PROGRAMMING NOTE: As with last night’s newsletter there will be no voiceover tonight. I am over my cold but my voice has still not fully returned and in addition to sounding ragged it is painful to talk at length.
TODAY IN HISTORY
April 13, 1953: Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles orders the formation of Project MKUltra, a program for human experimentation into “mind control” drugs and techniques. Among its more unsavory components were experiments in which human subjects, often pulled involuntarily from prisons and mental institutions, were dosed with drugs (LSD in particular), usually without their consent. Some of the techniques MKUltra tested eventually found their way into George W. Bush’s “enhanced interrogation” (torture) program, and it has spawned innumerable conspiracy theories since the revelation of its existence in the 1970s.
April 13, 1975: An attack by Christian Phalangist militia fighters on a bus carrying Palestinian fighters and civilians in eastern Beirut triggers the Lebanese Civil War. That conflict, which fed on religious and sectarian tensions that were inherent in the structure of the Lebanese state and were exacerbated by the influx of Palestinian refugees following the 1948 and 1967 wars and by the arrival of the Palestine Liberation Organization after the Black September 1970 event in Jordan, lasted some 15 years and killed anywhere from 150,000 to 250,000 people.
MIDDLE EAST
LEBANON
The Israeli military (IDF) killed at least six people in multiple airstrikes across southern Lebanon on Monday. Israeli forces also reportedly encircled the town of Bint Jbeil and began an operation to seize it ahead of Tuesday’s planned “peace” talks between the Israeli and Lebanese governments. According to Reuters there is a Hezbollah garrison inside Bint Jbeil that is hunkering down and preparing “to fight to the death.” It’s unclear how large that garrison is but Israeli officials are apparently expecting to take the town in a matter of days and proceed from there to securing a strip of land running all the way across the Lebanese side of the border. It is yet to be seen what Tuesday’s negotiating session will look like, given that the Lebanese government appears singularly focused on achieving a ceasefire and the Israeli government has already rejected a ceasefire in principle.
