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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, JULY 3–9  
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_ Getting War in Asia Started (1979), A Rent Strike for the Ages
(1839), Blood on the Embarcadero (1934), Go-Slow Asbestos Ban (1989),
When “Intelligence” Was Wishful Thinking (2004), Just a
Coincidence?, Nice Try, International Court of Justice (2004) _

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_GETTING WAR IN ASIA STARTED_

45 YEARS AGO, on July 3, 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency
embarked on a top-secret operation named Operation Cyclone. By doing
so, the U.S. started down a road that led inexorably to a 43-year-long
series of wars that killed hundreds of thousands of  civilians in
Afghanistan and Iraq, plus nearly 7,000 members of the U.S armed
forces, and provoked the worst-ever terrorist attack on the U.S.,
which killed nearly three thousand civilians and seriously injured
tens of thousands more. 

Operation Cyclone, which provided money and weapons to Islamic
guerrillas opposed to the Russian presence in Afghanistan, started out
with very little risk to the U.S. But giving Afghanistan’s
mujahideen thousands of tons of weapons worth several billion dollars
opened the floodgates to a tide of death and destruction that still
reverberates from Kabul to Lower Manhattan.
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_A RENT STRIKE FOR THE AGES_

185 YEARS AGO, on July 4, 1839, a sometimes violent, 6-year-long
revolt by thousands of tenant farmers in the Hudson River Valley and
the Catskill Mountains was inaugurated at a mass meeting in semi-rural
Berne, New York. The date of the meeting was no accident, because the
outraged farmers proclaimed “We will take up the ball of Revolution
where our fathers stopped it, and roll it to the final consummation of
freedom and independence of the masses.” 

What followed was a successful struggle by tens of thousands of
farmers against a semi-feudal system of land ownership that had been
established more than a century before the American revolution. After
years of intense struggle, including a massive rent strike, the
so-called Anti-Rent War forced the state legislature to amend the
state’s constitution and compel the landlords of ancient, vast, New
York estates to give up their centuries-old prerogatives that held
their tenants in semi-serfdom.  

The amended New York State Constitution added provisions for tenants'
rights that had the effect of abolishing the ancient system of feudal
tenures. Within a short time, the owners of the pre-revolutionary
manors sold off thousands of farms to the families that had rented
them for generations. It was a social and economic revolution that put
an end to one of the last vestiges of a quasi-feudal system.
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_BLOOD ON THE EMBARCADERO_

90 YEARS AGO, on July 5, 1934, known as Bloody Thursday, two
longshoremen were killed by police gunfire in San Francisco during a
strike that shut down every major West Coast port for almost three
months. The two victims were among a total of five strikers killed by
police or company thugs in the course of work stoppage. Despite the
repression, the strikers won a 30-hour week, time-and-a-half for
overtime and the right of the union, and not the employer, to
determine which workers would be assigned to which job openings.
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_ASBESTOS BAN ON THE SLOW ROAD_

35 YEARS AGO, on July 6, 1989, more than 60 years after asbestos was
known to be a potent carcinogen, the Environmental Protection Agency
issued regulations designed to begin the phased-in ban of almost all
uses of asbestos in the U.S. by 1996.Even now, The U.S. remains one of
the few developed countries to not completely ban asbestos.
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_WHEN “INTELLIGENCE” WAS REALLY WISHFUL THINKING_

20 YEARS AGO, on July 7, 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee
published a harsh 511-page report declaring that the
“intelligence” information about “weapons of mass destruction”
that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq had been
“overstated” so much that it was just plain wrong.  The report
had the unanimous support of the 17 committee members, nine Democrats
and eight Republicans.
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_JUST A COINCIDENCE?_ 

ON JULY 8TH at precisely 5-year intervals –

IN 1959: The first two fatalities among U.S. military personnel in
Vietnam take place when Vietnamese freedom fighters attack a U.S.
compound in Bien Hoa, 20 miles northeast of Saigon, killing a major
and a master sergeant.

IN 1964: United Nations Secretary General U Thant tells a press
conference that "the only sensible solution" to the war in Vietnam is
to reconvene talks in Geneva to negotiate peace; to which U.S.
President Lyndon Johnson responds: "We do not believe in conferences
called to ratify terror."

IN 1969: Having reached a peak military presence in Vietnam of
543,000, the U.S. withdrawal begins when the first of 25,000 soldiers
deplane at McChord Air Force Base near Seattle, Washington.
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_NICE TRY, INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE_

20 YEARS AGO, on July 9, 2004, the International Court of Justice
ruled that "Israel cannot rely on a right of self-defense or on a
state of necessity in order to preclude the wrongfulness of the
construction of the wall" between Israel and the West Bank and that
"the construction of the wall, and its associated régime, are
contrary to international law." The vote in favor of the decision was
14-1. The sole dissenting vote was cast by the court’s only justice
from the United States.

The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement, which is widely known
as BDS, was founded in 2005, on the first anniversary of the
International Court of Justice's ruling. 
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