... 1857 (150 years ago today), more than 100 children, women, and men, emigrants in a wagon train headed from Arkansas to California, were killed when they made camp in Utah. As the Archeological Institute of America writes of this Mountain Meadows Massacre, "Who attacked the group is an ongoing debate, but historical accounts tell of a combined force of local Mormon militia and Paiute Indians. Executed in 1877, Mormon Bishop John D. Lee was the only person punished for the crime." The story is told as well at this LDS site, and is the subject of a just-released film, "September Dawn." The cairn above marks a mass grave.... 1973, Chilean President Salvador Allende died in a coup d'état led by his military chief, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Allende, as the BBC reported, was "the world's first democratically-elected Marxist head of state" -- a status that made him a target for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, said to have "backed" the military "uprising."
... 2001, hijackers used U.S. civilian airliners as tools of terrorism. The World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington each were hit, killing thousands; a 3d jet crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The September 11 attacks touched off a campaign that U.S. officials dubbed GWOT, the global war on terror. The attacks were attributed to the Al Qaeda network, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, remains at large to this day.
