But I can say with assurance that the black budget peaked at about $36 billion a year in 1988 and 1989. This year, in the fiscal 1991 Pentagon request, the declassification of the costs of the Stealth bomber and MILSTAR brought the black budget back down toward $34 billion.
Blank Check - Tim Weiner p.16
Orbit of Influence: Spy Finance and the Black Budget by Robert Dreyfuss
In 1988 nearly 20,000 U.S. industrial plants put 2.4 billion pounds of toxic chemicals into the air.
Our Endangered Earth - John Langon
During the campaign year a parade of gun runners and drug dealers claimed that Bush's associates had known of schemes to help the contras with cocaine money.
Landslide - Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus p.392
more on drugs1989
Noam Chomsky on the contras - Is Peace At Hand?
The year 1988 also brought the startling revelation that William Webster's FBI had conducted a massive investigation of more than thirteen hundred organizations and individuals who were opposed to Ronald Reagan's South American policy. The main target was the Washington-based Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) but the investigation, in which fifty-two of the fifty-nine field offices participated, soon spread to include the National Council of Churches, the Maryknoll Sisters, the United Auto Workers, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
J. Edgar Hoover : The Man and the Secrets - Curt Gentry p.758
Whatever the reasons for starting the CISPES [Commitee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador] investigation, twenty-seven months of agents' time and hundreds of thousands of tax dollars were spent on spying - and there is really no other word to use - on the political activities of thousands of citizens who didn't agree with what their government was doing.
p.268 The Bureau: Inside the Modern FBI - Diarmuid Jeffreys
more on civil rights1992
Between 1984 and 1988, ballistic missile technology and advanced radar-controlled antiaircraft equipment were illegally shipped from the United States to Iraq via South Africa with the full knowledge of the CIA.
Elite Deviance - David R. Simon and D. Stanley Eitzen p. 163
Teicher suggests that the U.S. intelligence material was so sensitive that Iraq may have been able to "reverse engineer" its military defenses, to defend its own troops from the systems the United States was using to spy on Iran. After 1988, the Iraqis undertook a massive military program to harden and hide their command, control, and communications systems.
...The fact remains that from 1988 until the opening of the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqi military underwent a massive program to make sure that its major communications links would remain unsevered in the case of war.
Eclipse - Mark Perry p.387
more on Iraq1990
After tracking down the fugitive perpetrators of the December 21, 1988, PanAm explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, we have yet to win their extradition.
When the Eagle Screams - Stephen Bowman p.62