-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 8, 2007 7:36:47 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Subject: Fwd: The Terror America Wrought
Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL.com.
From: "Jim S." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: August 8, 2007 6:55:42 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: The Terror America Wrought
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------
"America is a nation founded on the principle that all human life
is sacred...
Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not
ethical."-- G.W.
Bush on the occasion of vetoing Congressional bill on stem cell
research. June
20, 2007
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18142.htm
*The Terror America Wrought*
By Robert Scheer
08/08/07
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/
20070807_robert_scheer_august_8_a_bomb/
"Truthdig" -- During a week of mayhem in Iraq, in which terrorists
have rightly
been condemned for targeting schoolchildren, it is sobering to
recall that this
week is also the 62nd anniversary of a U.S. attack that
deliberately took the
lives of thousands of children on their way to school in the
Japanese cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As noted in the Strategic Bombing Survey
conducted at
President Harry Truman's request, when the bomb hit Hiroshima on
April 6, 1945,
"nearly all the school children ... were at work in the open," to
be exploded,
irradiated or incinerated in the perfect firestorm that the
planners back at the
University of California-run Los Alamos lab had envisioned for the
bomb's maximum
psychological impact.
The terror plot worked all too well, as Hiroshima's Mayor Tadatoshi
Akiba
recalled this week: "That fateful summer, 8:15 a.m. The roar of a
B-29 breaks
the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then
suddenly, a flash, an
enormous blast -- silence -- hell on Earth. The eyes of young
girls watching the
parachute were melted. Their faces became giant charred blisters.
The skin of
people seeking help dangled from their fingernails. ... Others died
when their
eyeballs and internal organs burst from their bodies -- Hiroshima
was a hell
where those who somehow survived envied the dead."
Like most of the others killed by the two American bombs, neither
the children
nor the adults had any role in Japan's decision to go to war, but
they were
picked as the target instead of an isolated but fortified military
base whose
antiaircraft fire posed a higher risk. The target preferred by
U.S. atomic
scientists -- a patch in the ocean or unpopulated terrain -- was
rejected,
because the effect of hundreds of thousands of civilians dying
would be all the
more dramatic.
The victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were available soft targets,
much like the
children playing in Iraq, suddenly caught in the crossfire of
battles waged
beyond their control. In "White Light/Black Rain," a devastating
HBO documentary
released this week, there is an interview with the sole survivor of
a Japanese
elementary school of 620 students. The murder of the other 619,
and the 370,000
overall deaths attributed to the bombings, 85 percent of which were
civilian
deaths, has never compelled a widespread examination of the "end
justifies the
means" morality of our own state-sanctioned acts of terror.
Indeed, the
horrifying footage taken by Japanese and American cameramen soon
after the
devastation, and shown in the HBO film, was long kept secret by the
U.S.
government for fear that an informed American public might question
this nations
incipient nuclear arms race.
Just exactly what distinguishes the United States' use of the
ever-so-cutely-named "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" atomic bombs on
cities in Japan
from the car bombs of Baghdad or the planes that smashed into the
World Trade
Center? To even raise the question, as was found in one recent
university case,
can be a career-ending move.
Of course, we had our justifications, as terrorists always do.
Truman defended
his decision to drop the atomic bombs on civilians over the
objection of leading
atomic scientists on the grounds that it was a necessary military
action to save
lives by forcing a quick Japanese surrender. He insisted on that
imperative
despite the objections of top military figures, including Gen.
Dwight Eisenhower,
who contended that the war would end quickly without dropping the
bomb.
The subsequent release of formerly secret documents makes a hash of
Truman's
rationalization. His White House was fully informed that the
Japanese were on
the verge of collapse, and their surrender was made all the more
likely by the
Soviets imminent entry into the fight.
At most, the Japanese were asking for the face-saving gesture of
retaining their
emperor, and even that modest demand would likely have been
abandoned with the
shift of massive numbers of Allied troops and firepower from the
battlefront of a
defeated Germany to a confrontation with its deeply wounded Asian
ally. Instead,
the U.S. played midwife to the birth of the nuclear monster, the
ultimate
terrorist weapon that presents a continuing and growing threat to
the survival of
human life on Earth.
This is a lesson to be pondered at a time when President Bush plays
power games
with a nuclear-equipped Russia while coddling Pakistan, the main
proliferator of
nuclear weapons to rogue regimes, and Congress authorizes an
expansion of the
U.S. nuclear program to better fight the war on terror by
"improving" the
ultimate weapon of terror, which the U.S. alone stands guilty of
using.
For a fuller explanation of the suppression of footage taken
shortly after the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, follow this link.
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?
vnu_content_id=1003622202
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