Browsing: Military

A Brief History On November 8, 1965, a North Vietnamese force of 1,200 soldiers ambushed 400 of the US Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade West of the Dong Nai River and paid dearly for their disregard of American military prowess. Digging Deeper In a search and destroy mission called Operation Hump, the US Army was roaming South Vietnam hoping to find and engage North Vietnamese forces to force a battle that would diminish the Communist forces.  As often happened during the US war in Vietnam, it was the Vietnamese that found the Americans first and initiated contact. Although the outnumbered American…

A Brief History On November 3, 1986, a Lebanese magazine reported that the US had been selling weapons to Iran as part of a negotiation to get seven Americans released in Lebanon.  President Reagan, as part of his “tough guy” image as a presidential candidate had repeated a line from US leaders since Nixon, “there will be no negotiation with terrorists of any kind.” Digging Deeper Reagan, however, appeared outed as dealing with terrorists in violation of US law in the Iran-Contra Scandal, dealing with Iran, a state sponsor of terrorists.  Reagan’s team was allegedly even negotiating with terrorists before…

A Brief History On October 27, 1962, US Air Force Major Rudolf Anderson was shot down and killed while flying his U-2 spy plane over Cuba. Digging Deeper The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a face-off between the US and the USSR over the Soviets stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba, close to the American mainland.  After two weeks of negotiations and nearly causing a nuclear war, national leaders reached a deal where the Soviets would remove nukes from Cuba and the US would remove nuclear missiles from Turkey and possibly Italy. Despite debate about taking drastic military action…

A Brief History On October 26, 1979, Kim Jae-kyu, the head of the South Korean CIA, assassinated the country’s president, Park Chung Hee.  The president died on the spot of gunshot wounds to the chest and head. Digging Deeper One pervasive conspiracy theory regarding the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy is that the American CIA was somehow involved.  While such theories are usually treated as forays into fiction, the assassination of the South Korean president by his own CIA show that the idea might not be all that farfetched. Director Kim used a Walther PPK to shoot his…

A Brief History On October 25, 1924, the Daily Mail, a London based British newspaper, published a fake letter called “the Zinoviev letter,” a letter said to be from Grigory Zinoviev, a Moscow based leader of the Communist International.  The letter was a fake and intentionally presented to sway public opinion against the Labour Party in Britain’s 1924 elections. Digging Deeper The fake letter was successful in stoking anti-communist public hysteria and getting the Conservative Party a victory in the elections. While calling the media “Fake News” is often seen as a conspiracy theory ploy used by one side or…