gave Saddam's Republican Guard safe passage through US lines in order to attack the rebels. US helicopters circled overhead, observing, taking photographs, while Saddam's forces crushed the uprising. In the north, the same happened to the Kurdish insurrection. The Americans did everything for Saddam, said the writer on the Middle East Said Aburish, except join the fight on his side. Bush Sr. did not want a divided Iraq, certainly not a democratic Iraq. The New York Times commentator Thomas Friedman, a guard dog of US foreign policy, was more to the point. What Washington wanted was a successful coup by an iron-fisted junta: Saddam without Saddam. DV

• Mar 1: Los Alamos Memo encourages those writing `after-action' reports on the Gulf War say good things about dU's effectiveness or else its effects on the environment might kill it politically. (ie they knew they had to hide the fact it's nasty stuff.) Even a decade later, with all that's known of low-radiation hazards and poisonous heavy metals, NATO is still trying to convince dU is harmless.

  The meaning of this memo is quite clear, Rokke said. Since DU munitions are so effective, they must continue to be used in combat, regardless of the environmental or health consequences.

  The other issue is financial, he said. If the true effects of DU were known, cleanup costs would be absolutely staggering.

  DU contaminated areas extend much farther than the Persian Gulf battlefields. Rokke said DU is regularly used in practice maneuvers in the US, namely in Indiana, Florida, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Maryland and Puerto Rico. Then there's Kosovo, where DU rounds were used to take out Serbian tanks. DN

• Mar 26: Publishing of USPatent 5003186, believed related to chemtrail activity.
• Apr: Sen. Henry John Heinz III dies in plane crash. He chaired the Iran-Contra review board. BK
• Apr: Kurdish leaders meet Saddam in Baghdad to negotiate a settlement after the uprisings. PBS
• Apr: Lee Atwater dies of cancer at 40. It is widely rumoured in Washington that he had expressed deep remorse for his role in creating the Bush regime.
• Apr 3: UN SC Res 687
• Apr 6: Iraq accepts UN resolution requiring it to end its WMD programs and allow for ongoing monitoring and verification of compliance. BG

• After WW2 the American empire decreed that the three conquered countries were not to maintain military establishments. As a result, Japan and Germany, unencumbered by military pretensions, now lead the world's economy while Italy is doing very well indeed. For almost half a century America's client states in eastern Europe have depended on American nuclear power to protect them from godless communism and brute Russia. Thanks to all these [terabucks] spent to keep at bay phantom Barbarians, the US has ceased to be the world's preëminent economic and industrial power. Worse, the SU has perversely lost all interest in playing Lucifer to America's nuclear god, and so by opting out of our peculiar version of Paradise Lost we are bereft of a beloved enemy.

  Desperate attempts are being made to rally the American people and their European clients…by redemonising the Japanese. [Vidal United States p1041]

• Jun 5: David Rockefeller: `We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years but the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries.'

  Some argue that quote is apocryphal urban legend. However, although I have never been able to find three corroborating independent sources for it, it is consistent in content and tone with other Bilderberg quotes I have been able to confirm. NWV

  (Take these references in that spirit. On the other hand Metcalf lists the quote here without qualification.) VE [FBF, CRC claiming Bilderberger meeting] [MS claiming Trilateral Commission meeting] [CC citing TMM]
• Jun 10 (`6/10/1991'): Wall St. Journal report on links between Prescott Bush Jr. and a major Japanese gangster organization Inagawa-Kai, controlled by Susumu Ishii. NB
• Aug 14: Wall St Journal: The world's businessmen understand that the US legal system is a running joke, and trade tales that start, have-you-heard-this-one-yet? AMPP
• Aug 15:

  In a sense, he have had three republics. The first, a loose confederation of former British colonies, lasted from 1776 to 1789 when the first Congress under the Constitution met. The second republic ended 1865 Apr 9, with the South's surrender. In dues course Lincoln's third republic was transformed (inevitably?) into the national-security state where we have been locked up for 40 years. A fourth republic might be nice. [Vidal United States p707]

• Sep 26: Nicaragua v. US at the International Court of Justice closes, with overall victory to Nicaragua. ICJ Washington thumbs its nose, and escalates its aggression. NC (It's in this case, in 1986, that the US was convicted of `unlawful use of violence'—terrorism—but blamed if I can find it online.)
• 1991 Oct: Assassination plot on GHWB. It's officially blamed on Iraq; but Ostrovsky claims it was a Mossad operation using Palestinian dupes, for GHWB's attempting to stanch the US-to-Israel monetary hemorrhage. [ABBC & WR citing Ostrovsky The Other Side of Deception] (This is confusing. What's here indicates it never got beyond threats, yet it's wagged about ten years on as if actual shots were fired.)
• thanksgiving day: Bill Cosby tells CNN's Showbiz Today he believes HIV is artificial. JR He repeated it to Nat'l Inquirer Dec 24: `I believe AIDS has been man-made. The people who created AIDS didn't realize the holocaust they would cause.' BP (Different version here: `A real-life Frankenstein started the disease. I believe AIDS has been man-made. AIDS was started by human beings—maybe even one person—in a Frankenstein sort of way to get certain people they didn't like.')
• 1991 Nov: USGS uncovers just west of San Francisco 47000 barrels of nuclear waste and a radioactive aircraft carrier that was part of the 1946 Bikini test. EN
• 1991 Dec: Kimberly Bergalis dies. The CDC pins her death on HIV they allege she caught from her dentist four years before.

  Her death became the ultimate symbol of the deadly powers of HIV. No one pointed out that, according to the HIV hypothesis, the virus should take ten years to kill its victims, particularly someone like Bergalis with no other risk factors. She had died within four years of her initial visit to Dr. Acer. As her symptoms would indicate, AZT must have killed her instead…

  The evidence that [HIV] has ever been medically transmitted remains dubious. Based on their own research, insurance companies concluded that the HIV strains in the five patients were different from that in Acer, meaning each caught it from a different source. A study out of Florida State University has backed this conclusion. Even the CDC acknowledged this evidence, though it still preferred to believe the dentist had infected Bergalis. TMH

• Quite possibly the most important court trial of the 1990's (yes, even more relevant than OJ) was E. Howard Hunt vs. The Spotlight newspaper. Although I won't delve into the circumstances surrounding it, juror Leslie Armstrong told The Spotlight in their November 11, 1991 issue, `Mr. Lane [representing the defendant] was asking us [the jury] to do something very difficult. He was asking us to believe John Kennedy had been killed by our own government. Yet when we examined the evidence closely, we were compelled to conclude that the CIA had indeed killed President Kennedy.' This information is extremely important to 20th-century history, yet the mainstream media gave it virtually no coverage due to its explosive nature. GO · NW

  This seems to be the culmination of a 13-a battle. In '78 Spotlight had an article for which Hunt sued, successfully, in '81. In '85 Mark Lane defended Spotlight and got the decsion overturned. WP (No mention by Post of this trial? Perhaps this trial was in '85 and the Spotlight article is about Lane's '91 book)
• GHWB: `My view is we don't want to lift these sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.' Baker: `We are not interested in seeing a relaxation of sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.' But later the lethal consequences of the sanctions are blamed on Saddam for not disarming. FAIR

1992

• MacArthur & Bagdikian Second Front: censorship and propaganda in the Gulf war withering critique of government and media actions that he says misled the public after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. R
• Clancy Sum of All Fears

  The key to it, Qati knew, was whether or not the Americans would put real pressure on the Zionists. They'd never done so. They'd allowed the Israelis to attack an American warship and kill American sailors—and forgiven them before the bleeding had stopped, before the last victim had died. When American military forces had to fight for every dollar of funds from their own Congress, the same spineless body of political whores fell over itself giving arms to the Jews. CH

  (Amazing what one can say so long as one uses the proper mouth.)
• Clinton, on MTV: `The Constitution is a radical document…it is the job of the government to rein in people's rights.' WISC [AMPP says 1993]
• `I want the truth!' `You can't handle the truth!' [A Few Good Men] (Dir by Rob Riener of All in the Family)
• Batman Returns uses `Gulf of Tonkin' and `Reichstag fire' correctly in a sentence. (or something like that =)
• Ben-Menashe Profits of War: inside the secret US-Israeli arms network

  An example, wrote Ben-Menashe, is the case of the Palestinian attack on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. That was, in fact, an Israeli black propaganda operation to show what a deadly, cutthroat bunch the Palestinians were. According to Ben-Menashe, Israeli spymasters arranged the attack through Abu'l Abbas, who, to follow such orders was receiving millions from Israeli intelligence officers posing as Sicilian dons. Abbas…gathered a team to attack the cruise ship. The team was told to make it bad, to show the world what lay in store for other unsuspecting citizens if Palestinian demands were not met. As the world knows, the group picked on an elderly American Jewish man in a wheelchair, killed him, and threw his body overboard. They made their point. But for Israel, it was the best kind of anti- Palestinian propaganda. MM

• Army inquiry finds that lab specimens of anthrax spores, Ebola virus, and other pathogens disappeared from Ft. Detrick during a turbulent period of labour complaints and recriminations among rival scientists. [JR citing HC]
• Whitehouse attempts to have Beth Osborne Daponte fired for estimating more Iraqi civilian casualties than Cheney liked. BW
• Supervision of the dose-reconstruction project is switched from DoE to the Department of Health and Human Services. TCH
• The magician's trade is that of convincing an audience that something has happened that has not. Misdirection is a core tool of the magician.

  Since WWII the US had a very convenient misdirector; communism. Anytime Washington needed to distract its audience, it waved one of its `communism' wands; its favourite being the Soviet Union.

  But now the SU has fallen to pieces, and the US is without a major distractor; `enemy,' or `excuse to beat up the weak.' It'll cast about for a real good one until September Eleventh (OKC will fail to `take'). But in the meantime…

  All during the cold war the Yugoslavs had been relatively independent of the Soviet Union by doing a political balancing act between the superpowers. Now Yugoslavs didn't want to relinquish their independence. The Milosevic government refused to grovel before Washington the way literally every other European government did.

  Such national independence is `the threat of a good example' (cf Cuba) and has always been seen by Washington as a serious political challenge to its imperial authority. So an example must be made of Yugoslavia.

  Therefore, the US creates the Kosovo Liberation Army and lies about mass graves (pity the US mass graves of Iraqis weren't lies) and `ethnic cleansing,' etc. etc. CoT

• Kevin Ingram is overseeing all trading of Goldman Sach's mortgage and asset-backed securities. Mortgage trading is a good money-laundry machine. FTW citing NY Observer
• 1992–1995: The Iraqi National Congress (INC), the US-funded opposition to Saddam's government, uses `Kurdistan' as a base. Kurdish groups contribute forces to a CIA-backed rebel army. PBS
• Jan: `Maybe Bush is taking a hint from the masterful yet disgusting first national campaign of our current president. Then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton rushed home from the campaign trail in January 1992 to oversee the execution of Ricky Lee Rector, a man so severely mentally disabled that he left the pecan pie from his final meal with a guard—Rector wanted to eat it after his execution.' BW
• Jan 22: Op-ed piece in NY Times about GHWB's Halcyon (benzodiazepene) use. A `president with [this] chemical between himself and reality is the last thing America needs.' Halcyon is banned in England and three other countries; the side effects of the tranquilizer/anti-insomniac have led to major litigation around the world. FDA is `frantically' trying to explain their 1982 approval of the drug since the `pivotal study' they cited has been exposed as the work of a confessed fraud. The manufacturer, Upjohn of Kalamazoo, has acknowledged underreporting side effects such as paranoia and memory loss. NB
• Feb 29: An international tribunal convened in New York City condemns GHWB, Cheney, Powell, and others for `major' war crimes in Iraq. WCT (I don't know if there are `minor' war crimes, but deliberate and sustained targeting of civilians sounds major to me.)
• Mar: US finally stops selling chemical weapons to Iraq. [CD quoting Seattle Post Intelligencer 2002 Sep 17] [SH citing Senate C'tee on Banking, Housing, & Urban Affairs] (I've found no mention of these shipments beyond these two articles, esp in the Riegle Report which lists nothing past a bacteria shipment 1989 Nov 28. I think MacKay & Arbuthnot got confused with until the present phrases and a '92 Mar British shipment of Pralidoxine that can be reverse-engineered to create nerve gas.)
• Thimerosal is now considered unfit for a dog. But still fit for a child. VT, PWG
• Powell: I want [the US] to be the bully on the block. [CC citing Armstrong Dick Cheney's Song of America: drafting a plan for global dominance Harper's 2002 Oct p78]
• Mar: Wolfowitz' Defense Planning Guidance, the US-uber-alles forerunner of Rebuilding America's Defenses, leaks to the New York Times, raising dust. ICH
• May: Hooper Bay Alaska finds its water has 150ppm fluoride. Dominic Smith is killed and 290 of the villagers get flulike symptoms simultaneously. G
• May 21: Kissinger, speaking to Bilderbergers, taped by Swiss delegate: `Today Americans would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government.' TO · GM (Compare Göring quote from Nuremburg.) (This is often datelined `Bilderberger conference, Evian, 1991' even though the (doubtful) Rockefeller quote ('91 Jun) is most often datelined `Bilderberger conference, Baden-Baden, 1991' eg)
• Apr 19: First, abortive, raid on the Weavers, Ruby Ridge. [Edgar Steele email] VV

  Mistake #19: You grant the federal government the right to kill you if you are politically incorrect

  In the widely-publicized cases of Ruby Ridge and Waco (and numerous less-known cases), federal officers have murdered men, women and children who committed no capital crimes. In the case of Ruby Ridge, the husband of the murder victim had been charged with illegal firearms sales, a charge which was later dropped. In other words, there was no crime at all, capital or otherwise! But the victim's husband was a white supremacist, so, because you hated him, you didn't care that his wife was shot in cold blood. So much for free speech. AOS

• GHWB, re Iran-Contra: `If the people were to ever find out what we have done, we would be chased down the streets and lynched.' [Sarah McClendon Newsletter]
• June: Owners of Yankee Rowe nuke plant decide to shut 'er down. `Atomic bombardment' had made the 32-a-old reactor vessel too brittle* to use or repair economically. The estimated deconstruction cost is M$247; twice what was planned, thrice what is banked. GSP

  *This is an interesting, oft-mentioned phenomenon an `official' explanation for which I've never encountered. My guess is that the ionizing radiation damages enough molecular bonds and neutron radiation changes enough elements that the metal simply loses its structure; over time the accumulating little flaws where radiation had changed the metal to something brittle begin to connect up.

• June: US ratifies the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. AI (And, as usual, proceeds to ignore it.)
• Jun 1: A first: Rockwell International, fined M$18.5 for environmental violations at Rocky Flats nuke-weapons plant near Denver CO, must pay out of its own pocket. In 20 previous instances when government contractors were fined for illegalities, the Department of Energy paid the fines on behalf of its contractors. GSP
• Jun 5: Enron sends surveyors to Dabhol (near Bombay) to lay out a LNG–electricity convertor which is hoped to meet ±20% of India's power needs in 5 years. FB
• June 9: Koppel, on Nightline: It is becoming increasingly clear that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes through the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy. CD · [DIP citing Baker Iraqgate Columbia Journalism Review]
• Jun 20: Enron and the government of the state of Maharashtra sign a non-binding memorandum of understanding to build the plant. This leads to formation of the Dabhol Power Company (DPC), a joint venture with GE and Bechtel. Enron has a 65% stake. FB
• Jul 2: Ottawa admits to having f*d up and shuts down an `inexhaustible,' 5-century industry, the Grand Bank and area cod fishery. Supposedly for two years; but the cod don't cooperate and the `moratorium' goes on at least ten years. I don't believe it will recover in our lifetimes; other species have taken over the niche. Way to go, Ottawa! We in Atlantic Canada, of course, wouldn't know enough about fishing to have so righteously f*d it up… [Arrrgh! Lloyd Robertson just said (2002 Jul 2 23:25) the government claims it doesn't know why the stocks collapsed. How gullible do they think we are??]
• Jul 13:

  The word radical derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonised by our masters, and no one in politics dares even to use the word favorably, much less track any problem to its root.

  But then, a ruling class that has been able to demonize the word liberal is a master of controlling—indeed stifling—any criticism of itself. Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.

  Meanwhile, isolationist has been revived to describe those who would like to put an end to the national security state that replaced our Republic a half-century ago… [Vidal United States p1048]

  (Vidal doing some of his best Chomsky. I thought of the radical part myself, a few months before reading this.) (I'm a lifelong agitator, a radical. A rebel is just against things for rebellion's sake. By radical, I mean someone who goes to the roots. IMDB I allus did like Will Geer.)
• Jul 30: C. Victor Raiser II, son Montgomery, and five others die in private-plane crash is Alaska. No cause is ever announced. C. V. was a `major player' in the Clinton machine, and national finance co-chair of the presidential campaign. DM
• Aug: Brig. Gen. R. S. Bowen of the OSS, The Immaculate Deception: the Bush crime family exposed&warn; confessing his `drug-running on behalf of a secret government' and the connexions with the `Bush crime family' and even Rudolph Guiliani.
• Aug 21: Ruby Ridge incident. `Sammy Weaver [age 14] was ambushed and fatally shot in the back by two US Marshals. And lest anyone accuse the US Marshals of not being thorough in the performance of their assigned tasks, I would point out that they also shot the dog, also in the back.' X
• Sep 24: Paul Tully/Tulley, Clinton's `dear friend and trusted advisor,' chief strategist for the DNC, found dead in a hotel room in Little Rock of `unknown causes;' autopsy is disallowed. DM
• Richard Foulkes, who wrote the 2000-page 1973 report which recommended Canada mandate fluoridation, recants. The fluoridation of community water supplies can no longer be held to be either safe or effective in the reduction of dental caries…Therefore, the practice should be abandoned. DW
• AIPAC president David Steiner resigns after being caught on tape boasting about `negotiating' with the Clinton campaign about who'll be Sec'y of State. [WoI p 87 citing Washington Report on Middle East Affairs '94 Feb-Mar]
• Oct 4: Israeli cargo plane collides with highrise in Bijlmer NL. The plane bore 282 kg of dU `ballast' and 190 L of dimethyl methylphosphonate, a `crucial component' of Sarin, destined for the `Israeli Institute for Biological Research' near Tel Aviv. (Notice there have never been overt recriminations on Israel for proven dealing in nerve-gas precursors; compare Sudan.) Some 300 people, mainly rescue workers and local residents, will complain of chronic health problems; neurological complaints, severe headaches, nausea… WSWS Supposedly one starboard engine fell off and took the other with it. X (Be careful. X makes an elementary physics mistake. Mass×velocity is momentum, not energy. Incidentally, I've been told aircraft do get ballast, bizarre as it sounds; it's set in two of the four points to balance the airframe.)
• Nov 24: Sequoyah Fuels' Gore OK U processor, one of two privately-owned US factories of fuel rods and armor-piercing shells, closes for repeated gov't citations for violations of nuclear safety and environmental rules. The plant had been shut down a week before by the NRC when an accident released toxic gas, sending 34 to hospital. L
• Dec 9: Paula Grober, Clinton's deaf-signer, dies in a one-car accident with no known witnesses. Her body was thrown 10 m from the car, indicating a very high speed. She had traveled extensively with Clinton since 1978. DM
• Dec 21: Jim Wilhite, `extensive ties' to Clinton and an associate of Mack McClarty, dies in a skiing accident. WR

• [The so-called 16th amendments was never properly ratified.] In the case of People v. Boxer (December 1992), docket number #S-030016, US Senator Barbara Boxer fell totally silent in the face of an Application to the California Supreme Court by the People of California, for an order compelling Senator Boxer to witness the material evidence against the so-called 16th amendment…

  The material evidence in question was summarized in AFFIDAVIT's that were properly executed and filed in that case. Boxer fell totally silent, thus rendering those affidavits the truth of the case. The so-called 16th amendment has now been correctly identified as a major fraud upon the American People and the US. Major fraud against the US is a serious federal offense. See 18 USC. 1031. [SL]

1993

• Netanyahu chairs Likud Party. L
• UN truth commission on El Salvador names the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of them had been trained at the School of the Americas, Ft. Benning GA. G
• Jan: General Accounting Office Operation Desert Storm: Army Not Adequately Prepared to Deal With Depleted Uranium Contamination (GAO/NSIAD-93-90): `Inhaled insoluble oxides stay in the lungs longer and pose a potential cancer risk due to radiation. Ingested dU dust can also pose both a radioactive and a toxicity risk.' HP
• Jan: W'm Jefferson (Bill, B. J.) Clinton anointed. Gore is V.P. Janet Reno, case-closer for vote fraud in FL VS, his Att'y Gen'l. (Like John Sununu for GHWB?)
• Feb: Enron signs formal agreement to build a Dabhol plant that could generate ±2450 MW at a cost of ±G$3. FB
• Feb 22: Salem 1. automatic shutdown systems fail to act properly. L
• Feb 23: Army UH-60 Blackhawk crashes in Weisbaden; no cause is ever announced. Four die: Maj. Gen. W'm Robertson, Col. W'm Densberger, and Col. Robert Kelly of V Corps; and Gary Rhodes. V Corps figured prominently in the Bosnia–Serbia `peacekeeping,' along with the carrier Roosevelt. DM
• Feb 25: A catastrophe at Salem 1. averted by just 90 seconds when the plant was shut down manually, following repeated failure of automatic shutdown systems. L
• Feb 26: WTC tower truck-bombed in parking garage. Clinton promises to find and punish those responsible. BB A Mossad mole (Ahmad Ajaj) may have been involved even though he's in federal prison. [CR quoting Village Voice citing Israeli intelligence sources] The FBI had an informant in the group who offered to neutralise the bomb; the FBI had other plans. [WRH quoting NY Times 1993 Oct 28 (probably BI)] LL

  The FBI had one of its own informants—former Egyptian Army Colonel Emad Eli Salem—inside the group responsible for the bombing. According to Salem, who made secret tapes of his conversations with his FBI handler, Nancy Floyd, her supervisor refused to let Salem substitute a harmless powder for the real explosive. The agent then pulled Salem off the case. Soon afterwards, the bomb blew up… [OKCBPT citing NY Times, Wall St Journal]

  The CIA supplied the explosives. `That is confirmed by sworn court testimony from the CIA itself; its agents didn't really believe the terrorist cell it had infiltrated would actually use the explosives. ' [IM citing nothing more, unfortunately] Suspect Ramsay Yousseff would ultimately be arrested in Pakistan. NYM Some say a little bigger bomb would've brought the tower down; I doubt it. Building foundations are pretty frigging strong for obvious reasons (they must bear the full weight of the building plus resist wind torque). And the WTC foundations were themselves particularly strong given the permanent coffer dam (called the Bathtub; heavy enough to hold out the East and Hudson Rivers to some 70 ft depth, plus heavy enough more to not act like a ship with 110 storeys of superstructure and sail; and the hydraulic pressures on that dam were held back by the cellar's floors, ie 'twas all tied together) and unusual tower structure (rather than diffusing stresses over an array of columns as in `conventional' framing, the skin-and-core arrangement would concentrate stresses and demand much stronger foundation elements). I'm not an engineer or imploder or anything so I don't know as such, but my gut tells me it'd've taken a directed and or much stronger explosion to down a WTC tower from the cellar. [Nova's tower-fall hour said wind is the `greatest' load a building has to bear.]
• Feb 28: Four former Clinton bodyguards die in the Waco seige, of nearly identical gunshot wounds to the left temple: Steve Willis, Robert Williams, Conway LeBleu, and Todd McKeehan. DM
• Mar 17: Rep. James Traficant, Jr. (OH) describes the US as being in Chapter 11, in part because of the `Federal Reserve System' and its funny money, and begs the people to wake up and take back their country. We are here now in Chapter 11. Members of Congress are official trustees presiding over the greatest reorganization of any bankrupt entity in world history, the US government. [IR citing Congressional Record] [AMPP citing Cong Rec v33 pH1303]
• Mar 18: Clinton omits his connexion with one of the Feb 28 victims. DM
• Mar 26: Five unnamed Navy fliers die in an E-2C Hawkeye crash in Italy shortly after being `waved off' a landing attempt on Roosevelt. All five had been Clinton escorts during his visit to Roosevelt two weeks ago. DM
• Apr 19: SD Gov. and prez elector George Mickelson and seven others die when a state-owned airplane collides with an Iowan silo during a rainstorm. CNN · MP

  Clinton applies CS gas to a Waco TX church congregation, then burns them alive to cover the evidence. For some reason he is never compared to Saddam Hussein. Wesley Clark has some connexion with the mess. APN Cincinnati cop Harry Thomas:

  Has anyone here seen and read the Waco search warrant affidavit? It's crap. It didn't establish enough probable cause to even knock on the Branch Davidians door. When the FBI took over from the BATF (which some people say actually stands for Burn All Toddlers First) they knew that they would find no illegal weapons in the Branch Davidian compound.

  They were between a rock and hard place. 4 ATF men dead, an unknown number of Branch Davidians dead, the FBI had only one choice: destroy the compound, so that no one could ever prove whether illegal weapons were present or not.

  For hours, the FBI pumped supposedly non-lethal CS gas into the compound. Those of us in law enforcement and the military know differently. CS gas, in high concentrations in an enclosed area, is lethal. The first ones to be affected, by vomiting, convulsions, unconsciousness and death, would be the children. The same children that the feds claimed they were trying to rescue from the evil cultists. The same children that local Texas authorities found to be happy and healthy under the care of the Branch Davidians.

  The FBI did not pump CS gas into the Branch Davidian compound to force its occupants to come out. They pumped that gas in to make sure the occupants couldn't come out.

  In Waco, the crime was that David Koresh, the leader of the community there, according to the press, declared himself to be Christ. Did he really say this? What's the difference? It's legal in America. Like the real Christ, he was murdered for what he said. It wasn't a capital crime then, and it isn't now. AOS

  Actually, the purported justifications for the Waco massacre were a cache of weapons which was known to the local constbulary and perfectly legal; and save the children although the claims of child abuse are dubious, esp compared to other groups which have yet to be set afire, and this was certainly a curious solution.
• Apr: World Bank manager for India Heinz Vergin rejects Enron's loan application, saying that the Dabhol plant is `not economically viable.' FB
• Apr 8: Police serve search warrants on the Anti-Defamation League in San Francisco and Los Angeles, seizing evidence of a nationwide intelligence network accused of keeping files on more than 950 political groups, newspapers, and labor unions and as many as 12000 people. SanFran authorities simultaneously released voluminous documents telling how operatives of the ADL search through trash and infiltrated organizations to gather intelligence an `Arab-American, right-wing, pinkos' like Greenpeace, NAACP, United Farm Workers, Jewish Defense League, Mills College, KQED, and SF Guardian, Lyndon LaRouche. [ADV citing LA Times Apr 9]
• May 18: James Wilson found hanging. He was reported to have ties to Whitewater. P · LM
• May 19: Four men that escorted Clinton on Roosevelt die in helicopter crash near Quantico. Crash-site security is tight, no reporters, lots of Marines with guns. DM
• May 28: Banjawarn case: Something radiates shockwaves across hundreds of miles of Australian outback. Around the same time, truck drivers crossing the region and gold prospectors camping nearby see bright flashes in the dark sky, and they and others hear the distant rumble of loud explosions. Aussie (Harry Mason) and US investigators eventually speculate the upheaval was the work of the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo group (to be accused of the poison-gas attack on Tokyo subways in 1995), which had set up an advanced laboratory on a .5 megacre property near the event. Seismic work placed the origin 28.47°S 121.73°E. Note that quakes were very rare in the region and night mine blasting prohibited. SD · NDM If meteors are the source of these observations then lately we appear to be continually encountering a very odd species of meteor that exhibits a previously undocumented very exotic behavior and a very high statistical rate of arrival in Australia—apparently largely ignoring the rest of the world. C
• May 28: Nuclear Regulatory Commission warns operators of 34 GE water-boilers that the instruments for reactor water levels used pipes which were prone to gas-bubble blockage which would mask falling water levels during routine shutdowns and fail to detect important leaks. L
• May 29: Clinton: You know the one thing that's wrong with this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say. AMPP
• Jun 3: Assemblyman John V. Kelly, at press conference, requests the FDA remove all children's fluoride supplements from the market. He'd asked the FDA to supply his office with the studies supporting the safety and effectiveness of children's fluoride supplements and the FDA replied that no drug applications had ever been filed for these prescription drugs. All children's fluoride supplements, in the FDA's words, were unapproved new drugs. G
• Jun 14: Gonzalez sputters about the Fed. That is one reason I introduced an impeachment resolution on Chairman Volcker…Of course, nobody paid much attention, but…I have said that the Federal Reserve is really not a federal agency, which it really is not. How then could I impeach Volcker? [S citing Congressional Record]
• Jun 22 or 23: Att'y Paul Wilcher found dead on a toilet in his Washington apartment. No cause of death is ever reported by the coroner. He was investigating connexions between the October Surprise during the 1980 federal election campaign and drug and gun-running out of Mena, Arkansas, as well as the Waco assault; and planned on producing a television documentary on his findings. Three weeks ago he had delivered a 105-page affidavit to Janet Reno detailing the evidence he had collected regarding the Mena drug operation. a 105-page affidavit · DM
• Schindler's List, `Shown in theatres, free, to nearly 2 million students through the cooperation of this nation's governors.' [Spielberg, introducing the US network premiere*] It impresses on the mind the holocaust (which is good) but ignores the nonJewish victims (which is bad), and the US' role in establishing the Nazis and exploiting the slave labour of the camps (which may be worse), leaving the impression that the US was a great liberating `good guy,' which (apart from the pressure from the Zionist lobby) is probably why the US' governors were willing to `cooperate' in exploiting the film's propaganda value. Notwithstanding; what bothers me, watching it now, is how likely we're going to see it all again very soon. And who'll stop the US this time? China?
  * sponsored by Ford. Henry Ford was one of the great American antiJudists. Ford Motors was a major supplier to for both sides of the war. (Interesting critique here, which questions even the Talmudic accuracy of the ring's inscription. `[SL] depicts every member of the German military as either a monster or a homicidal robot. The perpetuation of this false stereotype constitutes hate propaganda.' (Actually I think that's slightly exaggerated—I thought the soldier that was playing Bach through the mop-up massacre was zoning out of the horror in one of those screwball ways humans find when trapped. If I misinterpreted, it's Spielberg's failure as a director, yes? :) It also mentions the anti-jew Nazi-Zionist collaboration which Brenner tries to remember.)
• Jul 8: Father of FBI operative Darlene Novinger dies four hours after she appears on Tom Valentine show. BK
• Jul 20 or 21: Clinton aide Vincent Foster is found dead, probably murdered, possibly within the Whitehouse. The rest is a tangle of inconsistencies. WRH The first search of his briefcase `missed' his `suicide note,' which had been torn into 28 pieces without leaving any fingerprints. Three `renowned' handwriting experts hired by Strategic Investment declared the note was a bad forgery. DM
• Aug: During refueling, crane collapses onto the reactor core at England's Wylfa facility, nearly causing a meltdown. Covered up for two years. EN
• Aug 15: Jon Parnell Walker, investigating for Resolution Trust Corp. Whitewater subscandal Morgan Guarantee, falls to his death from his Arlington VA apartment balcony. P
• Sep: Burton Pentagon Wars: reformers challenge the old guard. Rivero: Made into a movie by HBO, the movie tells the true story of how the Pentagon spent $14 billion developing the Bradley Infantry fighting vehicle and transformed it from the original economy transport concept to a high-tech monstrosity so overloaded with costly gadgets and gizmos that it was virtually useless. The first attempt to test the supposedly amphibious vehicle resulted in a sinking, and the first live-fire test (the focus of the book and movie story) destroyed the vehicle completely. Another billion dollars in redesign was required to strip the system back down to something more usable.
• Sep 13: Oslo accord. EIR
• Sep 26: Luther/Jerry Parks, head of Clinton's Little Rock security team, gunned down in his car near Jacksonville. Parks is reported to have said `Clinton is cleaning house' about the news of Foster's death. Parks' son said his father was building a dossier on Clinton; after he died the files were mysteriously removed from his house. DM · P
• Israel has `ubiquitous practice of torture' against Palestinian detainees. WR
• Nov: India's Central Electricity Authority gives provisional clearance to the Dabhol project. It is the largest single foreign investment in India. FB
• Nov 22: Dealy Plaza made a nat'l landmark. No one mentioned the assassination. Even the plaque that was set into concrete on the north side of Elm St., just at the base of the Knoll, states for future generations this is now a national landmark for all and was dedicated by Nellie Connally. It makes no mention of JFK or the assassination 30 years ago. PC
• Nov 30: Ed Willey found dead of a shotgun blast to the head in VA deep woods. Real Estate attorney intimately involved in several Clinton fundraising events. Died on the same day his wife was allegedly sexually accosted in the White House by Clinton. DM
• Dec 2: Pablo Escobar's cell phone is triangulated and him killed. FL (This is why Osama avoids electronics.)
• Dec 20: GHWB dubbed Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath.

1994

• Jane's Intelligence Review confirms Israel has at least 200 nuclear warheads, making it 6th-rank nuclear power. G
• &rad;This is the first year vehicular barriers are required at US nuke plants. TMIA
• Three days after her article on fluoride's bad effect on IQ was accepted by the Journal of Neurotoxicology and Teratology, Dr. Phyllis Mullenix is fired by the Forsyth Institute because her research is not `dentally related,' even though Forsyth had assigned her this research in the first place. Soon after, Forsyth gets a k$250 reward grant from Colgate. FA
• Revised dose-reconstruction estimates are unveiled. Revised estimates are lower for people near Hanford and higher for people living farther downwind. In the final official estimate Hanford released 739 kCi of iodine-131. TCH (One curie (Ci) was the radiation of 1 g pure radium; now taken as 37 gigabecquerels. One becquerel (Bq) is similar to the hertz (Hz); one nuclear disintegration per second. I assume `739 kCi of iodine-131' means the quantity of I-131 that has an initial decay rate of 27.3 PBq. I-131 has a half-life of 8.00 days [CRC 65th Hdbk of Chem & Phys p B-361]. I figure total atoms = half-life × initial rate ÷ ln(2); to get 2.73×10²² atoms, or 45.3 millimoles, or almost 6 g I-131; as a gas, about half a litre at STP. Sounds a boring small amount about which to get in a tizzy. Which is probably exactly why they thought it was okay to do this. (On the other hand, 1 Ci I-131 `could make 10 billion quarts of milk unfit for continuous consumption' even by the lax standards of the '60s. SF On the first hand, other US reactors habitually released hundreds of kilocuries a year, making Hanford look like a firecracker. On the other hand again, that's not exactly reassuring.) To check: Ra-226 has ½life 1620 a [B-31] and 1 Ci is thus 2.72×10²¹ atoms, 4.5 mmol, 1.02 g. Close enough. I've neglected the decay sequence; but as near as I can find out I-131 decays by electron emission to Xe-151, which is stable. [CRC 65th Hdbk Chem & Phys B-269, 270] TQ · OW · DoE If it decayed into something unstable, there'd be more radioactivity to account for. But then it would be less desireable in medicine, too.)

• Early in 1994, [Wesley Clark] was a candidate for promotion from two- to three-star general. Only one hurdle remained—a war-game exercise known as the Battle Command Training Program in which Clark would have to maneuver his division against an opposing force. The commander of the opposing force, or OPFOR was known for the military skill with which he routinely demolished opponents.

  But Clark's patrons on high were determined that no such humiliation should be visited on their favorite. Prior to the exercise therefore, strict orders came down that the battle should go Clark's way. Accordingly, the OPFOR was reduced in strength by half, thus enabling Clark, despite deploying tactics of signal ineptitude, to triumph. His third star came down a few weeks later. CP

• The first results were published in 1994, and they were devastating. The HIV-infected villagers of Masaka were dying at a rate fifteen times higher than their uninfected neighbors. Young adults with the virus in their bloodstream were sixty times more likely to perish. Overall, HIV-related disease accounted for a staggering forty-two percent of all deaths. The AIDS dissidents were crushed, HIV theory was vindicated. If there are any left who will not even accept [this], commented the US Centers for Disease Control upon the release of the results, their explanation of how HIV-seropositivity leads to early death must be very curious indeed.

  Clearly, only a fool would second-guess such powerful evidence, so I just visited the villages where Mulder's work was done, verified what he'd found and headed back toward the airport, my story about Mbeki's stupidity back on track. But on my way I spent an hour or two in Uganda's Statistics Office, and what I learned there changed things yet again.

  In 1948, Uganda's British rulers attempted a rough census in the Masaka area and concluded that the annual death rate was a minimum of 25-30 per thousand. A second census, in 1959, put the figure at 21 deaths per thousand. By 1991, it had fallen to 16 per thousand. Enter Daan Mulder with his blood tests, massive funding and armies of field workers. He counted every death over two years, and then five, and here is his conclusion: The crude annual death rate in Masaka, in the midst of a horrifying AIDS plague, was 14.6 per thousand—the lowest ever measured. AAW

• With a technique called `gene tracking,' Dr. Garth Nicolson at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston TX discovers that many returning Desert Storm veterans are infected with an altered strain of Mycoplasma incognitus, a microbe commonly used in the production of bioweapons. Incorporated into its molecular structure is 40% of the HIV protein coat, indicating that it had been man-made. Senator John D. Rockefeller issues a report revealing that for at least 50 years the Department of Defense has used hundreds of thousands of military personnel in human experiments and for intentional exposure to dangerous substances. Materials included mustard and nerve gas, ionizing radiation, psychochemicals, hallucinogens, and drugs used during the Gulf War. HNN
• 172 participants die in the Concorde trials, the only long-term study of AZT. Only 3 were on placebo. [SoD citing Lancet 343:871–81]
• Washington-based Export-Import Bank approves a M$302 loan toward a G$3 Enron-controlled power plant in India. (Dabhol?) Clinton takes an interest, and asks his adviser and former chief of staff Thomas F. McLarty to monitor the proposal. FB
• Jan 8: Gandy Baugh, attorney for Dan Lasater in a case concerning alleged financial misconduct, dies by falling from a window of a multi-storey building. Lasater was convicted of distributing cocaine and a close associate of Gov. Clinton. DM
• Feb 9: Gandy Baugh's law partner allegedly commits suicide. DM
• Feb 25: Baruch Goldstein, a `fanatical' Israeli settler of the Kach movement and charter member of the JDL, guns down several (one says 29, the other 50) Muslims at prayer in a Hebron mosque. This `triggered the beginning of the Palestinian suicide bombings, two months later.' EIR `The attack came at the precise time when Rabin and Arafat began the implementation of the Oslo agreement.' AN · [IM citing ABC News '02 Mar 19 and JDL's website] (to self: find that site)
• Project Dipole Might: BATF starts blowing up ANFO truck bombs at the White Sands Missile Range, supposedly to prepare a forensics kit for the Nat'l Response Team even though `the only major ANFO vehicle bombing in US history' is '70 Aug. (The Feb WTC bombing was urea nitrate.) This work just happens to finish in time for the OKC bombing. CTI
• Mar 1: Hershell Friday, attorney and Clinton fund raiser, dies when his plane explodes. Cause unknown. DM
• Mar 31: Fire at Long Is. nuclear research facility (Millstone?) results in contamination of 3 firefighters, 3 reactor operators, and a technician. Measurable amounts of radioactivity are released. L
• Apr 6-Jul: Massacre/genocide in Rwanda, directed primarily at the minority Tutsi ethnic group, but also against those from the Hutu majority who opposed the killings or had been active in the pro-democracy movement. UN

  The UN missed a similar opportunity to prevent [an] act of genocide in Rwanda in 1994. President Clinton did not want the UN to intervene. He feared that invoking the UN's Genocide Convention would mean sending American troops again to Africa in the aftermath of the Somalia débacle. The UN commander in Rwanda, Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, had 2500 troops. He pleaded with the chief of peacekeeping in New York for another 3000, plus armoured cars and other protective equipment, to prevent the genocide that his informants assured him was on the way…More than 800 000 Rwandans were butchered by Hutu extremists using rifles, machetes and knives.

  The US, Belgium and France were informed about conditions in Rwanda. So was the head of UN peacekeeping, Kofi Annan. Neither Annan nor the US ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, informed the UN or called for an emergency session. Annan became UN Secretary General. Albright was appointed Secretary of State by Bill Clinton, who went on to win a second term of office. The lesson was: keep quiet, ignore genocide and win promotion. O

  On the fifth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, Human Rights Watch called on the US government to order a thorough and transparent inquiry into the US failure to respond to that catastrophe…A comprehensive study of the genocide published last week by Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues showed that the US saw saving money as more important than saving lives both before and during the tragedy.

  In a visit to Rwanda last year [1998], President Clinton admitted he and his administration refused to heed cries for help from genocide victims. Alison Des Forges, author of the genocide study entitled Leave None to Tell the Story, said that Clinton's admission was not enough. US authorities must go beyond easy, generic apologies. Only if we really look at what went wrong can we learn the necessary lessons for the future.

  The US is the only major international actor in the genocide not to have agreed to investigate its role…

  (The US and its shills love to cite the Rwandan mess as reason to ignore the SC re Iraq 2002–3. In fact the SC did no less, and sometimes more, than USUK wanted; and then USUK were very slow to back SC resolutions with actions, in fact I don't think they ever provided troops.)
• Apr:

  The Final Act of the Uruguay Round, marking the conclusion of the most ambitious trade negotiation of our century, will give birth—in Morocco—to the World Trade Organization, the third pillar of the New World Order, along with the UN and the International Monetary Fund. [AMPP citing full-page NY Times ad by Moroccan gov't]

• Apr 14: Two US fighters shoot down as many US helicopters. [DB
• Apr 29: Boutros-Ghali writes stern letter to Security Council to act re Rwanda.

  Notes on the discussions within the Security Council in the days following the Secretary-General's letter show a body divided on a number of issues: on whether an intervention should take place, and if so, how to describe the strength of the action (countries such as Brazil, China and the United Kingdom are reported to have argued against too strong an interventionist wording regarding the role of the UN), the possible role of regional actors, the question of the arms embargo. On 3 May, the US gained some support for an idea to send a Security Council team to the region to seek information about the situation, an idea that the United Kingdom objected to, and which was not pursued…

  The Council President suggested that the Council write to the Secretary-General asking him to submit contingency planning to the Council and a recommendation on the mandate of an expanded UN presence. At the suggestion of the United Kingdom, the request was not formalized but worded as a request for a non-paper… [X emphases mine]

  (It appears the UK should not talk too wise about the SC's indecisiveness.)
• May: Open fighting breaks out between the two major Kurdish factions, the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union for Kurdistan. PBS
• May 11: Kathy Ferguson, ex-wife of state trooper Danny Ferguson, packs several suitcases and then shoots herself behind the left ear with a gun found in her right hand. PR She was a witness for Paula Jones in the sexual-harassment suit alleging D. Ferguson escorted Jones to a hotel room for an episode of sexual harassment by then-Governor Clinton. DM
• May 3: Cancelled premiere of Yorkshire TV's Conspiracy of Silence. Discovery Channel yanks the documentary on the GHWB-linked pædophile ring under threat of restrictive legislation. JG Unknown persons acquire the rights and almost all copies are destroyed. LP
• May 11:

  When the Council started discussing the non-paper, the Secretariat reported to the Secretary-General that several members had expressed support for the concept in the non-paper. Without actually objecting to that concept, the US highlighted a wish to explore the possibility of creating a protective zone along the Rwandan border with an international force to provide security to populations. The US representative stated that such a mission might require fewer troops and be less complex than some of the other proposals being discussed. However, the idea of protective zones around the borders drew criticisim from Dallaire in a cable dated 12 May. X

• May 13:

  The final day of consultations focussed largely on amendments presented by the US to the draft resolution. The US proposals contained i.a. an explicit reference to the need for the parties' consent, the postponement of later phases of deployment pending further decisions in the Council and requirement that the Secretary-General return to the Council with a refined concept of operations, including among other elements the consent of the parties and available resources.

  According to the Secretariat's notes, a number of delegations questioned the advisability of seeking clear consent from the parties. France and New Zealand had difficulties with the concept of deploying only a small number of military observers and one infantry battalion and delaying the rest of the deployment, as proposed by the US. X

• Jun: Bill Shelton, Arkansas state trooper, `shoots himself' in the back of the head at the grave of fiancée Kathy Ferguson. DM
• Jun 3: EO 12919: Directs various Cabinet officials to be constantly ready to take over virtually all aspects of the US economy during a State of National Emergency at the direction of the president. T
• Jun 12: Al Gore: `I want to extend condolences to the families of those who died in the service of the UN.' (The 15 US servicemen died enforcing the Iraq `no-fly zones,' which the UN disavows.)
• Jul 25:

  By 25 July, over two months after resolution 918 (1994) was adopted, UNAMIR still only had 550 troops, a tenth of the authorized strength. Thus the lack of political will to react firmly against the genocide when it began was compounded by a lack of commitment by the broader membership of the UN to provide the necessary troops. X

  (The US was as content to leave Rwandans to their fate as everyone else. It should not cite Rwanda when uppitay about everyone else's supposed inaction re Iraq. Incidentally, that pitiful 550 was over 5 times what the US initially suggested: The reconnaissance mission had estimated that a force of 4,500 troops was required to fulfil the mandate in Rwanda. However, the Secretariat believed that it would not be possible to get Council support for that number of troops. This picture of the political commitment at the time was probably correct: the US delegation had suggested to the UN that a symbolic presence of 100 be sent to Rwanda. If the mandate which the Security Council gave UNAMIR in its resolution 872 (1993) was more limited than the Secretary-General's proposal to the Council, then it was even more distant from the original broad concept agreed on by the parties in the Arusha Accords…The US presented a number of amendments to the draft resolution which weakened the mandate, including in relation to the disarmament of civilians… Discussions within the Security Council during these first weeks of the genocide show a body divided between those, such as the US, who were sympathetic to the Belgian campaign to withdraw the mission… [same source])
• Jul 26: Israeli embassy in London bombed. Two Palestinians are convicted despite alibis and circumstantial evidence. TILL `The person who is accused of being behind the bombing…Rida Maghribi, was an agent recruited by the Mossad and was assigned by Israeli foreign intelligence for that purpose. The paper added that behind such an act, Israel was seeking to distort the image of the Palestinians in Britain and the western countries.' AN citing British Independent 1998 Oct 22]
• Sep 8: Plane crash kills 131, including federal witness Paul Olsen who had had just finished two days of FBI interviews. DM
• Loftus & Aarons Secret War Against the Jews

  It was Bush who fulfilled Nixon's promise to make the ethnic emigés a permanent part of Republican politics. Bush's tenure as head of the Republican National Committee exactly coincided with Laszlo Pasztor's 1972 drive to transform the Heritage Groups Council into the party's official ethnic arm. The groups Pasztor chose as Bush's campaign allies were the emigé Fascists whom Dulles had brought to the US…Nearly twenty years later, and after exposés in several respectable newspapers, Bush continued to recruit most of the same ethnic Fascists, including Pasztor, for his own 1988 ethnic outreach program when he first ran for President…[One] group of suspected Nazi war criminals, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, participated in a 1983 White House meeting with George Bush and Ronald Reagan. One photo of the meeting was signed: To the Honorable Yaroslav Stetsko, With Best Wishes, George Bush. BN

• Oct: North Korea negotiates in good faith with US representatives for ½Gg/a of oil in exchange for shutting down their existing reactors until the first of two LWR reactors built to replace them is ready, by 2003. Although US advisors believed it was vital for the US to follow through on this important first major agreement NK had made with the outside world lest they get the idea the world can't be trusted, the US's compliance is spotty whereas NK's is thorough according to the IAEA. Eventually NK begins to get balky, especially after GWB cuts off the oil, and the US accuses NK of blackmail, breaking the agreement, and starving its citizens to fund its military. [Kim's Nuclear Gamble Frontline 2003 Apr 10] (Well, if that isn't Nazis calling the KKK white…)
• Oct: Parade of low-n-slow fireballs over Tom Price, Australia. Came from the general direction of the US base at Exmouth peninsula.
• Nov: Ostrovsky Other Side of Deception: a rogue agent exposes the Mossad's secret agenda Israel would call for Ostrovsky, a Canadian and former Mossad agent, to be murdered for his books. WR
• Dec: G$5.9 Monju breeder closes for at least 2 years after a serious accident releases 2 3 tons of liquid Na. Cover-up resulted in a top official committing suicide. The US media ignore the accident which has crippled Japan's massive breeder program, similar to one being promoted in the US. EN
• Dec: One of Canada's Pickering reactors dumps 140 m³ of radioactive water into the containment vessel. EN
• Dec 10: Yassir Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres receive the Nobel Peace Prize. (WRH claims the committee is having second thoughts about Peres. This may be a piece of sarcasm. Peres expresses the doubts about world opinion that make Sharon blow up at him. Peres will call Jenin a `massacre' while the rest of Sharon's cronies desperately try to convince the world it was some sort of necessary defense…like their bogus preëmptive hit on Egypt. Granted, Peres isn't loud about his reservations, nor fussing about quite the right stuff. But at least he shows some humane sanity.)

1995

• California mandates fluoridation. F
• 14 min to midnight. BAS
• US Government admits that it had offered Japanese war criminals and scientists who had performed human medical experiments salaries and immunity from prosecution in exchange for data on biological warfare research. Dr. Garth Nicolson uncovers evidence that the biological agents used during the Gulf War had been manufactured in Houston TX and Boca Raton FL and tested on prisoners in the Texas Department of Corrections. HNN
• GWB becomes Gov. of Texas. He will put 152 to death and become the most-lethal governor in US history. He will undermine the viability of international law by refusing consular assistance to detained foreigners. BK
• Jan 4: (This is prolly just before GWB but who cares, he sure doesn't make improvements.) TX offs Jesse DeWayne Jacobs. At his trial, the prosecution had argued that `the simple fact is that Jesse Jacobs, and Jesse Jacobs alone, killed Etta Ann Urdiales.' Seven months later Jacobs' sister, Bobbie Jean Hogan, was also put on trial for the murder of Urdiales. Peter Speers, the same DA who had prosecuted Jacobs' case, told the jury that `through the course of it all I have changed my mind about what actually happened. And I'm convinced that Bobbie Hogan is the one who pulled the trigger.' Jesse Jacobs was a `central' witness in Hogan's trial and the prosecution urged the jury to believe him. Bobbie Jean Hogan was convicted of shooting Urdiales and was sentenced to ten years for involuntary manslaughter. Yet Jacobs remained on death row; the prosecution argued that Jacobs was still guilty of a capital offence as an accessory to the murder. However, this argument ignored [the illogic of giving the worse sentence to the lesser crime] and the fact that the jury who sentenced Jacobs to death believed him to be the triggerman in the killing of Urdiales and that the prosecution had put forward two different versions of the killings at the two trials. AI
• Jan 25: &rad;Rocket bearing scientific satellite misidentified as Trident missile by Russians, Yeltsin comes within moments of anihilating the world. NF
• Feb: US authorities name Osama and brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa among 172 unindicted coconspirators in the WTC bombing. [ENC citing Jane's]
• Mar: The Kurdish Democratic Party breaks with the Iraqi Nat'l Congress after the US government fails to back a planned attack on Saddam's forces. PBS

• Despite the obviously irrational cruelty of circumcision, the profit incentive in American medical practice is unlikely to allow science or human rights principles to interrupt the highly lucrative American circumcision industry. It is now time for European medical associations loudly to condemn the North American medical community for participating in and profiting from what is by any standard a senseless and barbaric sexual mutilation of innocent children. [MGMP quoting Fleiss `Circumcision' Lancet Apr 8]

• Apr 17: Planeload of top US Military brass assassinated when their plane blows up by sabotage near Alexander City Alabama. Clark Feister, an assistant Secretary of the Air Force, close friend of the then Secretary of Defense Perry; Major General Glenn Profitt II, director of plans and operations for the Air Education and Training Command at Randolph Air Force Base, San Antonio TX. WA
• Apr 19: Murrah federal building of Oklahoma City is destroyed. Alan Whicher is the only `agent' killed; he had been transferred from charge of Clinton's SS detail in October. DM [rewrite the rest to reflect this find.] A Tim McVeigh, caught by a state trooper for lacking a license plate (compare Final Jihad 1991), will take the fall for it. US racism shows in the initial suspicion of Arabs. (Maybe it was a diversionary tactic. But both are silly idears. Why in * would Arabs care about such an obscure building?) There is a squall about the Internet being a source of dangerous information, but it's not like this mixture is a big secret (see 1960s) especially in the south (see 1947, 1973). `Dynamite is still used, but has now been replaced widely by ammonium nitrate.' CA Big burly cop Terrence Yeaky tearfully tells his wife `It's not true. It's not what they are saying. It didn't happen that way.' [APFN quoting PS] Questions arise about why shortly beforehand a nearby military base was playing with a truck twin to the one carrying the bomb. WRH [There's mention of `proof' Washington knew it was going to happen; note to self: track it down. It's probably to do with none of the several FBI personnel based in the building being `in' at the time, and the moved/lost files. In any case, mistrust of Washington was alive and kicking at this time, but of course the US was seeded on principles of misturst of government.]

  [I went looking for a dissenting book, Oklahoma City: What Really Happened? by OK State Sen. Charles Key [IR] but the closest match at Amazon is Final Report on the Bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building&warn; by Rep. Charles Key. Also available here. I think what I thought was a book is actually a VHS tape.]

  Of course there's the `motive' question; why in blazes would Washington want to blow up its own building, employees, citizens, and their children? Well…terrorism is terrorism, whether internal or external in origin—recall that the war on `terrorism' is not new—and makes a handy excuse to `update' a slew of important laws and liberties in an otherwise unpopular direction. (In this case the `Omnibus Counterterrorism Act,' which `wipes out the 4th & 5th Amendments.' D) Also it makes the public more accepting of the gov't playing at urban warfare in their midst. Frank Morales wrote a good essay about the latter.

  It's also just possible that it intended to have this stuff, real live terrorist bombs, heroically found at the last minute, not actually blow anyone up. That would be almost as effective at pushing that bill through. Or it may have been some sort of `sting operation' but I'm too dim to see how that would work out.

  A blast-effects study was done at Eglin AFB that `proves' the one truck bomb could not have brought down the building as happened. But I saw a documentary somewhere that the building was constructed with a pour-and-jack method for the floors (perhaps like the one in M$'s favourite time-lapse of the Redmond campus being built?) which left a relatively fragile floor–column connexion. The method is now prohibited in earthquake areas and possibly totally banned, I don't remember. IIRC there was also something about a couple of unusually long façade spans; and this doco acknowledged the Eglin results. So who is right??

  But there seem to be at least three recordings indicating a second explosion; a lawyer's dictation tape, the OK Water Board tape, and seismic records. WRH There's lots of sworn testimony and documentation that at least two other bombs were present. WRH And how did Candy Avey get blown away from the building if she was between it and the `truck' and there was no other, earlier explosion? D The Athenian restaurant sat ±45 m northwest of the Murrah Building and was almost completely destroyed. Pieces of the Murrah Building wound up in the Athenian. OCBPT (I know, there are stories of freakish reärrangements in the Halifax explosion (1917), but…altogether it sure smells to me.) The infamous axle with the VIN number that was supposed to be underneath the bomb was initially found two blocks away; then later `found again' atop a nearby car. And the bomb in the WTC went off right next to a column, and took out several floors; but no columns. Yet we're meant to believe that in OKC a comparable bomb took out comparable columns over 15 m away. None of the ATF and FBI that worked there, nor any of the children they usually had in the daycare, were killed. D More APFN

• Apr 22: The Murrah `car' bomb becomes a `truck' bomb. The invisible crater finally reveals itself. [D citing many media]
• May: Philip Schneider says that the physical evidence of `melted' concrete and `extruded' rebar in the WTC bombing indicate a small nuclear device. No way a Ryder truckload of ANFO could do it. Nor could a Ryder bomb do the OKC job. Trouble is, his claims in general are straight out of X-Files. [several copies: X · X · X · X] Besides I thought it was Harold Edgerton that made those highspeed cameras. And why would Germany waste a theoretician of Philadelphia-Experiment calibre on Uboat captain? But why kill such an otherwise obvious total wacky wingnut, who expected to die of natural causes in six months (in fact he got seven)? HL · JR (A friend o' mine suggested a cunning plan: If `they' killed him, it would look like they wanted to shut him up because he actually had something to spill. So: do an obvious job of killing him, and people will waste time trying to figure out what he knew and look in all the wrong places. Judging by the number of Schneider pages it worked. 'Course, Lord he'p us, he may also have been genuine.) Among his list of contractors in stealth programs are two oddballs: Wackenhut Security Systems (of which I've read in an Atlantic Monthly, they're near-monopoly in the incarceration industry) and Ryder Trucks. Someone else was puzzling about why so many of these terrorists use a yellow Ryder Truck. Why never a UHaul, or one of Ryder's white trucks? And he mentions an earthquake generator. I must check into the recent Afghanistan quakes.

  One `simple' question to answer: is there such a thing as a nuclear device small enough to do what he claims? The masses of U and Pu in the '45 bombs, and the respective yields, should be `well-known' by now. So should the critical masses of U and P. The yield should be nicely proportional to the mass od the core. Calculate the minimal yield…

  Unless you can get less yield with a sub-critical core and some sort of neutron generator…

  I found Schneider-free pages that mention Rhyolite in security-related context: AIIPOW&MIA · ditto, notes Another mention of Rhyolite intel satellites: CVNI

  Yike: Schneider mentions railway cars outfitted with shackles.

  Investigators found this rail car, equipped with shackles, parked in an isolated area on the train tracks. It appears to be designed to transport prisoners. TM

• May 1: Perth event: huge UFO takes strange interest in Perth, Australia. Only about half the city of a million notice it booming and shaking the place up circa 2am. Explained away as a Mt meteor explosion although it was subsonic and moved erratically. C (compare Banjawarn)
• May 15: Robert Louis Harding, the pilot thought to have photographed the yellow Ryder truck at Camp Gruber about two weeks before the OKC bombing, dies after his plane crashed on a road near that same `bomb-making' compound. PP
• May 23: Last of the Murrah building is demolished, DK the evidence is buried near OKC and guarded? S Is this like the `burial mound' to be installed over Estonia?
• Jun 26: There is nothing secret about the biotelemetry chip. Ads for commercial [albeit somewhat simpler] versions of the device have appeared in national publications. Time magazine ran an ad for an implantable pet transceiver in its June 26, 1995 issue—ironically enough—opposite an article about a militia leader who was warning about the coming New World Order. OKCBPT
• Jul: Naeim Giladi Ben Gurion's Scandals: How Haganah & Mossad eliminated Jews
• July: Netherlands arrests Daniel Spiegelman for trafficking in stolen diamonds and antiques. Reno quietly requests an extradition in connexion to OKC, insisting on absolute secrecy. The Dutch refuse to work in camera, the media get wind of it, and Reno drops the request. I
• Aug: Treasury Sec'y Robert Rubin and Energy Sec'y Hazel O'Leary personally urge India to accept Enron's proposed project. FB
• Aug 9: Netscape IPO. E
• Sep 24: Howard D. Chumley killed when the plane he's piloting from Amarillo to Guthrie dives into a field. He had refused to falsify injury reports on OKC BATF agents, and was threatening to blow the whistle on a colleague for such falsification. [I quoting Spotlight '97 May 19]
• Oct: Indian PM Rao and Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati discuss alternate routes for NG pipeline, including one which would run through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. FB
• Oct 3: The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments delivers its report to Clinton. DL A couple hours later the OJ verdict kills any chance of it appearing in the news. C (Related executive dictat 12975 issued the same day.)
• Nov 4: Israel PM Yitzhak Rabin assasinated `by his extreme right wing.' EIR There was a Shin-Bet mole, Avishai Raviv, in the `ultra-nationalist' group but he apparently didn't inform on the assassin, Yigal Amir. T Amir got so close `Rabin felt the gun before he felt the bullet.' T

  I quickly gathered proof that our government told not a word of truth about the real circumstances of his demise. And for this I was vilified in the Israeli media…But I could almost count myself lucky. My partner in Inside Israel, Joel Bainerman, flew to Washington in 1992 to research his book on the Bush era, Crimes of a President. Before anyone else, he reported on the Clinton/Bush cocaine ring run through the airport at Mena, Arkansas. He was the first to reveal the murder of Amiram Nir, a senior advisor to Shimon Peres and a major player in Iran Contra. He blew the lid off the involvement of Peres and Rabin in all that was Iran Contra: arms for hostages, drugs for money for guns for control.

  While in Washington an admirer gave him a gift: a necktie. He even fit it around his neck. That very night, Joel's neck swelled so frighteningly that he called his wife to tell her something was wrong. Four months later he had cancer in the glands of his neck which spread throughout the lymphatic system…

  There is murder in the air in Israel. Former Interior Minister Arieh Deri suffered a loss a while back, when after his wife's adoptive mother refused to sign an affadavit testifying that she gave him all the money he was accused of stealing from the Israeli Treasury, she was run over by an employee of one of his cronies. Rabin's Deputy Defence Minister Motta Gur committed suicide because of his cancer. Only his doctor told reporters his cancer was cured. Two of Rabin's bodyguards also committed suicide. One of them Yoav Kuriel, did so by shooting himself in the chest seven times. A very persistent suicide. JR

• `Software retail stores open at midnight so that people can rush off with a new Windows '95 package the very minute it is released[. I]t's obvious that OS [selection] is no longer based on common sense or rational decisions, but merely on a stampeding software market that has been hyped into hysteria. It's obvious that something here is very, very wrong.' X (And if it can be done for OSs, it can be done for other things.)
• Oct–Dec: US Army develops dU training regimen in response to the GAO's '93 Jan report. But the product is hardly ever used. ICH
• 1995? Nov 28: Federal court of the Southern District of NY (95 Civ. 0157 JES) bans all US distribution of the Ellison & Duesberg AIDS book. APFN

1996

• &rad;Tunnelling at Yucca Mountain produces geochemical data which can no longer be ignored by the DoE indicating `bomb pulse' Cl-36 had made its way into the tunnel and appeared to be coincident with many fault and fracture zones. [S quoting NV] (ie, this planned nuclear-waste dump had much more connexion with the damn groundwater than DoE wants you to know.)
• (perhaps '97): Arafat calls elections as required by Oslo. Hamas calls for a boycott in protest; but Arafat wins handily. [Frontline]
• Ullman, Wade, & Edney Shock and Awe: acheiving rapid dominance
• School shootemup, Dunblane Scotland. The gunman Thomas Hamilton has a few known mysterious ties with the powers-that-be; other ties are suspected to be the reason for a 100-year secrecy imposed on some of the evidence at the public inquiry. There has been much speculation about the identity of the politicians in the report. It is known that in June 1996 Michael Forsyth, then Scottish secretary and MP for Stirling, congratulated Hamilton on running a boys' club in Dunblane. G
• FDA approves Cidofovir aka Vistide as a treatment for cytomegalovirus retinitis, which so-called AIDS patients are supposed to get.

  When Vistide has been used in humans, such as AIDS patients, the side effects have been numerous and often life-threatening. According to the Physicians' Desk Reference… the side effects of Vistide include toxicity to the kidneys resulting in kidney failure leading to dialysis and death, abdominal pain, sarcoma (cancer), sepsis (generalized total body infection), death, congestive heart failure, hypertension, shock, fainting, rapid heart rate, migraine, colitis, dysphagia (difficulty swallowing), fecal incontinence, enlarged liver and spleen, jaundice, liver damage, pancreatitis, gastrointestinal bleeding, a blood cell panel indistinguishable from some types of leukemia, amnesia, convulsions, delirium, dementia, depression, hallucinations, hemiplegia (paralysis on one side of the body) asthma, hemoptysis (coughing up blood), pneumothorax (collapsed lung)

  Vistide is very carcinogenic. Normal two-year studies in rats and mice could not be carried out. They had to be terminated at 19 weeks because so many female rats developed mammary adenocarcinomas… GNAG

• This obsession with weapons—a form of power—is an overcompensation for deep-rooted feelings of inadequacy, added the FBI's Douglas, attempting to drive another nail into McVeigh's coffin.

  One must wonder if an interest in stamp collecting or bird watching—other legitimate hobbies—could be construed as a bid for attention. The author—much more of a trouble maker in his formative years than Timothy McVeigh—personally remembers his own interest in guns, and even military armor. Like motorcycles, fast cars or other macho symbols, such interests pass as one matures. Yet federal authorities, with the backing of the corporate-owned media, attempted to make this a cornerstone of their psuedo-psychological case against McVeigh. He was obsessed with guns, ergo, he is a mad bomber. I doubt if all the gun enthusiasts in the country would be pleased to know they are, by association, being implicated as mad bombers.

  Not to be deterred, Post reporters discovered that young Tim had stockpiled food, camping equipment and weapons in case of a disaster in case of a nuclear attack or the Communists took over the country, said an anonymous neighbor in the Post. Perhaps it made sense that a young boy often forced to fend for himself would fantasize about fighting the world all alone, mused the Post. Fighting the world? Or developing common sense at a young age? In his Media Bypass interview, McVeigh recalled that one of his most vivid memories was the winter blizzard of 1977, which dumped 15 feet of snow on Pendelton, stranding his mother miles away, and knocking out power and phone lines for days. The young, inventive McVeigh responded by helping his father store necessities, even recommending that the older McVeigh purchase a generator.

  Apparently the armchair psychoanalysts of the mainstream press felt this indicative of early creeping paranoia, rather than the natural combination of the active imagination and common sense inherent in a remarkable 9-year-old boy. If the youngster was concerned about Communists, one only need ask where such fears were incubated. OKCBPT

• Department of Defense admits that Desert Storm soldiers were exposed to chemical agents. HNN

• And then there was that bizarre incident in early 1996 when Jacques Chirac went bananas in the Old City of Jerusalem. Peres had sent Yoram Rubin, everybody's prime suspect as Rabin's downfall, to guard Chirac. His French bodyguards informed him who he was and Chirac ran to the nearest reporters nearly crying that he did not need Israeli bodyguards. That he'd feel safer with Arab guards protecting him. JR · JW

• &rad;France gives iodine tablets to people living near reactors. S
• `5/12/96': Albright makes her infamous it's worth it comment about the deaths of a half-million Iraqi children from US sanctions. [X & M citing 60 Minutes]
• John O'Neill describes `new groups that had beaten the Soviets in Afghanistan' (al Qaeda and the Taliban?) `who can assemble quickly and can quickly disperse and are extraordinarily hard to track.' NYM
• T. F. McLarty, who later becomes a paid Enron director, speaks with Ken Lay on several occasions about the Dabhol plant. Four days before India grants approval for Enron's project, the Houston-based firm contributes k$100 to the Democratic Party. FB
• Unocal wins contract for 1617-km pipeline from the Duletabad (Turkmenistan) NG field through Afghanistan and Pakistan almost to India. FB
• Enron signs contract for rights to explore 11 gas fields in Uzbekistan, a project costing G$1.3. The goal is to sell gas to the Russian markets, and link to Unocal's southern export pipeline crossing Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan. FB
• Jan: Ralph W. Yarborough dies. Rode in JFK motorcade JFKDE, testified they came to near or complete halt while the shooting went on. [CSO citing '64 Jul 10 affidavit in WCR] (At least 58 others have said the same. 59) (Also GHWB opponent. GBUB)
• Jan 8: Enron and the state government of Maharashtra reach new agreement to shift some of the construction costs and lower the electricity tariffs. FB
• David Edwards' Burning All Illusions: A guide to personal and political freedom `We can…be controlled by simply not being informed, by limiting our access to the facts so that we perceive no need to be concerned or take action…truth, compassion and understanding seem a side issue and even a hindrance in our lives devoted to improving our standard of living and having fun.' BI (Or, I would submit, by lives programmed toward `being too busy earning a living and minding my own business.')
• Feb: Goldwater, to Dole: We're the new liberals of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that? [PS citing AC] AC
• Mar: Rivers of the Black Moon&warn;
• Mar: Sudan offers to extradite Osama; US declines. `The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict.' (But there was enough to fire on Sudan [ah drat that's later]. And what happened to the charges of 1995 Feb?) `Let him go to Afghanistan.' [ENC citing WP] [NM citing fmr US ambassador to Sudan Tim Carney] [see Feb 2002 NM]
• Apr 3: A converted 737 used by the Air Force crashes while approaching the airport of Dubrovnik, Bosnia. Forty die, including Ron Brown, Commerce Sec'y and former DNC chair. A perfectly cylindrical hole the size of a .45-caliber round was found in the top of his head; no autopsy was performed. He was on the verge of being indicted and had stated his willingness to make a deal with prosecutors. CNN · DM (taking CNN's date instead of DM's) Also aboard, thanks to last-minute wheeling, was Frank Maier, pres of Enserch, Israel's oil-driller. He had been VP at the time Yvonne Fletcher was shot from or from very near Enserch's offices in London. The aircraft was out of position due to tampering with the airport's guidance machines; Niko Jerkuic, the guy in charge of that equipment, just happened to get shot to death before he was questioned in the matter. JV Labelled a suicide. PR The only survivor is stewardess Shelly Kelly; she is fit enough to get herself aboard a rescue helicopter but somehow acquires a neat 8-cm slice in her femoral artery and bleeds to death surrounded by medics. DL
• Apr 24: Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act becomes law. The intent behind the new statute is to increase the number of executions by imposing strict time limits on appeals, to restrict access for prisoners to the federal courts, and to empower the state courts to redress any constitutional violations. Federal courts are now directed to show deference to state court findings. AI
• Apr 28: Martin Bryant goes on shooting spree in Port `Author' Tasmania, wounding 18 and killing 35. (Vialls has pointed out this is an exceedingly suspicious kill ratio, especially given assault rifles, which are designed to wound more than kill.) The Aus gov't bans guns, spends G$½ over 12 mo to buy them back. After another 12 mo, a study shows that after 25 years of steady declines: homicide is up 3,2%; assault up 8.6%; armed robbery up 44%; homicide w/firearms quadrupled in Victoria. `Australian politicians are on the spot and at a loss to explain why no improvement in "safety" has been observed after such monumental effort and expense was successfully expended in "ridding society of guns". Their response has been to "wait longer".' GO

  Recent history is replete with cases of individuals who calmly walk into a restaurant, schoolyard, or post office and inexplicably begin shooting large numbers of people, as though they were in a trance. What appear like gruesome but happenstance events to the casual observer raises red flags to those familiar with CIA sleeper mind-control experiments. Such cases may be indicative of mind-control experiments gone horribly wrong.

  The most recent case was in Tasmania, where Martin Bryant calmly walked around a tourist site in May [sic] of 1996 methodically shooting and killing over 35 people. Interestingly, Bryant was in possession of an assault rifle that had been handed in to police in Victoria as part of a gun amnesty program, but mysteriously wound up in Bryant's hands before the massacre.

  An anti-social loner, Bryant had also recently returned from a solitary two-week trip to the US, ostensibly to visit Disneyland. Australian Customs agents noticed he carried no luggage, and was acting strangely. They took him to the hospital to be examined as a possible drug courier, but found nothing. Had Bryant actually visited Disneyland, or had he visited a different type of playground-one inhabited by the mind-control masters of the CIA?

  In the wake of the massacre, Australia underwent wholesale gun confiscation… OKCBPT

• Hiroshima's Genbaku dome made a World Heritage Site over the objections of the US and China. UNESCO · UNESCO (The US still pretending there was some justification for that Bombing. Myself, I don't care that FDR goaded the Japs into attacking Pearl. I don't care that the Japs had been trying to surrender for at least two months beforehand. I wouldn't care if everything within 10km of the aiming point had been military installations. It was the first time nukes were deliberately applied to huamn beings. That makes it World Heritage. If Lunenburg can be World Heritage (1995), then that ruin must be.)
• May: Netanyahu elected Israeli PM L
• May: Jeremy `Mike' Boorda, Clinton's former Chief of Naval Operations, supposedly commits suicide by shooting himself in the chest with a .38 caliber pistol on his front lawn for the unauthorized wearing of valor pins. This motive is undermined when the Navy issues a report that Boorda had earned the right to wear the pins. LM He may have fired twice rather than be interviewed by Newsweek. WR
• May 6: W'm Colby found dead in an area that had already been thoroughly searched several times since he went missing in April, 20 m from where his canoe had already been found. He had recently become an editor of Strategic Investment, an important financial newsletter which had covered the Vince Foster death in detail. He'd been in charge of the infamous Op. Phoenix during the Vietnam War, in which more than 20,000 South Vietnamese citizens were rounded up, tortured, and executed. For being over-coöperative with congressional investigations, revealing the plans to kill Castro, the spying on American citizens (a direct violation of the CIA charter), and the conducting of biological tests unsuspecting citizens, Ford had replaced him with GHWB as head of the CIA. DM He may have been assisting the flag officers that were plotting to arrest Clinton for treason. SR Lawyer, friend and confidant John DeCamp says that Colby was prepared to disclose that missing POWs were working for a dope smuggling operation orchestrated by Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, and GHWB. BK (see also Kiss the Boys Goodbye) In other words, there was a heap o' power that wanted him dead.
• May 8: Terrence Yeakey found dead, three days before he was to be decorated for valour in his work in OKC ('95 Apr 19). He had: a slash on one wrist and three on the other, two cuts in one elbow vein and four in the other, a stab on each side of his throat near the jugular, rope burns, handcuff bruises, and a temple-to-jaw bullet wound with no powder marks or gun nearby. And supposedly self-inflicted all that before putting a mile of rough terrain and a fence between himself and his car. I [APFN quoting PS]
• May 15: The US refuses to officially acknowledge the Turkish genocide of Armenians earlier in the century. It will refuse again in 2000, although others such as the French, Italians, and Vatican have not refused. GF This is probably to avoid embarassing questions about Clinton's support for Turkey's crushing of its Kurdish population. NC

  In The Holocaust Industry [p69] Norman Finkelstein describes how Israel helped its ally Turkey deny the massacre of one million Armenians in 1915. Acting at Israel's behest, the US Holocaust Council practically eliminated mention of the Armenians in the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Jewish lobbyists in Congress blocked a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide. JR

• May 18: Sudan boots Osama to Afghanistan.
• May 27: Ari Shavit essay in Ha'aretz lamenting Sharon's killing of 100+ Lebanese appears in NY Times:

  We killed them out of a certain naiïve hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own…[emphasis added] JS

  ADM pleas `guilty to a violation of subsection 45(1)(c) of the Competition Act with respect to the sale of lysine in Canada,' agress to fine of M$16 cdn. CA

• May 30: Bilderbergs supposedly meet in Tronnah. IR (hmm Conrad Black…I knew he scared me for a reason. … oh c*p this Bilderberg group is real)
• Jun 25: US military complex in Dhahran is bombed. Osama bin Laden is blamed. Saudi Binladin Group will build the M$150 replacement; Saudi Arabia will foot the bill. [ENC citing AFM] Clinton promises to find and punish those responsible. BB [Economist Sep 15–21 p 18]
• Jul 4: R. William Davis Shadow of the Swastika: the real reason the government won't debate medical cannabis and industrial hemp re-legalization `Documented Evidence of a Secret Business and Political Alliance Between the US Establishment and the Nazis—Before, During and After World War II—up to the Present'
• Jul 9: Melvin Belli dies.

  In 1983 [SS Commander Karl] Wolff made the social pages when he and some of his old SS buddies sojourned on the late Hermann Göring's yacht Carin II of Hamburg. The skipper was Gert Heidemann, an avowed Hamburg nazi. The yacht belonged to the widow, Emmy Göring, whose estate attorney was the celebrated Melvin Belli. Belli has always had an eclectic clientele. He represented Jack Ruby after he shot Oswald. [JFKDE] And he represented actor Errol Flynn's family interests. Flynn (once a close friend of Ronald Reagan) has been identified as having collaborated with the Gestapo. MB

• Jul 15: EO 13010: Directs FEMA to take control over all government agencies in time of emergency. FEMA is under control of executive branch of the government. T
• Jul 17: TWA 800 explodes off Long Is. Sound [check]. The official story is a freak vapour ignition in the centre fuel tank; this leaves as a mystery the zirconium-barium pellets and shrapnel found in many of the bodies. [AIM citing FIRO] But senior Iranians claimed it was one of their shoulder-launch Stingers, and the US is covering up because 1) they don't want a panic in air travel and 2) they don't want to have to explain how US Stingers got into Iranian hands to down a US aircraft. [RCN citing London Times 1996 Aug 25] (On the other hand, 800 was abnormally low for the traffic there and still 900 m higher than a Stinger can reach, the missile hit the cold part of the craft and Stingers are heat-seekers, the missile didn't explode, and the dog didn't bark; all consistent w/shootdown in Naval exercise and counter to terrorism. WRH) That would also explain why the CIA was cooking up hokey explanations of how it all unfolded—hokey as in, for instance, having the plane climb at a rate far beyond the power of its engines. There is much to say the plane was shot down; but the dissent is divided over a deliberate SAM or military training/testing accident. Even an NTSB official (investigator Vernon Grose) has doubts: `I did 170 interviews on TWA 800, probably more than anybody else. And I do think there were at times a cover-up.…I still have reservations…whether the center wing tank was the initiating event.' BO also · also · WRH (Salon's pilot mentions that aircraft have exploded with empty fuel cells baked over a taxiway, mentioning a Thai Airways 737 that blew up at a gate in Bangkok killing a flight attendant. S But this idea does not explain what was seen from the ground and found in the wreckage. Besides, hadn't this plane just departed on a transAtlantic flight? The tank would not have been empty when it was baking…?) One of the dead is Mohamed Samir Ferrat, who was supposed to be aboard Ron Brown's plane to Bosnia but begged off. PR
• Aug: KDP troops join the Iraqi Army in an attack on the INC forces based in Irbil, the largest city in Kurdistan. US-backed rebels request American air support but request is denied. Iraqi troops arrest and execute hundreds of rebel leaders. (Now that's confusing. The KDP joins Saddam in fighting the US-fed group; the US turns its back?) Kurdish groups soon strike autonomy deal with Saddam's government and remain skeptical of the extent to which the US is serious about its support for the Iraqi opposition. (Duh. Wonder why??) PBS
• Aug: San Jose Mercury News publishes an investigation by Gary Webb into the US-government links to the trade in crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles. His editor will eventually backpedal on the story and join in a contemptible mass-medium attack on Webb. But Webb's version is eventually vindicated, by a '98 report from the CIA Inspector-Gen'l IIRC, although no overt apology has ever come from his `journalist colleagues.' CSUN · CIA
• Aug 1: On the 11th anniversay of Gross' testimony that aspartame `without a doubt' causes brain tumours, it is approved in the US as a `general-purpose sweetener.' This is the 26th time in 23 a the FDA has asserted aspartame is safe. A
• Aug 14: &rad;`Someone rendered important safety equipment unusable by pouring glue into three lockable switches on the backup control panel at Florida Power and Light Company's St. Lucie nuclear power plant on August 14, 1996. The back-up control room is used to gain control of a plant during an emergency if the main control room is not working or uninhabitable. If the reactor could not be controlled from the main control room, the loss of the switches could have been devastating.' TMIA
• Aug 25: Neil Moody dies. Witnesses saw Moody sitting in his car, arguing with another; then his car sped off and hit a brick wall. His father, Arkansas judge James Moody, had married Foster's widow Lisa 1996 Jan 1. There are reports that Neil had discovered something very unsettling among his stepmother's private papers and was threatening to go public with it just prior to DNC. DM
• mid-'96: Israeli Mirabilis puts its flagship product, I Seek You (ICQ), online. ICQ It becomes the killer-app of instant-messaging (IM). H
• Sep: James Loewen Lies My Teacher Told Me: everything your American history textbook got wrong
• Oct: Archer Daniels Midland fined M$100 by US for its part in the lysine and citric-acid conspiracies. FBI (I bet we don't hear about that on Frontline.) The EU later repeated the fine. VfG
• Nov:

  Democrats told Bergen County Clerk Kathleen Donovan to come up with a better explanation for mysterious swings in vote totals. Donovan blamed voting computers for conflicting tallies that rose and fell by 8,000 or 9,000 votes. The swings perplexed candidates of both parties. For example, the Republican incumbent, Anthony Cassano, had won by about 7,000 votes as of the day after the election but his lead evaporated later. One candidate actually lost 1,600 votes during the counting. How could something like that possibly happen? asked Michael Guarino, Cassano's Democratic challenger. Something is screwed up here. SNZ

• Oct 27: IDF officer pistolwhips 10-a-old Helmi Salem Helmi Al Shawashe to death, to teach him a lesson. GO
• Nov 13: EO 13025 amends 13010.
• Nov 29: Barbara Wise found dead in her locked Commerce Dep't office, partially nude and covered with bruises. No cause of death is ever announced. DM
• Dec: Crichton's Airframe explains a lot about how Tabloid TV works.
• Dec: 60 Minutes points out that the alarming rise in US brain tumours is in direct proportion to the rising use of Aspartame. MPC

• In 1996 a scientist claimed he'd found a way to defeat AIDS. In the wave of euphoria that followed, a batch of new drugs flooded the market. Four years later, those drugs are wreaking unimaginable horror on the patients who dared to hope. What went wrong? It's telling, and perfectly symbolic that when AIDS researcher David Ho's face appeared on the cover of Time as Man of the Year, 1996, you couldn't see his eyes. Instead, a colorful swirl meant to represent HIV filled his glasses. George Orwell used precisely this image—a man whose eyes are gone, whose glasses have been filled with the refracting light of his ideology—to convey the triumph of politics over truth in his famous essay Politics and the English Language…

  Based largely on a single paper—Ho's 1995 paper—proteäse inhibitors received lightening-quick FDA approval and poured onto the market. The mass media declared AIDS to be over, albeit with a question mark floating overhead. A new euphoria filled the air, and David Ho spawned a multibillion-dollar drug industry.

  Amidst the excitement, something was overlooked. Ho's mathematical model was wrong…

  You don't have to waste a lot of time on this, says Bialy when I ask him about how and when Ho's research was refuted in the scientific literature. The Roederer piece finished it. Ho is finished. In the scientific world right now it is firmly established that the model is nonsense.

  One AIDS researcher and physician who spoke only on condition of anonymity had this to say about Ho's theory: Everybody in the scientific community has known for years that his HIV model was ludicrously wrong. I remember being at a conference in Chicago two years ago, and Ho's data was shot to shreds by one speaker after another. David Ho got up to speak at the end and there was really nothing he could say…

  Yes, he's a fraud, Sonnabend says, if a fraud means mediocre interpretations of the dynamics of T-cell changes in response to therapy. But, then, who is the fraud? Anybody is capable of having stupid ideas, but what's unusual is getting them onto the front page of the New York Times and Time. The real villains are the people in your profession, in my opinion. The journalists. We have traditionally depended on the press to protect us from nonsense like this—not anymore. Now people who have feet of clay become oracles thanks to their publicists and the cooperation of journalists. And the real tragedy is that years have been wasted on this David Ho eradication hype. What he did was unspeakable. To dangle a cure in front of such desperate people is the cruelest thing imaginable.

  I heard from a well-placed source that proteäse inhibitors were approved by the FDA, based on Ho's Nature paper, says David Rasnick. There was certainly no clinical data that they were effective, and to this day there is still none…

  How, I ask Joe Sonnabend, could all of this hype take place? How could David Ho be made Man of The Year? How could the eradication theory be extolled? How is it possible if David Ho's science is as bankrupt as all this?

  Sonnabend pushes his glasses up onto his forehead and looks at me almost quizzically. Then he shrugs slightly. He had a really good publicist. TMH

1997

• Clancy Executive Orders President, Congress, and Supreme Court are obliterated when a Japanese terrorist lands a 747 on the Capitol.
• Air Force One You, who killed a hundred thousand Iraqis to save a nickel on a gallon of gas, lecture me on the rules of war!? (Of course, some dispute this, favouring 150 000. PA It's a good cliffhanger and CGI-effects movie, but rather overblown in the rah rah U-S-A department.)
• Microsoft builds into Windows a Java Virtual Machine with extra, nonstandard definitions which are not flagged as such by the documentation, making any code that uses those def'ns Windows-only. This is absolutely contrary to Java's entire raison d'etre of providing a platform-independant environment; Java's creator SUN Microsystems sues for and wins IIRC. But the damage is done. /.
• Eighty-eight members of Congress sign a letter demanding an investigation into bioweapons use and Gulf War Syndrome. HNN
• Clinton or Congress tries to prop up the economy by forcing everyone to buy a new (HD)TV by 2006. (Incidentally putting a financial strain on PBS, about the only mass-medium organ that still points out the odd balls-up by those in power. I figure this is why, by 2002, WGBH seems to be running fundraiser every other week.*) Note that this not only forces sales of new TVs but vastly improves the Pay-per-View potentials. Recall that the US is now an `information' economy; most of its product is `Intellectual Property,' and most of that is movies, `sports,' and such. So it wants/needs a way to skim from every viewing. And the ol' analog systems give out too many freebies. /. There's also the `click the remote to buy onscreen product' feature. The present home-shopping channels are hampered by the distraction and effort of using a tellyophone; HDTV can pack it all into the one handy clicker. WP It's not the public that needs HDTV; it's big biz and its gov.) But he's forgotten that Zenith is the only remaining domestic TV manufacturer… WRH The decline in domestic material-transmogrifying industries is also forcing large amounts of post-consumer stuffs to be exported for `recycling.' BBC A lot of it is old electronics chocablock with heavy metals. R
  *It could also be the crap economy; `PBS (perennial begging system) is pleading for help, as the usual contributors can't afford it of late.' G
• FDA loosens the rules on direct-to-consumer advertising, opening a floodgate of feelgood pharmochemical ads on a public totally incapable of handling them. SFG (Not because these things should be left to doctors—I don't think they should—but because most North Americans have been too dumbed-down to see through the PR glitz.)
• Conspiracy Theory, a revamped Manchurian Candidate. Apparently Gibson is something of a conspiracy buff himself; that may be why the stuff at the very beginning is spot-on contemporary thought. PNT
• Enron announces G$1 plan to improve Dabhol's links to India's gas network. FB
• Condoleeza Rice is provost of Stanford when prof John Lewis is discovered running a business for the Chinese army (Galaxy New Tech?) from a Stanford office on Stanford stationery with Stanford funds while also consulting for the DoD. Rice quietly drops the investigation before any charges get filed. NM (H'm. The Bushes have a lot of ties to China too…esp Prescott Jr.)
• American petro' companies finish investing nearly G$40 in Kazakhstan with no hope to recoup under the prevailing political situation. [Lucy citing House Committee testimony; probably [WRH quoting CR]
• A. B. Brown acquired by Banker's Trust. A. B. Krongard goes from chairing Brown to vicechair of the combo. He'll end up overseeing `private client relations' (money laundrying FTW) which will put him in direct contact with some of the wealthiest people in the world. FTW
• Wag the Dog is released. A producer and a spin-doctor join up to `fabricate' a war in order to cover-up a preëlection presidential sex scandal.

  An administration hypes the threat posed by a foreign power. It talks of links to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; it warns about a nuclear weapons program. The news media play along, and the US is swept up in war fever. The war drives everything else—including scandals involving administration officials—from the public's consciousness.

  Although the movie's title has entered the language, I don't know how many people have watched it lately. Read the screenplay. If you don't think it bears a resemblance to [W-era] events, you're in denial. IHT

• The Grand Chessboard&warn; of Z. Brzezinski (see 1975).
• Jan: Roberts The Medusa File: secret crimes and coverups of the US gov't
• 1997 Jan 16: Ennis Cosby killed. IP Some link his death to his father's ideas about HIV, see 1991.
• Feb 12: Gore Commission final report: `The federal government should consider aviation security as a national-security issue, and provide substantial funding for capital improvements. The Commission believes that terrorist attacks on civil aviation are directed at the US, and that there should be an ongoing federal commitment to reducing the threats that they pose.' Republicans and airlines sneer. N54

• From the moment [the Taleban] took Kabul last autumn, reports of the unprecedented severity of their version of Islam streamed from the Afghan capital…Many Afghans, though, do not see it that way. Nor, even, do a growing number of Peshawar's aid workers, despite the bakery incident. For a start, the Taliban are nothing like as dogmatic as they have been portrayed. `There's a big difference between what the Taliban say and what they actually do,' says Stuart Worsley, deputy director of Care International in Peshawar. `Some of the edicts that come out of the madrassas religious schools are pure Monty Python, and very often the guys on the ground choose not to enforce them.'

  Women, in other words, are not automatically beaten for showing their faces; no one is made to pray five times a day; and the education of girls is not universally forbidden. The Taliban is governed by consensus, not by imposition (a tactic which has never worked in Afghanistan, as the Russians found to their cost). Worsley cites the example of Ghazni, where the Taliban proposed converting the local school into a madrassa: when the public complained, the Taliban immediately backed down. `The enforcement of rules usually depends on local tradition,' says Worsley.

  But even the official line on girls' education is changing: from March 6, the start of the new school term, the Taliban have agreed to reopen girls' schools in the all-important Kabul area. This concession was the fruit of a Unicef brokered meeting in Herat at the end of last month—the first of its kind between the Taliban and a Western organisation.

  It is only a small step towards resuming human rights, but its significance is clear. `The Taliban always said they would do three things once they were recognised as legitimate,' says Worsley. `They promised to stop exporting terrorism, stop exporting drugs, and bring back the girls' schools. The fact they have given a date for the schools shows that they're feeling more secure.' [CSF quoting London Independent Feb 19]

  (Now, were the schools opened? I know they cut down the drugs, I've read they opened the schools—that's what I'm trying to nail down—not sure about the terror—although Mueller admits there's nothing to connect 9/11 to Afghanistan.)
• Mar: The `Down' Jones plummets; the `media cartel' massages and suppresses information to keep the public from panicking. [MC quoting American Almanac]
• Mar 19: UN special investigator on torture likens Israel to South Africa under apartheid and accused the Jewish state of institutionalizing the use of torture in interrogating Palestinian detainees. JAI
• Apr 28: Sec'y of Defense W'm Cohen, at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and US Strategy at UGA, Athens GA: `Other [countries] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.' MH `Precautions against unconventional arms must be intensified as potential terrorists develop chemical and biological weapons and electromagnetic methods that could create holes in the ozone layer or trigger earthquakes or volcanoes.' [NDM citing Reuters]
• May: 40-gallon tank of toxic chemicals illegally stored at Hanford explodes, causing the release of 20000–30000 gallons of Pu-bearing water. A cover-up ensues, involving the contractors doing clean-up and DoE, who denied the release of radioactive materials. They also told 8 plant workers that tests indicated that they hadn't been exposed to Pu even though no such tests were conducted (later testing showed they weren't exposed). Fluor Daniel Hanford Inc., operator of the Hanford Site, was cited for violations of the DoE's nuclear safety rules and fined $140,625. Violations associated with the explosion included the contractor's failure to assure that breathing devices operated effectively, failure to make timely notifications of the emergency, and failure to conduct proper radiological surveys of workers. Other violations cited by the DoE included a number of events between November 1996 and June 1997 involving FDH's failure to assure adherence to PFP `criticality' safety procedures. L
• May: R. D. Morningstar fairly thoroughly outs the Zapruder film as heavily altered. CSO (There're no less than 59 records of the car coming to a near or full halt during the shooting; yet that doesn't show up in most viewings of the film.)
• Jun: Zalmay Khalilzad, advisor for Unocal, draws up a risk analysis of a proposed gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean, and participates in talks and social meetings between Unocal and Taliban officials. FB
• Jun 3: Police storm the homes of several women in western India who had led a massive protest against Enron's new NG plant near their fishing village. The women were dragged from their homes and beaten by officers paid by Enron. [FB citing AI] (Remind anyone of J. D. Rockefeller?)
• Jun: Bernard Rostker, spokesman for the DoD investigation of GW hazardous exposures, claims the yet-unused dU training materials (1993q4) will be given to a limited number of troops beginning next month. ICH
• Jun 18: GWB kills Mexican Irineo Tristán Montoya for accessory to murder (the actual killer got prison). Following his '86 arrest, Montoya underwent a lengthy interrogation without the presence of an attorney or the assistance of the Mexican Consulate, and signed a four-page confession in English, a language he did not read, speak, or understand. When the State Dep't inquired into why Article 36 was ignored, TX replied it was not a signatory to the Vienna Convention. AI
• Jul 6: Former Clinton WH intern Mary Mahoney is shot at least five times at the Georgetown Starbuck's she managed, along with two employees. The police acknowledge the execution style of the killings but classify it as a robbery, even though more than $4000 remained in the store. DM · LM

  FBI tracking down an Israeli mole in the Whitehouse. [GUNA quoting London Sunday Times] Ted Turner is advocating a change to the US nat'l anthem. [FR quoting Reuters] (`Most of the world's at peace'? Obviously Turner doesn't watch CNN. No wonder the US needs to start another war, with its wealthy talking like this.)

• Jul 8: Pat Roberston suggests stoning as a treatment for belief in ETs. PS
• Aug: Rappoport Oklahoma City Bombing: the suppressed truth
• Aug 15: Wood, Hyde, and the Kissinger of physics Edward Teller, present Prospects for Physics-Based Modulation of Global Change at 22nd Int'nat'l Seminar on Plantary Emergencies [C, malformed PDF but readable with ghostscript]
• Sep: Ted Turner wants to give the UN G$1. Whether it's legal for the UN to accept is not clear. APFN
• 1997: 67 decapitated in Mapiripan, Colombia. The military officer accused of masterminding the nassacre was accompanied `at all times' by a dozen US military trainers. [JR mirroring AR]
• 1997: David Wayne Spence texecuted despite heap of irregularities which W completely disregarded. BK
• 1997 Aug 31: Diana F. Spencer (Windsor?) and her boyfriend Dodi Al Fayad die in (or because of) a violent car accident in a Paris street tunnel. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but in the end will look very likely nothing more sinister than plain ol' impaired driving. But there are sticky open (2003) questions M:
  • What caused abnormally high levels of CO in Henri Paul's blood, if he was instantly killed?
  • Why were the 17 government radar cameras situated between the Ritz and the tunnel switched off and out of film?
  • Why were lights turned out in the tunnel minutes before, disabling the cameras?
  • If Henri Paul was driving at 80-100mph, why was there no speed camera photo, even though other drivers were fined for speeding with camera technology on the road?
  Diana supposedly wrote a letter in Oct '96 fretting about a car-crash assassination plot M (However, this news breaks just as Bliar needs distractions, so it should be treated skeptically.) And why did it take an hour to get her to the hospital? Some are critical of France's ambulance practices in general, saying the grab-n-go methods use in North America are statistically more effective; but others wonder if the wait was an opportunity to finisher her off. S

  Colonel Gadafy of Libya has asked the International Court of Justice in the Hague that when those responsible for the death of Diana be caught they be put on trial in Libya. The reason for what at first glance seems a strange request is that Dodi was a Libyan citizen and Gadafy's belief that both were assassinated by the British Intelligence Services. This belief has widespread acceptance in the Arab world, especially Egypt and Libya…

  Both Tony Blair and Hilary Clinton have sensed and grasped the public mood. Both have pledged to continue her work. H

  (Ya, well, look at Phony Bliar again in 2002-3 and see what you think. And Hillary is a dissenter's suspect in the coming crash of JFK Jr.)
• Sep 21: USS Yorktown left dead in the water for several hours when M$ database software fails to protect itself from buffer overruns and division by 0. Rather than correct the SW to do basic range checks, as every undergrad in CS is taught, Administrators are now aware of the problem…and are trained to bypass a bad data field and change the value if such a problem occurs again. GCN (The Smart Ship program seeks to reduce `crew workloads,' Orwell for `crew complement,' Politcally Correct for `useless eaters.')
• Sep 25: Israel botches assassination of Hamas official Khaled Meshal in Amman, Jordan. The Israelis had forged Canadian passports to gain access. Under Israel's eye-for-an-eye policy…can Lebanon rightfully assassinate Gen. Ariel Sharon, who, in 1982, ordered the invasion of Lebanon, and massive shelling of Beirut that killed 15,700 Lebanese civilians? FM [WoI p 49]
• Oct: Nichols & Papovich Freedom's End: conspiracy in Oklahoma
• Oct 12: Ron Miller dies. He was the man who tape-recorded the Lums and turned those tapes and other records over to congressional oversight investigators. The OK Medical Examiner refuses to acknowledge even that it completed its tests on his blood. DM He had been healthy until Oct 3, then deteriorated and died. WR
• Oct 29: Iraq demands that Americans on the UN Special Commission inspection team leave BG because they are spies. LT USUK spin is that Iraq dislikes inspectors in general. [WoI p 50] (Personally, I remember the reports about complaints against US inspectors specifically.) (Eventually the allegations of spying are proven; then they are respun into allegations. FAIR)
• Unocal gets Richard Armitage to work on Central Asia pipeline interests. [X citing PU, apparently a page of Drillbits & Tailings Vol 7 #1]
• Nov 1: As of today, the US has given Israel a grand total of nearly G$85, at a cost to US taxpayers of nearly G$135. WRMEA
• Nov 4: Clinton signs EO imposing `comprehensive' economic sanctions on Sudan. The Whitehouse charges that Sudan tries to destabilise its region, yet just a year ago the Washington Post reported the US gave M$20 to antiSudanese forces. [WoI p 51]
• Nov 14: Enron CEO Rebecca Mark unveils energy plan that includes a M$300 pipeline from Dabhol to Hazira and to the North to add 1.2 Mm of complimentary [sic] pipeline system to the existing HBJ pipeline at a cost of M$900. FB
• Nov 20: Americans return to Iraq inspections. BG
• 

  James Bacque…showed that more than nine million Germans (mostly civilians) died as a result of Allied starvation and expulsion policies in the first five years after World War II. These deaths were not accidental, but were the result of deliberately genocidal policies instituted by Dwight Eisenhower and Henry Morgenthau…

  The book is not listed by Barnes & Noble, and is available only secondhand from Amazon US, but is [2003 Jul] available from Amazon UK… S

  In his book…James Bacque describes how he confronted New York Times reporter Drew Middleton with evidence that after the war the US starved to death over one million German POWs. What Middleton told me basically was that, yes, he had lied in 1945 and no, it did not matter to him or the New York Times if I exposed this.

  Middleton's sense of security, his sense of the New York Times' power, took my breath away, Bacque writes. But worse than that, Middleton did not care about this atrocity…the New York Times witnessed it, then denied that it happened. And has gone on denying it into the 1990s. JR

• A senior delegation from the Taliban is at Unocal HQ in Sugarland TX about building 1.3 Mm of gas pipe from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan. BBC
• Simpson trial of the century—a label from the Hauptmann trial. He is acquitted, much to the chagrin of the bumbling LAPD, who thought they had a slamdunk or touchdown or something despite fumbled and suspect evidence and and implausible theory. (I think OJS knows who did it—maybe even did it himself—but the prosecution fu@ked up, and left the jury lots of room to doubt, and shouldn't've pitched childish and disgusting temper tantrums at a jury that did its job. After all, that's why we have juries of our peers. Lest you write me off as an OJS fan: Pro sports are a senseless waste of human life which exist purely to fill broadcast airtime, creativity being too scarce and truth too offensive to the advertisers. And OJS wasn't all that much of an actor. Myself, I knew him only for his bit part in Earthquake, a movie which made quite an impression on me as a youngster. (Remember the jaysus-big woofers the theatres installed?))

  One of the bulwarks of our constitutional republic was the protection against double jeopardy. The 5th Amendment of the Constitution reads nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb

  Why this Amendment? In merry old England, if the King wanted you in jail, he would charge you with a crime. If you were acquitted, he would ask for, and be granted, another trial. Sooner or later, you went to jail.

  In the sickness of the extreme publicity surrounding the trend-setting Simpson murder trial, every white American took note when he, a black man, was acquitted of murder by a black jury. White America was enraged! Every self-respecting hater of black skin color knew that Simpson was guilty. So your government, seeing a golden opportunity to further trash the Constitution, dragged Simpson into Federal Court, to try him again for the same crime. Of course, they changed the name of the crime. In the first trial, Simpson was charged with murder. In the second trial, he was charged with violating the civil rights of the slain (ie, by killing them). How creative!

  In this second trial, a white jury found Simpson guilty. America, thirsting for Simpson's blood, was thrilled. Was justice not done? No, justice was not done! Simpson was tried twice for the same crime. Changing the name of the crime may have fooled some, but it didn't fool me. AOS

  Hanging is great spectator sport only until you're the one in the noose. H'm. Does it just say in jeopardy of life or limb, and not liberty? That'd kinda undercut the argument.
• Tomorrow Never Dies

  [TND has] a very information-technology type scenario and supervillain. I stole this from a web review…In the hopes of starting a devastating world war, media mogul Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) uses incredible technology to spark a dispute between the British and the Chinese. Now think about that statement very carefully. Go back to the Who Owns What article I referenced before. Realize that although no one person/company owns everything you see and hear, that awesome power is held by a very small group of powerful billionaires with presumably similar economic/geopolitical interests. Also realize that many of these are multi-national corporations, international octopi that span the globe and are potentially loyal to no one and no country. Would they have qualms about starting a coup here in the good ol' US of A if a major portion of their ownership and/or financial interests lie elsewhere? Remember that American corporations (including Enron and Haliburton and Harken Energy) were recently outed for cheating the US government (and shareholders) in billions of tax dollars in offshore accounts, thus revealing their true loyalty not to baseball and apple pie but the almighty dollar. Now imagine if the sitting president threatened a major shakeup somewhere that tens or hundreds of billions of dollars were at stake. Would you kill someone for $100 Billion? Perhaps try to oust a president? (Or, say, lure him into Dealy Plaza?) Or send a few peacekeepers off on a snipe hunt to defend said assets? What's a few hundred ordinary lives in the grand scheme of things anyway? Remember, stick and stones can break your bones…but the words of the press can topple governments. GM

• 1997 Dec: Hong Kong officials order the entire poultry population slaughtered. `Epidemiologists and public health officials from around the world got their first glimpse of an entirely new variety of human influenza. Known as subtype H5N1 for the surface proteins which the virus carries, the new strain had only ever previously been observed in birds. Ominously, the effect of H5N1 on poultry had earned it the evocative title of Chicken Ebola. And when it surfaced in the human population of Hong Kong…it proved to be almost as deadly.' 9D
• Dec 3: The `Princess Di' landmine treaty is adopted by the civilised world. The US declines, landmines being its pet way of depriving indiginous peoples of agricultural assets without destroying them (ie the assets; the US cares not a snap of the fingers for the indiginous peoples, see Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Nicaragua, Phillipines, Vietnam, etc.). In this instance the US was remarkably honest; its usual practice is to sign a treaty and then ignore it (Reciprocity, NAFTA, Paris accords, Geneva accords, missile defense…). As of 2002 Oct 17, 145 countries will have signed or acceded to this treaty; the only NATO country still balking being the US. VVAF
• Dec 7: Unocal invites a Taliban contingency to visit them in Houston to discuss pipeline construction. They stay in five-star hotels, dine at the home of Unocal VP, and Mullah Mohammed Ghaus gets medical treatment. FB
• Top-11 military spending (G$US):
  • US, 260
  • Russia, 82
  • Japan, 50
  • France, 48
  • Germany, 42
  • UK, 34
  • China, 32
  • Italy, 20
  • South Korea, 14
  • Saudi Arabia, 13
  • Taiwan, 13
  • `Potential Adversaries' Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, and Cuba combined: 16
  Total listed: 624; US portion, 41.7%

• Toward the end of 1997, a study from Germany showed that almost half of those taking proteäse inhibitors had their [HI] virus levels increase, not decrease. The authors wrote: The success seen in controlled studies is not necessarily reflected in everyday practice.

  These damn things were released without proper evaluation or testing, says Rasnick, who now devotes his time to warning people about proteäse inhibitors…

  A few years before proteäse inhibitors came onto the market, Rasnick attended a conference where a paper authored by a Dr Paul Saftig, and published in the journal EMBO, was presented. It had no relationship to AIDS, but nonetheless stayed vivid in his memory.

  It was a so-called knock-out experiment, in which scientists totally erase a gene from an animal, and then gauge what effect it has. The gene is erased from either a fertilized or non-fertilized egg then implanted, and then the resulting offspring, if there are any, are studied. Typically what happens, says Rasnick, is that either the animals are born with absolutely no difference that you detect, or, you don't get any offspring at all.

  But this experiment was highly unusual. In it, scientists removed an aspartyl proteäse known as cathepsin D—one that all humans have—from the mice. The mice were all born normal, and for the first three weeks of their lives, appeared to be thriving. But on the 21st day, every last one of them died. Autopsies showed that the mice had starved to death. Their intestines were completely destroyed, says Rasnick. Also, they had what the authors called fulminate loss of T-cells and B-cells. In other words, their immune systems were shot.

  That study was a real red flag, says Rasnick. Cathepsin D is the only proteäse I know that is absolutely essential for life, so you'd want to stay away from it. I remember thinking to myself at the time, thank God we are not working on aspartyl proteäses, or making inhibitors for them.

  When Rasnick began hearing stories of the chronic diarrhea and wasting syndrome that was among many problems to afflict people on the new proteäse inhibitors, he had a sinking feeling. I said, Oh shit, it's happening. You see, there's always crossover. Even though it's not the target, all of these proteäse inhibitors also inhibit cathepsin D. The same aspartyl proteäse that they knocked out in the mice. And they're giving people up to 7 g a day of this stuff. I don't see how anybody can survive that in the long run. I'd love to see some post-mortems done on these guys who die on cocktails. I'd like to see what their intestines look like.

  Rasnick believes it was a grave mistake for the FDA ever to approve proteäse inhibitors for human use. I would pull these proteäse inhibitors off the market based on the Saftig paper alone. TMH

  (Something else twigs—that aspartyl—isn't that a piece of Aspartame?)

1998

• 9 min to midnight. BAS
• Lappé & Bailey Against the Grain: biotechnology and the corporate takeover of your food
• Canada removes dU from its weapons inventory, despite being a major supplier of dU and despite having cranked out many papers denying health risks. DoD Note the procedure obviously employed to write this report. 1: establish conclusion (dU isn't all that bad). 2: Find everything you can about dU, the harder to get the better. 3: Scrounge it all for favourable sentences. 4: Weave those sentences into support for your conclusion. 5: List the sources to give the impression there's heaps of research supporting your preset conclusion. 6: Sleep soundly knowing may one person in a million will actually get around to linking what you've written to those sources which actually refute your conclusion, knowing that he'll never get anyone to notice him anyway.

  Case in point: the report cited in note 19. It's actually a favourite of the anti-dU crowd to show the US knew how bad dU was before going into the Gulf War. It does indeed say there is little danger from intact munitions. But it immediately points out successly used dU munitions pose many hazards, and that training and provisioning are needed: `Our conclusion regarding the health and environmental acceptability of dU penetrators assume[s] both controlled use and the presence of excellent health physics management practices. Combat conditions will lead to the uncontrolled release of dU…The conditions of the battlefield, and the long term health risks to natives and combat veterans may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of dU kinetic penetrators for military applications."

  I note that the greatest note number used is 24, although there are 46 references. This is padding to boost credibility. (eg ref 33 `Iraq blames Gulf War bombing for increase in child cancers'—as do others, BTW—is never used.) Note that most sources are used exactly once, indicating unfavourable matter is being ignored while, again, padding the set of references.

• Hoffman OKC Bombing and the Politics of Terror
• `Jeb' Bush kills the FOX. /.
• John Ashcroft: `Your [Southern Partisan] also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like Lee, Jackson and Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda.' (SP admits to—revels in—the Ashcroft controversy, and offers to show you a transcript of the actual interview `untwisted by the media'…in exchange for a subscription.) FAIR: `Southern Partisan's bigotry targets virtually anyone who isn't a straight white male neo-Confederate.' McVeigh allegedly wore SP's sic semper tyrannis T-shirt when arrested. FAIR (While the Civil War can certainly be argued as another instance of Washington forcing its will upon foreign peoples—eg, the Emancipation Proclamation—SP seems to propound slavery as Christian; Christian as the only way to be; immigrants as not American and genetic disspation; that AIDS is God's wrath on homos (and probably also blacks, given the African situation); etc. Bleah.)
• AOL(-Time-Warner-Sun-Netscape?) absorbs Mirabilis' ICQ, a competitor to its own IM application, the creatively-named AIM. Curiously, it neither kills off ICQ nor integrates it with AIM. ICQ
• Jan 13: Iraq temporarily withdraws cooperation, claiming that the inspection team had too many US and British inspectors. BG
• Jan 19:
  
• Jan 20:
  
• Jan 22: Iraq refuses inspection of presidential sites. BG
• Jan 26: Neocons send Clinton a letter urging hom to invade Iraq 'cause of all the WMD there, signed by Armitage, Kristol, Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Woolsey, among others. PNAC (In 2004, after the neocons' invasion of Iraq starts to go sour, they try to pin the mistaken idea Iraq had WMD on Clinton.)
• Feb: Schwarzkopf It Doesn't Take a Hero: From the brief time that we did spend occupying Iraqi territory after the war, I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit—we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of the occupation. This is a burden I am sure the beleaguered American taxpayer would not have been happy to take on. [PS citing AJC] [D citing p498]
• Feb 3: GWB offs Karla Faye Tucker. AI Later, he would mock her pleas for clemency with a purse-lipped, teary-voiced, `pleeese don't kill me.' TZ WP IAP [original report from Tucker Carlson, Talk, '99 Sep] Supposedly Bush was imitating what he saw on Larry King, but apparently this bit (maybe the whole interview?) didn't happen. X This past fall, Bush's office squelched a bill that would have outlawed execution of mentally retarded persons in Texas. `In Switzerland, they call Bush a serial killer.' In a CNN campaign debate, GWB chuckles over the case of Calvin Burdine, whose lawyer fell asleep at his trial. [gotta move this] BW (Come on, GWB is clueless. He can't even put up a politic front.)

  20 skiers killed when low-flying USAF aircraft clips their cable-car cable.

• Feb 12: John J. Maresca, VP international relations Unocal Corporation, testifies to House Committee on International Relations and the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific regarding `a proposed extension (of the proposed Trans-Caspian pipeline) [to] link with the SUI pipeline system, moving gas to near New Delhi, where it would connect with the existing HBJ pipeline.' FB
• Feb 22: Sandy Hume, son of journalist Britt Hume, reportedly found dead in his Arlington VA home. Aside from an `apparent' suicide statement, there is near-total media silence. He had broken a major story in 1997 regarding the friction between House Speaker Newt Gingrich and a faction led by Rep. Paxon, who'll announce his resignation tomorrow. He already had a reputation for getting the story nobody else wanted to look at, and it's worth noting that his death is hard on the heels of reports that `a reporter' was about to break a story confirming the White House's use of investigators to dig up dirt on critics and invstigators. WR
• Feb 23: Kofi Annan secures Iraq's cooperation and unrestricted access to inspectors. BG
• Mar 2: GHWB and Scowcroft:

  Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in `mission creep,' and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the UN's mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.

  [TMH citing `Why We Didn't Remove Saddam' Time]
• Mar 8: Just prior to another round of testimony before Kenneth Starr's grand jury, James McDougal suffers a heart attack in solitary at the Fort Worth Federal Medical Center, is eventually transported to a distant, less-than-5-star hospital, where he dies. The diuretic Lasix had been forced upon him; Lasix is not compatible with heart disease which he had, and Digitalin which he may have been taking. DM
• Mar: Conference in Kingston ON revealing existence of injectible chip that could replace prisons, by providing the capacity to remotely immobilise or kill the host. The possible abuse won't be there since this will be tightly supervised by governments. [H7 citing Whig-Standard 1998 Mar 19]
• Mar 29: Johnny Franklin Lawhon and a friend die in `high speed' collision with utility pole `after their car had become airborne,' having driven less than 400 m. Two years before, a tornado had ripped through Johnny's junkyard and opened up the trunk of a car, revealing a box of Whitewater records including a copy of a k$27 cashier's check from Madison to Bill Clinton. Lawhon turned the box over to the FBI. DM
• Apr: A. B. Krongard helps merge Banker's Trust into Deutschebank (possibly to try to hide shifty dealing, see 1999 Mar) producing Europe's largest bank, before changing jobs to counsel CIA Director George Tenet. [FTW says '99 but others say '98] [FTW] [FTW citing W Post]
• Watching Calgary reëvaluate its decision to fluoridate, Whitehorse council decides to end its 30-a use of fluoridation. [F citing Vancouver Province July 29]
• Apr 20: Rudolph Giuliani: `Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it.' [AMPP citing New York Newsday]
• Clinton gets the US back into dual-use biowarfare work, developing super weapons-grade anthrax in quantities and strengths that have no legitimate defensive purpose in clearcut violation of the Biological Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act which GHWB enacted. CP
• May: Netanyahu, UN ambassador at time of Achille Lauro ('85 Oct), allows the chief suspect Abu Abbas to return to Gaza. Supposedly, under the '93 Oslo accords a Palestinian allowed entry by Israel cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed prior to Oslo, and Peres had let him return in '96 for the Palestine Nat'l Council. Furthermore, the US gave up trying to extradite him because the warrants were dropped after his conviction in Italy. [G citing Boston Globe Jun 26]
• May 6: Cecil Weeding, fmr Montana state rep and senator, dies in crash near Lodge Pole. MP
• May 29: PNAC writes Gingrich and Lott begging for regime change in Iraq because, among other things, it's not fair Iraq has all that oil. PNAC
• Jun: McCain: Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno. When McCain subsequently apologized to Clinton, the Washington Post noted the apology but said the joke was too vicious to print. FFG)
• Jun 23: In a speech to the `Collateral Damage Conference' of the Cato Institute, Cheney says `the good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the US. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is.' FB
• Cisco is providing ISPs with the ability to cripple or deny access to selected sites. [A quoting Y! quoting Reuters]
• Ken Smith's Raw Deal: Horrible and ironic stories of forgotten Americans.
• Jul 1: Gerald Ford, sole survivor of the Warren Commission, admits they fiddled at least one crucial fact. ININ [WRH quoting AssocPress]
• Jul: GWB: You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier. [BF citing Governing via Is Our Children Learning?]
• Jul 4: Clinton: I'll rule this country by executive order if Congress won't adopt my agenda. AMPP
• Material of apparently negative resistance found by Shoukai Wang and Deborah Chung, U of Buffalo. This would easily give a room-temp superconductor. FA PW [JN citing J. Materials Science 2000] [C citing Composites 1999] What would one call this, a hyperconductor? No, that seems to already mean something less than a superconductor. Anyhow, it seems to fall into a memory hole.
• Jul 9:

  The price for reserve [electric] power needed by [California's] ISO was running at $1 a megawatt-hour and was being tracked on computer screens in the market operations department of the agency. A staffer hurried up to ISO chief executive Jeffrey Tranen with a note. The $1 price tag, set by the power generators, had shot up to $2500. Then, just as suddenly, it spiked again to $5000, where it stayed for three hours. After that, it mysteriously dropped again, all the way back to $1.

  Four days later it happened again, but this time the price went to $9999 and stayed there for four hours. Then it dropped to a penny.

  All of us saw those numbers… said Tranen, now a software executive. SB

  Employees of one of the two power-marketing centers in California watched incredulously as the wholesale [electricity] price of $1 per megawatt-hour spiked to $9,999, stayed at that price for four hours, then dropped to a penny. Someone was testing the system to find the limits of market exploitation. PS It is suspected someone was testing means for the defrauding to come in late 2000 and 2001.
• Jul 17: NY Times `Three Mile Island: Cleaned Up, and for Sale': `The owners of one plant, Maine Yankee in Wiscasset, even created a Web page (www.buynuclear.com), complete with color photographs, to promote its sale, but to no avail. The plant was retired though its equipment is still for sale.' S I was going to make a joke that they should've tried eBay. But look at where that URL puts you now!! (2002 July)
• Jul 29: State Dep't is pleased that Turkmen Minister of Oil and Gas Arazov announced Turkmenistan's selection of Enron to carry out a feasibility study funded by the Trade and Development Agency for a Trans-Caspian gas pipeline. FB
• Aug 5: Iraq ceases cooperation w/UNSCOM because Butler refuses to certify their disarmament compliance. CNN
• Aug 7: Two US embassies, Kenya and Tanzania, are bombed. Clinton promises to find and punish those responsible. BB This is blamed on bin Laden; but it appears there were Israeli quirks again:

  How is it that the Israelis, who for some time have been seeking to…dismember Sudan, were first on the scene? Did the Israelis contaminate the crime scene with planted evidence, or remove evidence that may point to them? Why was the Fiarfax rescue squad, ready to travel immediately following the bombing, unable to get an airplane for 24 hours, and upon arrival in Kenya, prevented from participating in rescue efforts by the Israelis? Why did Israel, according to an Associated Press report of Aug 12, advise US officials `to treat with skepticism a warning that the US embassy in Kenya might be the target of a bombing attack'? [WoI p 72–73]

• Reno quashes plan to capture Osama bin Laden. ABC (Revealed in '03, this could be a Republican leak to make the Democrats look bad; it doesn't seem to be a total fabrication since it claims Reno refused to discuss it, it being classified.)
• Aug 20: Clinton flings about 75 Tomahawks and blows away Sudan's sole pharmaceutical plant and a nightwatchman. With diplomatic relations but no warning, this is technically an act of war. No physical evidence is ever found to support the allgations the plant was manufacturing a precursor to some chemical weapon. Nor does the claim of Sudan support for Osama hold much water (see 1996 Mar–May) He also fired into Afghanistan, destroying a mosque.

  Following the attack, the US then played an immature and inexcusable game of musical evidence; stories were changed or discarded on several occasions, including exactly what the original evidence was justifying the attack, which shifted from one thing to another as soon as someone asked for proof. After this debacle ended, every 'irrefutable' claim made by the government turned out to be untrue.

  YT [CoT quoting WRH] The UN will shortly impose sanctions on Afghanistan, further crimping talks with the Taliban; Unocal abandons its Afghanistan route plans for now. FB The owner of the plant, Saudi Saleh Idris, sued the Clinton admin; they settled and released M$24 of frozen assets.

  Monika Lewinsky testifies against Clinton to a grand jury, which may be the real reason for all the missiles. [WoI p 79, 118] And the real reason for Lewinsky?

  While Scaife's cronies made sure that all eyes were focused on Whitewater, Lewinsky, Foster, et al, the mainstream focus was kept far from the infinitely more nefarious, and damaging, scandal that was known by the four-letter word Mena, the crucial transit point in Arkansas which, under Gov. Clinton, had served to sustain the arms/drug-dealing operations that were fed through Iran-Contra and laundered through BCCI. Thus, with Whitewater as the Scaife-funded public face of the Starr inquiry into Clinton, those Clinton associates who could really provide the dirt on the Clinton/Mena connection were being purged in plain sight—through various prosecutions, accidents, murders, or well-timed heart attacks (in the case of Jim MacDougall). Meanwhile, all eyes were directed to the curious stain on the blue dress. GR

• Aug 26: Scott Ritter resigns over the UN's inaction at Iraq's intransigence. CNN (Bizarrely, he later becomes a lead Iraq complied voice.)
• Sep 2: SwissAir 111 plummets into the Atlantic off St. Margaret's Bay. This is one of the only crashes SwissAir's ever had, and it never quite recovers from it. (I suspect the Capton insulation did its trick of cracking and becoming a conductor in the presence of humid warmth.)
• Sep 9: UNSC suspends the periodic reviews of Iraqi sanctions, as a rebuke for noncooperation w/inspectors. CNN
• Sep 14: ME judge Douglas Clapp declines to force AIDS medicines on 4-a-old Nikolas Emerson. His mother had watched her AIDS-infected daughter succumb to an agonizing death while on AZT, and she vowed to let nature take its course with Nikolas. The boy survives well for at least two years. A&W

  [Ms Emerson] has placed her faith in this medical approach in the past and has lost a child. She has discontinued her own treatment with no apparent present ill-effects. She has observed an outward improvement in her sick son's condition with a discontinuance of drug therapy. The State of Maine is now in no position to tell her in the face of her unique experience that she is wrong in her current judgment to wait for better and more reliable treatment methods. [TMH emphasis added]

• Sep: Scowcroft & Bush A World Transformed: We should not march into Baghdad. To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero. Assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerilla war, it could only plunge that part of the world into ever greater instability. [PS citing IHT]
• Sep 16: Iraq threatened to halt all activities by UN arms inspectors unless the Security Council rescinded a resolution suspending the regular review of sanctions. Since the collapse of US plans to launch massive air strikes against Iraq last winter, the US and its ally Britain have staged one provocation after another aimed at blocking the lifting of sanctions against Iraq and preparing the ground for a new military attack. WSWS
• Sep 17: Three former ADM execs convicted for the lysine conspiracy. FBI
• Sep 29: Just why does the Dep't of Energy care enough about Ritalin to fund Ritalin is safe research? BNL
• Oct: Israel & Jones Others Unknown: the Oklahoma City bombing case and conspiracy
• Oct 10: Amnesty International releases Lethal Injustice, a scathing report on Texan capital punishment. GWB did fully half (37) of last year's US executions (74). TX executes more people than any other jurisdiction in the Western world. TX is prepared to execute without ensuring compliance with the Constitution. TX's highest court upholds the sentences of trials through which the defence attorney slept. Somalia and the US are the only two countries (UN members, or globally?) that have not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. (Is this is the one which the US right squalls overrides the rights of the parents?) `Gov. Bush has previously made numerous comments expressing complete faith in the criminal justice system.' `The conveyor belt of death in Texas must be stopped.'
• Oct 23: Wye River accords.
• Oct 25: Phil Angell: Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job. [OC citing NY Times] (And I actually agree with him. The radical problem is that the FDA fobs its testing duties onto the manufacturers, taking their profit-motivated word as gospel.)
• Oct: Bin Laden gives up using his satphone. His calls were thusly distibuted:
  • 260 to Britain
  • 200-odd to Yemen
  • 131 to Sudan
  • 106 to Iran
  • 67 to Azerbaijan
  • 59 to Pakistan
  • 57 to Saudi Arabia
  • 13 to a ship in the Indian Ocean
  • 6 to the US
  • 6 to Italy
  • 4 to Malaysia
  • 2 to Senegal
  • zero to Iraq [PS citing CCR]
  (There have long been more connexions to Britain than to Iraq.)
• Oct 31: Iraq ends all forms of cooperation with UNSCOM, which withdraws. BG
• Nov: AOL acquires Netscape. E
• Nov: London Sunday Times reports Israel is developing an `ethnic' bioweapon against Arabs. TWF (No US retaliation seems forthcoming.)
• ABC posts the results of the election—the day before the election. They claim it's just a sample page; but it called each race perfectly, over 90% of the time. VS
• Nov 11: UNSCOM withdraws, partly in fear of US attack, partly because of Iraqi stalling (over American teammembers IIRC). HS
• Nov 14: Iraq allows inspections to resume. BG
• Dec: Huntsman chemical plant of Odessa–TX has an enormous `upset'—an `unplanned accident' releasing pollution that doesn't count against its regulated limits. The sky is black for two weeks. G
• Dec:

  Dr. Lanka: I'm absolutely sure that no antibody test in medicine has any absolute meaning. Especially in HIV antibody testing, it is clear that the antibodies that are detected in the test are present in everybody. Some people have them in higher concentrations, and some in lower concentrations, but only when you reach a very high level of antibodies—much higher than in any other antibody testing—are you considered to be positive. This is a contradiction in terms because in other antibody tests, the lower your level of antibodies, the higher your risk for a symptomatic infection. But with HIV they say you are positive only when you have reached a very high level of antibodies. Below this level, you are said to be negative.

  Zenger's: So this is what Dr. Roberto Giraldo was talking about when he spoke to HEAL in San Diego. He said that when they do the HIV antibody test they dilute the sample to 1/40 of its original strength, and if they didn't do that all the samples would test positive.

  Dr. Lanka: That's it. How ridiculous…

  I can foresee, here and now, that people regularly using Viagra will be coming down with [Kaposi's sarcoma] in two to three years because Viagra acts by blocking the neutralization of nitric oxide…Poppers act by the same mode, because the nitrites are transformed into nitric oxide in the smallest vessels, and so the smallest vessels become relaxed. But whereas poppers directly produce nitric oxide, Viagra works by preventing the neutralization of nitric oxide which comes into existence normally in the process of blood pressure regulation. It constantly persists at a very low level, but if it accumulates, you are in a very big danger..

• DEA seizes $242 484 from Deborah Standford, owner and president of Mike's Import & Export USA Inc, at Miami Int'nat'l Federal appeals panel will tell them at least twice that large amount is inadequate probable cause. Y!

• The CDC is forcing states to document everyone diagnosed with HIV, civil liberties be damned…the AIDS hysteria scenario is getting played out to its logical conclusion…

  This is why the dissidents have been begging and pleading for somebody to force the US government to demonstrate their evidence for the rootless idea that HIV is the cause of AIDS…Look at all that sprang from this one seed, this one announcement. Now sex is criminalized? Now sex is no longer a private matter? Now sex is equated with death and even murder? Now if you don't get tested you may be unwittingly carrying a murder weapon? Now disenfranchised groups are infected flesh, walking around infecting others? Now if you don't take the drugs you're not doing your societal duty to lower you viral load thus rendering yourself less infectious? Now you lose the right not to poison your own children with anti-HIV drugs? Now the government gets to ask you detailed questions about your sex life, and you have to answer truthfully? Now you have to take mutagenic, carcinogenic drugs throughout your pregnancy, and the police will come to your door if you breast-feed? Now even African and Asian women are forbidden from breast-feeding and forced to take AZT during pregnancy? Now, finally, every last damn person who harbors antibodies to this potentially meaningless virus will be ferreted out, targeted for health care (toxic drugs) and have their every sex act traced and put into a governmental database?…All of that has happened or is happening, and all of it sprang from the unquestioned HIV-equals-AIDS hypothesis. VM

• Dec 16: UNSCOM removes all staff from Iraq. US and British airstrikes begin. BG `The UN pulled its inspectors out so they wouldn't be caught in planned US and British air raids on Iraq.' TS (Actually, that's not quite true: `Butler ordered the inspectors to leave Baghdad in anticipation of an attack. The Russian ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, criticised Butler for withdrawing the inspectors without seeking the permission of the UN Security Council.' TA `Butler late Tuesday ordered UNSCOM staff out of Baghdad. The entire staff was evacuated before dawn on Wednesday.' [CNN with the spin that Iraq was stonewalling] FAIR has good documentation on how the pullout has since been perverted to `Saddam kicked them out.') Operation Desert Fox hits many sites that had been inspected, leading to the idea the spies in the inspectorate had set up the hit list. (Actually, a Scott Ritter statement broadcast by Frontline made a good case of this, but I can't quite capture it from memory.) (This departure of inspectors is often spun later as `Saddam kicked them out.' He did not.) Clinton used a report of Butler's listing six complaints of Iraq blocking inspections; but the 400-some unimpeded inspections since Nov 14 are ignored. [WoI p 97 citing `Wag the Congress' Washington Post Dec 21]
• US announces intention to use commercial power reactors for weapons work, ending 53 years of nonprolifera,tion policy. [WoI p 105 citing Washington Post Dec 22]
• For the first time, the 1998 survey included information about ISO 9000 certificates being withdrawn. The main reason for withdrawal has been organisations deciding to discontinue registration to ISO 9000. The leaders are the UK and Australia. In Australia almost ten percent of registered companies have discontinued registration despite the (false) appearance of lack of care for quality. LS

1999

• Robert Stinnett Day of Deceit: the truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor

  These days, word about Roosevelt's advance warning about Pearl Harbor has gotten out. Robert Stinnett's book, Day of Deceit (1999), which actually favors Roosevelt's actions, makes it clear: the critics [going back to 1946] were right. But he never cites them. He cites primary sources instead.

  He does not remind a handful of professional historians who will actually read his book that: (1) their academic predecessors were engaged from day one in systematic historical deception and villification; (2) they themselves have been dupes…the academic guild has refused to take Stinnett's book seriously, despite enormously detailed documentation from the primary sources. LR

  Pearl Harbor's Establishment historiography remains as secure in its tenured cocoon as it was when I began college in 1959. American history textbooks are as free from the truth about Roosevelt's deliberate provocation of Japan, and his advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor, as they were in 1943. LR

• M$100 deal give Houston Astros an Enron Field. [WW2BM?]
• Franken Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot: and other observations
• Lasn Culture Jam: the uncooling of America

  Every day, scenes that would have seemed surreal, impossible, undemocratic twenty years ago play out with nary a squeak of dissent from a stunned and inured populace.

  At Morain Valley Community College in Palos Hills IL a student named Jennifer Beatty stages a protest against corporate sponsorship in her school by locking herself to the metal mesh curtains of the multimillion-dollar McDonald's Student Center that serves as the physical and nutritional focal point of her college. She is arrested and expelled.

  At Greenbrier High School in Evans GA a student named Mike Cameron wears a Pepsi T-shirt on the day—dubbed Coke Day—when corporate flacks from Coca-Cola jet in from Atlanta to visit the school their company has sponsored and subsidized. Mike Cameron is suspended for his insolence.

  In suburban shopping malls across North America, moms and dads push shopping carts down the aisle of Toys R Us. Trailing them and imitating their gestures, their kids push pint-size carts of their own. The carts say, Toys R Us Shopper in Training. AB

  (Wal-Mart does the same.)
• Ron Paul R TX cosponsors bills to withdraw the US from the UN (HR1146), repeal the Federal Reserve (HR1148), lift the embargo on Cuba (HR1181). RP
• Some of CENTCOM's telephones can't take messages. So someone goes out—not to military supply, but out—and buys dozens of answering machines. AMs which just happen to have an eavesdropping feature designed to let parents spy on babysitters; call the machine, press *91, and you can listen as long as you want. Many of these went into Secured Compartmented Information Facilities, vaultlike areas where classified information is handled. TT
• First New-World cases of West Nile virus appear in Queens, killing 7. MSNBC The virus is genetically identical to an Israeli strain. It's not officially known how it jumped the Atlantic; some point to the ongoing vaccine experiments in NY, MD, and DC. WND
• US government explicitly states that an Iraqi attack on the Kurds would lead to a heavy US response. (Since f*kin' when?? This is like the explicit statement Hussein gassed the Kurds, utterly unsupported by heavydense.) State Dep't tries to resolve disputes between the two main Kurdish factions, the KDP and PUK, but sharp divisions remain. (That'd be like Mulroney trying to solve Canadian unity.) PBS
• France and China raise questions about VX found in Iraqi lab possibly being used to contaminate warheads as a frameup; US objects. AP US had done the testing; Warheads are destroyed before independent tests are done. C
• Napster goes online, recording-industry sales blossom, recording industry beats Napster to a pulp. /.
• Jan 5: John Glenn Moody texecuted. I911
• The US for nearly three years intermittently monitored the coded radio communications of President Saddam Hussein's innermost security forces using equipment secretly installed in Iraq by UN weapons inspectors, according to US and UN officials. [EHA quoting WP]
• Jan 25: USUK raid kills ±20 in Basorah region of Iraq. BBC

  Human Rights Watch reports on human-rights violations as a result of opposition to the Dabhol Power project. Beginning in late 1996 and continuing throughout 1997, leading Indian environmental activists and representatives of villagers' organizations in the affected area organized to oppose the project and, as a direct result of their opposition, were subjected to beatings, repeated short-term detentions, and were not paid. HRW · HRWPR

• Feb: Joint agreement signed by Turkmenistan and two American companies, Bechtel and GE Capital Services to build G$2.5 Trans-Caspian pipeline, after Enron conducted a feasibility study. FB
• Feb: Steve Kangas found dead in washroom near the office of a PI firm that had him under suveillance. [wrong—rewrite that] He had a `meticulously researched' website that was closing in on Bush's `real boss' Richard Scaife. The death is ruled suicide, even though, eg, Kangas had ordered a burlar alarm installed at home just before he went to Pittsburgh (where he was found). PA · X · BK
• Feb 1: Washington Post article on how just about any desired video and audio can now be faked. `The conspiracy-minded will no doubt ponder the worrisome mischief that lurks in the not too distant future.'
• Feb 10: Jorge Cordova texecuted. I911
• Feb 24: Norman Green texecuted. (The man that pulled the trigger got life.) I911
• Feb 27: Hon. Warren K. Urbom, sr US district judge, awards M$1 civil judgement in favour of Paul Bonacci against Lawrence King. JG
• Feb 28: USUK raid damages oil pipeline in Mosul, Iraq, cutting exports. BBC
• Mar: Banker's Trust pleads guilty to diverting nearly M$20 `unclaimed' funds to prop up other units. FTW citing NY Times

• Dr. William Cameron, an MD and consultant to the Canadian FDA, completely demolished the viral load surrogate marker as a relevant way to measure health or the success of treatments, according to Rasnick. He used as an example the clinical disaster, never reported in the media, of a drug many people were on years ago called DDI. Over a 12-week study, the drug worked brilliantly on viral load levels, but shortly thereafter turned out to be virulently toxic, in fact lethally so. At the highly private conference, where no press is allowed and attendees are told not to discuss what they hear,* even Ho recanted his central tenant, and said, Viremia [viral levels] are not predictive of clinical outcome. TMH

  * This is science, my fat fanny. This is one reason I got disenchanted with academic pursuits. They're as much BS as every other human pursuit, if not more so.
• Mar 5: Andrew Krepinevich, concluding his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities: `While there is growing support in Congress for transformation, the critical mass needed to effect it has not yet been achieved. One may conclude that, in the absence of a strong external shock to the US—a latter-day Pearl Harbor of sorts—surmounting the barriers to transformation will likely prove a long, arduous process.' CSBA
• Sophie Brassard does not have Valerie Emerson's luck, and loses her children to the AIDS police. She later kidnaps them.

  At least 2000 scientists, including Kary Mullis, winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993, UC-Berkeley scientist David Rasnick, and Peter Duesberg, a Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology, argue HIV by itself is harmless…Dr. Rasnick goes much farther, saying AIDS cocktails are DNA chain terminators that kill anything living. Taken as prescribed, he says bluntly, these drugs are a death sentence for women and children. AZT, Dr. Rasnick points out, was developed in the 1960s to treat cancer, but was found too toxic for human use. VM

• For 78 days, USAF and Navy pilots rain death indiscriminately upon women and children, elderly in the marketplaces, passengers in trains, people in cars and buses, people in schools, patients in hospitals—anyone and everyone, everywhere in Yugoslavia. CoT In March 1999, NATO…c[a]me to the rescue of ethnic Albanian Kosovars on the grounds they were being massacred by Serb forces. The forensic reports by the FBI and Europol confirm that the massacres did not occur. MC
• Mar 22(?) First sea-based launch of a satellite (Demosat by Sealaunch). [Discovery channel]

• At Lemuel Shattuck Hospital MA, a review was done on every HIV-positive patient who died at the hospital between May 1998 and April 1999, and compared to a group of patients who died in 1991, before drug cocktails were available.

  Of the 22 post-cocktail deaths, half died of liver toxicity from the drugs, and two more had liver toxicity listed as a secondary cause. The study concluded that liver toxicity was now the leading cause of death among HIV-positive patients at our institution. In other words, allegedly life-saving AIDS drugs are killing AIDS patients at this particular hospital.

  Hospitals around the country are reporting radical increases in heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and other complications caused primarily by the drug's interference with the body's natural ability to metabolize fat. This is also causing the fat redistribution that leads to humpbacks and huge torso in men, and gigantic breasts in women. At the same time, fat disappears from the face, arms and legs, rendering patients stick-like.

  Holly Melroe, a Registered Nurse at Regions Hospital in St Paul MN, wrote last year in the Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care that the drug therapies may have a greater life-threatening potential than the disease itself. TMH

• Apr: The Dabhol plant ('92) has been burning naptha until cheap LNG could be found. Enron planned to bring it from Qatar, but a global oil and gas glut trashes the plan. (Where to turn?) FB
• Apr:

  Two days before NATO bombed the Serb Television headquarters in Belgrade, CNN received a tip from its Atlanta headquarters that the building was to be destroyed. They were told to remove their facilities from the premises at once, which they did.

  A day later, Serbian Information Minister Aleksander Vucic received a faxed invitation from the Larry King Live show in the US to appear on CNN. They wanted him on air at 2:30 in the morning of 23 April and asked him to arrive at Serb Television half an hour early for make-up.

  Vucic was late—which was just as well for him since NATO missiles slammed into the building at six minutes to two. The first one exploded in the make-up room where the young Serb assistant was burned to death. CNN calls this all a coincidence, saying that the Larry King show, put out by the entertainment division, did not know of the news department's instruction to its men to leave the Belgrade building. WSWS quoting Robert Fisk

• Apr: Senior Taliban official, Mullah Moh. Khaksar, unhappy about Mullah Moh. Omar's support for Osama, approaches US about getting Omar replaced. US begs off. AP
• Apr: Root-Bernstein Rethinking AIDS: the tragic cost of premature consensus a heady and disturbing dose of rational discourse that shakes to its core the establishment AIDS industry of scientists, government, activists and the mass media. Root-Bernstein tries to demonstrate that our current scientific and public health approach to AIDS is fatally flawed; that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), commonly understood to be the cause of the range of diseases that we call AIDS, may in fact be no more than a co-factor, if that. TMH
• Apr: Hardy Limeback repudiates fluoridation.

  I had just tracked down Dr. Hardy Limeback, BSc, PhD in Biochemistry, DDS, head of the Department of Preventive Dentistry for the University of Toronto, and president of the Canadian Association for Dental Research. (Whew.) Dr. Limeback is Canada's leading fluoride authority and, until recently, the country's primary promoter of the controversial additive.

  In a surprising newsmaker interview this past April, Dr. Limeback announced a dramatic change of heart. Children under three should never use fluoridated toothpaste, he counseled. Or drink fluoridated water. And baby formula must never be made up using Toronto tap water. Never…we have been dumping contaminated fluoride into water reservoirs for half a century. The vast majority of all fluoride additives come from Tampa Bay, Florida smokestack scrubbers. The additives are a toxic byproduct of the super-phosphate fertilizer industry. [1 citing Mesa AZ Tribune Dec 5]

• Apr 20: 13 students of Columbine High School die in gunfire initiated by two of their number. But it is likely some were killed by overzealous agents.
• May 4: Jose de la Cruz texecuted. I911

  Oslo `peace process' deadline.

• May 13: USUK raid kills 12 in residential area of northern Iraq. BBC
• May 26: Amy Reiter apologises for reporting GWB denied dabbling in drugs. S
• May 21: GWB, in Austin TX: `There ought to be limits to freedom.'
• Jun 3: Mark Pierpont's letter of resignation. He'd been an orthodox AIDS educator for six years in Manatee Co FL, at the top of his profession, but on failure to find answers to the dissenters better than you're a fu@king wacko, decided he could no longer do the job with a clear conscience. VM
• Jun 17: Stan Faulder texecuted, first Canadian executed in US in 47 a, the same week GWB announces his presidential bid. I911
• Wesley Clark orders a British/NATO paratroop attack on their Russian allies who had just captured Pristina airport. Gen Sir Michael Jackson refuses, saying he's not going to start WW3 for Clark. [AW citing Guardian Aug 3, London Times 2001 May 23]
• Jun 30: Richard Butler completes his two-year term as executive chairman of UNSCOM. BG
• Jul 4: EO13129 freezes Taleban assets in US, and prohibits trade with Taleban. [FTW citing Federal Register v54 #129] But: The U.S. has paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official in hopes to secure a stable government in Afghanistan that will allow U.S. oil giant Unocal to build a pipeline through it to connect to the Caspian Sea. [911R citing SFC citing Ahmed Rashid Taliban]
• July 16: JFK Jr. `pulls a Kennedy' and pilots himself and two others to death in circumstances far beyond his training. Apparently. Presidential hopes for this Kennedy generation evaporate. (Oh sigh. This one's in dispute too. WRH In 2002 at the latest, suppossed witnesses will surface that claim to have seen JFK's plane explode. Unfortunately the site with the page is overloaded at the moment of writing... hmp. Actually, one of the earliest reports mentioned a `big white flash in the sky.' [WRH quoting UPI] R. D. Morningstar believes the flash was lightning and this disoriented JKFJ to the point of crashing. JFKR)

  This page and a companion, citing PAX TV, link the JFK Jr death to the NYC mayoral race. Unfortunately it says JFK declined Gore's offer in 2000. (Maybe it means Gore's offer for the 2000 election.)

  Another spin:

  So now what do we do about the information coming out on the explosion of JFK Jr.'s plane? The day it happened I wrote that JFK Jr. was doing more than any other American media figure to get to the bottom of the Rabin assassination truth. I reminded readers that his magazine George ran a 13-page exposé of the Shabak's involvement in the assassination. I suggested that this was a brave but risky stand.

  Then came the tidal wave of data. The FBI Preliminary Report confirming the bomb on the plane and noting the type of explosive was used by certain foreign intelligence services. This was followed by Catherine Crier of Fox TV's The Crier Report, announcing that JFK Jr. was about to meet high-ranking Mossad officers to get the full story on the Rabin assassination. Then Maariv ran an interview with JFK's chaufeur, who happens to be Israeli. Then people started noting that Barak was in Washington at the time of Kennedy's finale in life. JR

• Jul 18: USUK raid kills 14 southern Iraqi civilians. BBC
• Jul 26: Newsweek reports JFK Jr intends to run for Hillary's senate seat. On his death the entire printing is recalled.
• Jul 28: USUK raid kills 8 in northern Iraq. BBC
• Aug 17 (this year?): Major earthquake in Turkey, accompanied by odd luminous phenomena such as with the Great China Quake, plus electrical, thermal activity. Marmara Sea heated to 40C, although there are no volcanoes; hundreds of fish, crabs cooked alive, nets burned in the water. NDM
• Aug 18: Joseph Mario Trevino texecuted. I911
• Aug: GWB relieved of having to testify in suit of state official Eliza May fired for (she says) investigating funeral company SCI run by Robert Waltrip, old friend of Poppy and a major Bush contributor. SCI had a habit, in JEB's state of FL, of recycling Jewish graves, chucking preceding remains in the woods. [HIR citing FOX, CNN, WP, MH]
• Aug: Brig. Gen. W'm Looney: `If they turn on the radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs. They know we own their country. We own their airspace…We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need.' [TT citing Washington Post Aug 30]
• M$ blusters about the discovery of `NSA_key' in its OS. TW `Windows developers attending the [Crypto '99] conference did not deny that the NSA key was built into their software. But they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users' knowledge.' [VNYC—voxnyc taken out by SS '03 Jan]
• GWB, re something he's not good at: Sitting down and reading a 500-page book on public policy or philosophy or something. [DKB citing Talk, same issue as the infamous K. F. Tucker mockery]
• Shin Bet has been using torture despite Israel's signing of a UN contravention. BBC (Note the double terror bombing the day before the ruling. Could that have been `fake' terror to influence the court, or public feelings of the court?)
• Sep 11: WYE II treaty comes into effect, one week after its signing at Sharm-el-Sheik by Arafat and Baruk. S
• Sep 30: &rad;Nasty criticality accident at Japanese U defluorinator. Workers poured too much UF₆ solution into a settling basin. atmospheric radiation count monitored in Tokai-mura was announced to be 0.84 mSv/hr (more than 10,000 times the normal amount)…The amount of blood Na²⁴ [in one of the workers] showed that irradiation was about 17 Sv. J (Yike.)
• Oct: Kurdish leaders hold a general meeting of the Iraqi opposition in NYC since the US gov't refused to give security guarantees that would enable it in `Kurdistan.' PBS
• The Matrix, a Plato's-cave story, will become a touchstone for those trying to spread the truth about the modern world—trying to get people to take the red pill. IO · MS (The irony is that I take daily a little blue pill—30 mg Paxil—to be able to handle the truth.) This may originate in Icke Children of the Matrix
• Publisher withdraws `one of the great works about the Holocaust,' Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments: Memories of a Childhood as a near-total fabrication. G · G
• Oct 12:

  By not condemning a coup the US implicitly condones the overthrow of a government by Washington-friendly forces. On October 12, 1999, the popularly and democratically elected Prime Minister of (nuclear-armed) Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, was overthrown in a bloodless coup by General Pervez Musharaf. The US has officially recognized Musharaf's government, making any hopes of a return to democracy and the return of Sharif a moot point. Washington has spoken, and Herr General is our kind of man. So much for supporting democracy in the middle east/south Asia. Lucky for us that the Washington-friendly general was willing to allow us to use Pakistan as a staging area for attacks on Afghanistan only 2 years later…Another brick in the wall? GM

• Oct 23: Radiation and Public Health Project releases findings that Sr-90 had been found in the teeth of children born in the 1980s at levels equal to those of the middle 1950s, when the US and the former SU were conducting routine above-ground bomb tests. The elevated levels were attributed to accidents such as TMI and Chernobyl with contributions from ongoing releases from other reactors. L (Being in the same elemental family, the body tends to confuse Sr with Ca, hence its skeletal effects.)
• Nov: Enron purchases 5.1% of the company that operates India's sole long-distance gas pipeline, running from the offshore fields in the Bombay High area to New Delhi. FB
• Oct 28: Domingo Cantu texecuted. I911
• Nov:

  Computers gave the election to the wrong candidate, then gave it back. Bob Faulkner, a political newcomer, went to bed on Election Night confident he had helped complete a Republican sweep of three open council seats. But after Onondaga County Board of Elections staffers rechecked the totals, Faulkner had lost to Democratic incumbent Elaine Lytel. SNZ

• Nov 15: Ontario Ministry of Health does its darndest not to make fluoridation look bad: Although current studies of the effectiveness of water fluoridation have design weaknesses and methodological flaws, the balance of evidence suggests that rates of dental decay are lower in fluoridated than non-fluoridated communities. The magnitude of the effect is not large in absolute terms, is often not statistically significant and may not be of clinical significance. The effect tends to be more pronounced in the deciduous dentition. GO
• Nov 18: Gordon Earle (NDP Hfx W) presents antichemtrail petition from Espanola ON to Parliament. P
• Nov 20: National chemtrail protest. JR
• Nov 29–Dec 1: WTO meets behind closed doors in Seattle. Protests over the shutout are suppressed. GI Human Rights Watch will call for an impartial, independent panel to investigate allegations of excessive force and unwarranted restrictions on the rights to free expression and peaceful assembly. HRW
• Dec: Indian Airlines 814 Katmandu to New Delhi with 178 passengers hijacked by terrorists with knives. GR (An Omar Saeed comes up connected to this and Atta in 9/11, but not clear how. Was he released from prison on demand of the hijackers?)
• Dec 1: Pic of plane spewing suspicious vapour hits the 'net, but is ultimately identified as a Navy TACAMAO dumping fuel. Most large aircraft dump fuel from the wingtips, but the TACAMAO was modified with inboard dumps to avoid wingtip instrument. (Logged for memory. I bleeve I've seen two photos of obviously non-engine aircraft vapour trails; this one one, now I gotta find the other.)
• GWB begins promising to take out Saddam and his alleged illegal weapons. [CP citing `Rhetoric and Reality on Iraq' New York Times Dec 12]
• Dec 17: UN replaces UNSCOM with UN Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission. The change is part of the spy-scandal cleanup. `The new inspection agency, known as Unmovic, was deliberately designed to reduce the Americans' overwhelming influence—thus making it more difficult for Washington to provoke a crisis if it so desires. In the new body, Americans play a reduced role in planning inspection missions and, unlike its predecessor, it will not use US Government staff.' LT Iraq rejects the resolution. BG (Can't imagine the US was all that big on it either—should look up the votes.)
• Dec 31: The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight (Y2K bug). The US cedes the canal to Panama, who had already `privatised' it to a Hong Kong (now Chinese) company Hutchison-Whampoa, which would later get Global Crossing. HIR · UCG

Sometime in 1990s

• Fmr FBI boss Ted Gunderson, hired to smear John deCamp (onetime promotor of GHWB, who had been hired to smear those claiming Lawrence King ran a child mule-and-prostitution ring but wound up believing, representing the children, and authoring The Franklin Coverup), decides deCamp is the one telling the truth. PP
• Sometime after 1990, ACTUP San Francisco switches sides re the HIV theory. Other ACTUPpers are a bit bitter about it; they complain they were shouted down, intimidated, driven out…harassed and stalked. AUGG Like they're in any moral position to complain; and like there's any F in way the HIV is death people and the HIV is a scam people could get along.
• The West (mostly US) bungles the conversion of Russia to capitalism. It's probably not an accident. FTW
• Nicaragua appeals to the UN Security Council, which resolves that states should observe international law. The US vetoes it. NC
• Nicaragua appeals to the UN General Assembly, where they get a similar resolution that passed near-unanimously, which the US and Israel opposed two years in a row. NC
• Egypt Air 990 explodes 112 km off Nantucket. There were over 50 Egyptian military officers aboard (incl. 34 generals, contrary to 1978); some had just completed G$3 of training in US hardware. [alB quoting Egypt's al Ahram 2000 Apr 2] (re #14: ½g[40 s]²=±25900', close enough) Long before the wreck is recovered Clinton will announce it had nothing to do with terrorism. (Wait a minute. `Explodes'? then Why is the NTSB still saying (2002 Mar) the copilot dove it into the Atlantic? Carefully avoiding calling it suicide since a devout Muslim as the copilot is supposed to be can't self-destruct?)
• The US is in deep debt, somewhere in the terabuck range. WRH · WRH Lost change alone may tally G$7. FN Debunking its claims of being a high-tech country, in fact its top net exports are cowhides and scrap [drat i wish i could find that page again...it was by a former commerce or treasury secretary, some such muckamuck who should know what he's saying] (including, later, ±¼ of the ±200Gg of WTC steel FN). Its top three net imports are oil, vehicles, and clothes—that's right, they can't even clothe themselves. WRH (Another article on this point Cyberporn and the New Roman Empire. However you may feel about its anti-porn moralistic tones, the basic facts seem correct; porn is (or is about to become) the one place in that utterly fake IT boom [Matloff] where there are still a few jobs [X quoting LA Times]. Some big-name companies like AT&T and Sprint are quietly supporting themselves with pornpipes into hotel chains, etc.)
• Deciding that the Pentagon, like income tax, isn't going to be as temporary as first thought, a multigigabuck upgrade begins.
• JFK assassination skeptics claim to find a gunman in the blobs of Mary Mormon Moorman's Polaroid print, one of the only public records of that area of the event. I don't buy it, myself. (Although now, on reading Morningstar's study, it's a compelling set of blobs. Now if only I could find them in a good full scan of Moorman. Incidentally, a problem with the Badgeman=Tippit theory is that Tippit appears to be reliably placed elsewhere. X On the other hand, mobster Sam Giancana is supposed to have told his brother that Tippit was one of the shooters CL)
• Arnold Schwartznegger-Schriver-Kennedy endorses Republican candidate.
• RK Jr. Michael Kennedy skis into a tree. (c1997, America's Prince) (Is this the MK that got mixed up w/ the babysitter?)
• Sonny Bono skis into a tree.
• Argentina links peso(?) to greenback, will need doses from the IMF. AM
• Despite trepidation about his criminal, warmongering past, Ariel Sharon is (allegedly) elected PM of Israel. `With Ariel Sharon leading Israel, the world will be a scarier place for everyone.' VWH
• US builds a new embassy in Moscow, and lets local contractors do the construction, expecting/hoping to get a peek at some of the latest Soviet spy gadgetry. They'll find such alarming gadgetry they knock off with this local-contractor bull, relegate the lower part of the building to insecure uses, and build themselves a couple of carefully isolated storeys on top for the important stuff. (ie, once again they underestimate the stupid Soviets—see space race.)
• A&E débuts Investigative Reports with a multipart review of the JFK assassination. Now the skeptics claim to have found in the blobs (see ^^) what looks like a railyard worker to the gunman's left, and a man with a home-movie camera on his right. IR claims to have found the latter and interiews him; he virtually wets his pants when he's shown the photograph. I begin to buy the story…should I?? Or is this one of the CIA's media plants?
• Since the stupid Soviets—actually I guess now it's the stupid Russians—have the most experience with long periods of space habitation, the US contracts with them to build the ISS. The Russians warn the Americans there are various unsolved medical side-effects of long-term µg exposure; the Americans pooh-pooh the idea. What would those stupid Russians know about tough Americans? They find out… (see embassy re `stupid' Russians/Soviets.)
• Time-Warner absorbs CNN. PA
• Unknown SS agent dies when the C-130 carrying the presidential limos crashes near Jackson Hole. DM
• Arkansas dentist Ronald Rogers dies in plane crash on his way to an interview with a London Sunday Telegraph reporter about Clinton scandals. DM
• An estimated 4.5 billion prairie dogs have been exterminated this century for being thought to interfere with cattle profits. In fact the ranchers overgraze the land, forcing the critturs into desperation competition. RD
• Neil Bush `unceremoniously dumped' for cheating in a Denver amateur tennis tournament by understating his skill level. NB
• Edwin Meese explaining to the ABA why Miranda was no longer necessary: `If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.' NB
• Proctor & Gamble get FDA approval for Olestra despite admitted sideëffects like `anal leakage' and various kinds of gastrointestinal distress. NB
• Netanyahu, as ambassador to UN, `discovers' Kurt Waldheim's alleged Nazi past. Waldheim had criticised Israel's activity in Lebanon. WR
• Jame Bunch Died from a gunshot suicide. It was reported that he had a "Black Book" of people containing names of influential people who visited prostitutes in Texas and Arkansa. P
• Florence Martin - Accountant sub-contractor for the CIA related to the Barry Seal Mena Airport drug smuggling case. Died of three gunshot wounds. P
• W'm Casey - dies two days before he can testify re Iran-Contra. BK
• Danny Casolaro - Investigative reporter. Investigating Mena Airport and Arkansas Development Finance Authority. He slit his wrists, apparent suicide in the middle of his investigation. P
• Suzanne Coleman - Reportedly had an affair with Clinton when he was Arkansas Attorney General. Died of a gunshot wound to the back of the head, ruled a suicide. Was pregnant at the time of her death. P
• Dr. Stanley Heard - Chairman of the National Chiropractic Health Care Advisory Committee died with his attorney Steve Dickson in a small plane crash. Dr. Heard, in addition to serving on Clinton's advisory council personally treated Clinton's mother, stepfather and brother. P
• Stanley Huggins - Suicide. Investigated Madison Guarantee. His report was never released. P
• Charles Meissner - Assistant Secretary of Commerce who gave John Huang special security clearance, died shortly thereafter in a small plane crash. P
• BARBARA OLSON - Author of "Hell to Pay" - a book critical of Hillary Clinton, killed in the Pentagon bombing. LM
• CHARLES RUFF - White House Counsel and Clinton defense attorney during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment trial. Of apparent natural causes. LM
• Edmond J. Safra - dies in fire at his Monaco penthouse apartment. His banks had been used for laundering money by the Iran/Contra conspirators. BK
• John Shaheen - a Republican businessman and friend of W'm Casey, head of the Reagan/Bush campaign, who helped set up arms negotiations with the Iranians. BK

• The AIDS magazine POZ and others like it are filled with proteäse-inhibitor ads that drastically contrast with the cruel reality. The ads feature muscular, tanned, and beautiful people at the peak of their powers: climbing mountains, sprinting over hurdles, sailing, and generally beaming with life.

  In reality, three years into the proteäse-inhibitor craze, most people on cocktail therapy can barely function. I talked to one of the most well-known proteäse models, Michael Weathers, whose handsome face adorns several billboards across America, and he said that he had not only never taken proteäse inhibitors, but had never taken any AIDS drugs. He is perfectly healthy 13 years after learning he was positive. They have this rule that they have to use HIV-positive models for their AIDS drug ads, Weathers comments, but they certainly do not use models who are using their drugs. That would hardly make for effective advertising.

  The list of side effects listed by the drug companies themselves in their own ads is so long it numbers in the hundreds. The toxic effects are so numerous, they have broken them down into categories…Leafing through POZ, I read the fine print that follows every proteäse ad. In each and every one, it states that the drugs have killed people. In the advertisement for the drugs. Yet the accompanying text warns in parental tones about the importance of staying on the drugs no matter what. TMH