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Today's
Stories
March 2, 2004
William Blum
If Kerry's the Answer, What's the
Question?
March 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Morris
Thanks War Criminal in Front of Billions
Richard Oxman
Oscar's
Obit: Thanking Bob McNamara
Elaine Cassel
Writing and Reading as "Terrorism"
Mickey Z
Thomas Friedman's Education
Mike Whitney
George Will and Anti-Semitism: a Cul-de-Sac of Prejudice
Heather Williams
Haiti
as Target Practice: How the US Press Missed the Story
Cathy Crosson
Chanson d'amour haïtienne
Website of the Day
God Hates Shrimp
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
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March
2, 2004
The Bravo H-Bomb Test
One
WMD They Couldn't Hide
By JOANN WYPIJEWSKI
"There's a story I can tell you",
a fellow called Bruno Lat said to me a few years back in Hawaii.
"I was 13 at that time. My dad was working with the Navy
as a laborer on Kwajalein", an atoll in Lat's native Marshall
Islands controlled by the US military. "It was early, early
morning. We were all outside on that day waiting in the dark.
Everybody was waiting for the Bravo."
That day was fifty years ago, yesterday.
March 1, 1954. Bravo was not the first, or the last, just the
worst of America's nuclear tests in the Pacific, a fission-fusion-fission
reaction, a thermonuclear explosion, an H-Bomb, America's biggest
blast. In today's poverty of expression, it would be called a
WMD. Except that it was "ours", and so real that days
after marveling that some strange sun had lighted the western
sky with "all kinds of beautiful colors", young Bruno
also took in the sight of refugees from downwind of the blast
at Bikini Atoll, miserable and burned and belatedly evacuated
to Kwajalein. Their scalp, he recalled, "you could peel
it like fried chicken skin".
In the standard history of Bravo, much
of what happened that morning was "an accident". That
is the term Edward Teller, the bomb's designer, uses in his memoirs.
The Navy said it had anticipated a six-megaton bomb, but Bravo
came in at 15. It had anticipated the winds to blow one way,
but they blew another. It had not evacuated downwinders in advance
because the danger was deemed slight, and anyway the budget that
year was tight. It had not expected that a Japanese fishing trawler,
the Lucky Dragon, would be out on the sea 87 miles from the blast,
or that when it returned home two weeks later its catch would
be "hot", creating a panic in Japanese fish markets.
It had not expected reports of radioactive horses in New Zealand,
radioactive rain in Sydney. It really had not expected that one
of the Lucky Dragon fishermen, hospitalized with radiation sickness
for months along with his mates, would die. Officially the US
government maintained that the cause of death was hepatitis unrelated
to radiation.
Officially the Atomic Energy Commission
also claimed, ten days after the blast, that the Bravo shot had
been "routine" and that among those stricken Marshallese
at whom Bruno Lat was gaping, "there were no burns. All
were reported well." A month later AEC chairman Lewis Strauss
told reporters they were not only well but "happy"
too.
Their medical records from the time tell
a story of burns and lesions, nausea, falling hair and weeping
sores. Dr. Seiji Yamada of the University of Hawaii Medical School
reviewed them in Kwajalein three years ago, and it is a simple
matter to find government reports acknowledging same, now that
that particular lie is unnecessary.
The Bravo blast was so immense, so terrible
that the typical comparison_"equal to 1,000 Hiroshimas"_seems
almost evasive, as if there were a continuum of comprehensibility
within which it might fit. The bomb on Hiroshima instantly killed
80,000 people, more or less. By crude mathematics, Bravo had
the power to incinerate 80 million. Ten New Yorks? 26,666 Twin
Towers, more or less? No one can grasp such numbers, and because
they are crude abstractions, the easier thing, for most Americans,
has been to forget the whole thing_or at best to regard Bikini
as a bit of cold war kitsch, a curio in the attic of memory.
Perhaps we can imagine a mushroom cloud
with a "stem" 18 miles tall and a "cap" 62
miles across, but probably not. That's a cloud five times the
length of Manhattan, vaporizing all beneath it, sucking everything_in
Bravo's case, three islands' worth of coral reef, sand, land
and sea life, millions of tons of it_into the sky, and then moving,
showering this common stuff, now in a swirl of radioactive isotopes,
along its path.
The Marshallese on the island of Rongelap,
120 miles from ground zero, had imagined snow only from missionaries'
photographs of New England winters. That March 1 they imagined
the white flakes falling from the sky, sticking everywhere but
especially to sweaty skin, piling up two inches deep, as some
freakish snowstorm. Children played in it, and later screamed
with pain. Unlike Bruno Lat, they had not been waiting for Bravo.
On other islands the "snow"
appeared variably as a shower, a mist, a fog. The Navy had a
practice of sending planes into the blast area hours after detonation
to measure "the geigers", as radioactivity was colloquially
known among sailors, and the early readings over inhabited islands
after Bravo are staggering. Scientists didn't know in 1954 that
a radiation dose of 30 roentgens would double the rate of breast
cancer in adults, that 90 would double the rate of stomach and
colon cancer, that young children were ten times as vulnerable.
But they did know that 150 roentgens, noted in one of the earliest
military estimates for Rongelap, were catastrophic. Yet the Navy
waited two days to evacuate Rongelap and Ailinginae; three days
to evacuate Utirik.
Nine years later thyroid cancers started
appearing in exposed islanders who had been children during Bravo,
then leukemia. Even in "safe" atolls, babies began
being born retarded, deformed, stillborn or worse. In 1983 Darlene
Keju-Johnson, a Marshallese public health worker, gave a World
Council of Churches gathering this description: "The baby
is born on the labor table, and it breathes and moves up and
down, but it is not shaped like a human being. It looks like
a bag of jelly. These babies only live for a few hours."
The Marshallese say that Bravo was not
an accident. Decades after the fact, a US government document
surfaced showing that weather reports had indeed indicated shifting
winds hours before the blast. In 1954 the United States had nine
years of data on direct effects of radiation but none on fallout
downwind; select Marshallese have been the subject of scientific
study ever since.
In all events, as Alexander Cockburn
once put it, "an 'accident' is normalcy raised to the level
of drama". Marshall Islanders endured sixty-seven US nuclear
tests between 1946 and 1958. It has been calculated that the
net yield of those tests is equivalent to 1.7 Hiroshima bombs
detonated every day for twelve years. A full accounting of the
displacements and evacuations, the lies and broken promises,
beginning with the Bikini people's surrender of their land to
US officers who vowed "to test this new weapon which is
designed to end all wars", would fill pages. A full accounting
of the health impact would fill volumes, and has never been done.
Bruno Lat is not an official victim of any test, so his thyroid
cancer doesn't count; the same with his father's stomach tumors.
Of the broken culture and broken hearts,
there can be no accounting. Never to be sure if the food is poison,
if the doctors are honest, if the cancer will get you next; to
never know home because however beautifully its white sands shimmer
beneath the dome of blue, however energetically its coconut crabs
skitter among the palms, living there is lethal; to live a different
kind of lethal, in a Pacific ghetto hell, unknown in the region
before the displacements and the testing, and to see no way out_we
don't call those things terror. Yesterday, March 1, on the fiftieth
anniversary of Bravo, the Marshallese formally petitioning the
US Congress to make full compensation for the ruin of their lands
and their health. They also want Congress to express "deep
regret for the nuclear testing legacy". Some had wanted
an apology, but that, the majority decided, America would never
concede.
JoAnn Wypijewski, former managing editor of The Nation, writes
about labor and politics for CounterPunch. She can be reached
at: jw@counterpunch.org.
Weekend
Edition Features for February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
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