Wednesday, April 20, 2011

ON THIS DAY, APRIL 19

On April 19, in the year 1961, the USA's clandestine invasion of Cuba ends in spectacular failure when JFK refuses to lend air support to the unapproved covert military action kicked off by CIA-trained Cuban ex-pats who land at the rocky cliffs at Cuba's Bay of Pigs.

On this day in 1971, cult leader Charles Manson is sentenced to die for his role in the Tate/LaBianca murders, which serve as an unofficial demarcation zone for the 1960's.

On this day in 1985 the FBI siege on the compound of the White Supremacist and Christian Identity group known as The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord comes to a non-violent end in Arkansas with the leaders giving up without a fight. Eight years later, in 1993, the same cannot be said of a similar siege, near Waco, Texas, against a similar (though less criminally inclined) group, the Branch Davidians. Eighty-one people perish in that catastrophe. Two years after that, a moving truck parked outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City explodes, destroying the building and killing 168 people, including dozens of preschoolers. Meanwhile, in Arkansas, Covenant/Sword/Arm cult-member Richard Wayne Snell is put to death in Arkansas for double-homicide. Snell claimed to have videotaped then-governor Bill Clinton accepting shipments of cocaine at Mena airport in Akransas, and was instrumental in getting Timothy McVeigh involved with the insurrectionist, Apocalyptic Christian Identity commune known as Elohim City

On this day in 1999, The German Bundestag returns to Berlin, the first German parliamentary body to meet there since the Reichstag was dissolved in 1945.

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