UT jun Ag ay

With uncharacteristic im-
precision, the Americans mis-
sed the date by three days. Had
Reagan waited until April 17 to
attack Libya, he would have
committed his blunder exactly
25 years to the day after Ken-
nedy stumbled into the Bay of
Pigs disaster in Cuba — April
77, 1961.

It struck me when in Cuba
last February to cover the
Communist Party congress,
that it had been 25 years since a
group of us young journalists

arrived at Playa Giron only
hours after the fighting had
ended. My notes, written on
the blazing hot beach, give
scattered impressions: ‘‘High-
way looks like an army camp —
buses, tanks, lines of troops ...
Columns of captured ‘gusanos’
(worms, as the Cubans call the
mercenaries) plodding along
looking tired, frightened and ter-
ribly miserable. . .”’

“New homes shelled to rubble
... supply ship sits stern-down
offshore, (this turned out to be

<4 # oe

Bay of Pigs 25 years ago
holds lesson for Reagan today

the Houston, whose anchor is
now displayed in the invasion
museum) ... We stopped at a
downed aircraft with what re-
mains of the pilot inside. ..”’
The Bay of Pigs fiasco has
been told and retold, and will
be so again. But its lesson has
obviously not been grasped by
its organizers in Washington.

ek oe

It was with some nostalgia,

then, that I wandered over the’

same beaches last February

Cuban militia and armor at Playa Giron. In 24 hours the mercenary brigade lost 92 killed, 1,197 captured.

Highway sign today illustrates what the 1,500-strong brigade owned
before the revolution. The 27,556 caballerias of land, for examP™
totals over 1.5 million acres. They were the rich returning to recapture
possessions and privilege, instead they met an armed people. —

and wondered if all this had
really happened. To be sure,
some signs and the carefully-
tended graves where Cuban
militia fell, line the single
highway into Playa Giron.

But the resort itself couldn’t .

be further from anyone’s idea
of a former war zone.

- Only the museum with its
story of the invasion which

struck at 0:200 hours, April 17,

1961; photos of the heroes who
met the first wave and paid
with their lives; the creaky old
aircraft with faded _ initials
“FAR” on its fuselage, and
views of the area, the poorest
in Cuba at the time, give evi-

‘can Republic (1965), invade

dence of those events so loné
ago.

*k * *
is pars. fe
SebiaSCort Disaster »
“Debacle”? — all describe

Kennedy’s 1961 folly. Bub
now we’ ve seen the U.S. wage
a 10 year war in Vietnal
(1965-75), invade the Domint

Grenada (1983), bankroll the
contras against Nicaragu@ |
(1982-86) and, just last week
send its sophisticated war ™
chine against Libya.
The little museum trucked
away in the Cuban resort of
Playa Giron still has some 1g
lessons to teach. a
— Tom Morris :

 Plausible lies to mislead publit

“Disinformation” is a word the PR wizards of the.

Reagan administration have invented to describe vir-
tually all attempts by Soviets to explain their point of
view to the West. The term apparently means
‘*propaganda skullduggery’’; the deliberate presentation
of plausible lies, with the intention of misleading public
opinion. So, for éxample, when Soviet journalist Vla-
dimir Posner was recently given seven minutes on
ABC-TV to analyze a Reagan speech, the White House
demanded — and received-— an apology from the net-
work for lending itself to ‘the designs of ‘*‘Soviet dis-
information”’.

Most things the Reagan administration accuses the
Soviets of doing, the U-S. is itself guilty of doing in
spades. Disinformation is a fine example. Since Reagan
came into office we have seen a virtual campaign of
deceit take hold in the U.S. media.

Typically, a disinformation ploy begins with sensa-
tional press coverage. Grave charges and serious wor-
ries about ‘‘national security’’ are leaked to the media, or
made outright by high administration officials. Months
or even years later a contrary truth may become clear,
but this information will receive only perfunctory press
coverage, if any.

Remember that ‘‘Libyan hit squad’’ that was sup-
posed to have stalked a newly-elected Ronald Reagan?
Washington officials now admit, with breathtaking un-
derstatement, that they ‘‘overreacted”’ to that one. Re-
member ‘‘yellow rain’’? Teams of independent scientists
investigating this for the past several years have now
conclusively demonstrated that the samples of ‘‘yellow
rain’’ solemnly presented to the media as proof of Soviet
malevolence were, in fact, 100 per cent bee dung. Not a
frightening new chemical weapon, but bee crap! Re-
member the ‘Bulgarian connection’’ and the ‘““KGB
plot” to kill the Pope? Well, you know what happened to
that . <=.

Now, remember ‘‘spydust’’? Last August, as prepara-
tions for the Reagan-Gorbachev Summit were getting
underway, the U.S. State Department suddenly an-
nounced that Soviet agents were sprinkling a chemical
called ‘‘NPPD’’ around the U.S. embassy in Moscow,
creating a chemical trail they could use to keep tabs on
American personnel. The State Department further
claimed that ‘‘NPPD”’ was a dangerous carcinogen that

12 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, APRIL 23, 1986

News
Analysis

Fred Weir

threatened the lives of Americans. One U.S. Senator
even called for shutting down the Moscow embassy
because it had become ‘‘a biohazard zone’’. These
‘‘revelations’’ came close to sabotaging the Geneva
Summit.

However, as Science magazine (March 7, 1986) re-
ports, the results of a systematic study of ““NPPD”’ are
Row in, and since you haven't read about it in the daily
press, you can probably already guess that ‘‘spydust”’
hasn’t lived up to its advance billing.

The study was done last August by the U.S. Environ-
mental Protection Agency, but not released until quite
recently. A scientific team went to Moscow, where it
scoured the grounds of the U.S. embassy for signs of
‘“*NPPD”’. It collected 418 ‘‘surface wipe’’ samples and
18 samples of lint or vacuumed material. Each was
analyzed at Versar, Inc., a laboratory in Springfield,
Virginia. The results were uniformly negative. ““NPPD
was not found in any of the samples,” the final report
said. It concluded that ‘‘no purpose would be served by
further random sampling of the general (diplomatic)
population.”

Furthermore, a study dc ae by the same researchers on
the health effects of American-made NPPD concludes
that ‘‘NPPD does not pose a health hazard to anyone’.

In light of this, U.S. State Department official, Charles
Redman, was asked by a Science reporter if he had any
second thoughts about the wisdom of having sounded
the alarm so sharply on the eve of the Summit. ‘““None

whatsoever,’ he answered, ‘‘absolutely none’’.
o* * ok

Plutonium Cover Up
Disinformation is what we see in the big media but

also, often as not, what we don’t see. No major news

outlet, to the best of my knowledge, has yet reported the

- the next space shuttle was meant to provide pow®

fact that the space shuttle mission scheduled to fol
the Challenger that exploded, was to have carne
package containing 21 kilograms (46.7 pounds) of
radioactive isotope Plutonium-238. h
Now, plutonium is the most toxic substance know! {
science. It is the main ingredient of hydrogen bombS;" | |
is used to power some types of nuclear reactors. A 5 ¥, |
ounce of plutonium, suspended in an aerosol and SPey
ed from the top of the CN Tower would create millio™
cases of lung and bone cancer downwind. aan
The plutonium that was to have been sent aloft ws

two deep-space probes, Galileo and Ulysses. It wage
have been the biggest such shipment ever. a
The Challenger disaster has created a storm
scientific community about the wisdom of | ;
plutonium in projects of space exploration. The risk iE
transporting the stuff through the Earth’s atmosP
are, as the shuttle catastrophe shows, enormous: . »
However, as Science magazine (March 21, 1986)
ports, the U.S. military is embarking on a scheme |
will magnify those risks a hundredfold. Last oct?
the Strategic Defence Initiative Organization (whit
overseeing Star Wars research) signed an agre® |
with the U.S. Department of Energy and the 5
agency NASA to begin work on a new generatlO
nuclear reactors for military space applications.
Under development is the ‘‘SP-100"’, a space 1"
that, according to Gerold Yonas, chief scientist for
Strategic Defence Initiative Organization, will OF
‘cornerstone’ power station of the entire Stal.
effort. If all goes as planned, by 1993 the U.S. mil
will be transporting ‘“‘SP-100"’ reactors into space @”
the shuttle, along with regular shipments of the ra°
tive fuel required to keep them operating.
Even this may only be the beginning. If the eS)
proves itself, the Pentagon is hoping to build much! f
reactors capable of powering directed-energy weape
As early as the turn of the century, we may not se& 2 ;
kilograms, but tons of plutonium-238 or the 4
equally deadly uranium-235 being transhipped 08 BY
ular basis through our atmosphere. si
Considering all of the trivia, not to say disinform?",
that our big media focusses upon, why are they incape
of drawing public attention to a matter as crucial a8