March 5, 2001
In his first major military action as president, George Bush ordered a bombing attack on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq’s capital city. Bush described the raid as “routine.” The president stated, “Our intention is to make sure that the world is as peaceful as possible.” Over the past two years bombing attacks have killed an average of one Iraqi civilian about every other day.
Cuba’s revolutionary government, the only voice on the UN Security Council during the 1990-91 imperialist assault to expose Washington’s aims and answer its rationalizations for its aggression, again sharply condemned the bombing attack.
A statement by the foreign ministry labeled the raid “the most recent in a long series of criminal and hostile actions that various U.S. administrations have been carrying out against Iraqi territory for the past 10 years.”
March 5, 1976
On Feb. 18, President Ford issued an executive order that gives an official green light for a whole range of unsavory CIA activity. Ford also sent to Congress a proposed secrets bill establishing criminal penalties for federal government employees who reveal information officials want kept from the public.
Ford’s secrets act would provide unprecedented legal cover for police-state methods. The bill threatens former and current government employees with up to $5,000 in fines and five years in prison for disclosing “classified” information. No proof need be shown that the revelation did the “national security” any harm.
Government employees would be denied their constitutional right to a jury trial. The defense that a “secret” was illegally classified could only be presented before a judge in a closed hearing.
March 5, 1951
Army Jim Crow is victimizing Negro GIs in Korea and Japan, it was revealed Feb. 21 in a report of NAACP special counsel Thurgood Marshall upon his return from the Korean front. He described trials of four men sentenced to life in prison. These trials lasted just 42 to 44 to 50 minutes.
Negro GIs have experienced in Korea the very same segregation and brutal discrimination that they were subjected to at home. At home the Negro is the last to be hired and the first to be fired. In Korea, the Negro GI is the first to advance and last to retreat.
As a reward he is framed up by white-supremacist officers, and handed drastic prison terms by lily-white courts martial. These 45-minute trials are replicas of the kangaroo courts of all-white lynch-juries at home which condemn Negroes to prison and death because of their race.