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Today's
Stories
August 4, 2004
John Ross
Mexico's Dirty War Never Ended: Inside
Puente Grande Prison
August 3, 2004
Uri Avnery
The
Oligarchs
Ray McGovern
The 9/11 Commission Chimera
Jack McCarthy
Sexual Politics in Jeb's Florida
Eric Ruder
Meet Barak Obama: the Democrats' New Liberal Star
John L. Hess
Crying Wolf: Orange Alert!
Elaine Cassel
Civil Liberties Elections: 1800 v. 2004
Jules Rabin
The Man Who Didn't Walk By
Website of the Day
No Wall
August 2, 2004
Robert Jensen
Kerry's
Hypocrisy on the Vietnam War
Joshua Frank
Greens, Kerry and the Politics of Mendacity
Mike Whitney
The 9/11 Commission and Civil Liberties: "We Need an American
Police State"
Gary Leupp
Beyond
Good and Evil: Some Thoughts on Invasions
July 31 / Aug.
1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Kerry:
He's the (Any) One
Merlin Chowkwanyun
Five Questions with Noam Chomsky: "The Savage Extreme of
a Narrow Policy Spectrum"
David Lindorff
The Shame of the DNC
John Chuckman
The
Disturbing Words of John Edwards
Brian Cloughley
All Slam and No Dunk; All Blame and No Responsibility
Christopher Brauchli
"Being Poor is a State of Mind": the Frowning Face
of Compassionate Conservatism
Fred Gardner
A World of Pain
Michael Donnelly
How Big Pharma Bilks the Elderly
David Nally
Genocide in Darfur?
Joshua Frank
Forest Battles Escalate in Oregon
Sam Bahour
Colin Powell and My Grandmother
Diane Farsetta
The IMF and the Indonesian Elections: The Invisible Hand in the
Voting Booth
Harold Gould
Was Iraq a Mutual Charade?
Van Bergen / Stephens
Election 9/11: Surreal Political Theater
Lee Sustar
A New Model for the Labor Movement?
Ron Jacobs
The Lost Art of Hitchhiking
M. Junaid Alam
An Interview with Palestinian-American Rapper, The Iron Sheik
Poets Basement
Albert, Ford, Krieger, St. Clair
Website of
the Weekend
Cross Cultural Poetics
July 30, 2004
Kolhatkar /
Ingalls
Shattering
Illusions: Kerry's Speech Tells Anti-War Activists They're Not
Wanted
Dave Lindorff
Murder
Not So Foul?
Bruce Jackson
Walt Whitman on the Sound of Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Fidel Castro
The
Pathology of George W. Bush
Maximilien Robespierre
Memo to Kerry and Bush: Why They Resist
Saul Landau
Bush
Charges Castro with Sex Tourism; JFK Rolls Over in His Grave
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
July 29, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
Hail,
the Conquering War Criminal: What Kerry Really Did in Vietnam
Frank Bardacke
What
Michael Moore Left Out of F9/11
Tom Barry
Shallow and Formulaic: Kerry's Latin America Plan
Ron Jacobs
Kerry
and Lennon: Hawking the CounterCulture
Robert Fisk
The Unreported War
Lichtman /
Kellis-Borok
What Kerry Must Do to Win (But Probably Won't)
William S. Lind
The 9/11 Commission Report: Cashing in on Failure
CounterPunch
Wire
Doonesbury Onto John Kerry in 1971!
Website of
the Day
Jabbing JibJab: Copyright Madness
July 28, 2004
Robert Fisk
The
Occupation at 114 Degrees: Baghdad is Swamped in the Smell of
the Dead
Kevin Mink
Kerry's Misperception of Palestine
Ray McGovern
Israel and the Iraq War: How the 9/11 Report Soft-Pedals Root
Causes
United for
Peace & Justice
An
Open Letter to John Kerry: Winter Soldiers and Summer Patriots
Mike Ferner
Vets Demand End to Occupation: "Pull the Troops or Face
Impeachment Mvt."
Imraan Siddiqi
Turning Tricks with Ann Coulter
Alexander Cockburn
Candidate
Kerry
Website of
the Day
Iraq Vets Against the War
July 27, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Why
the Democrats Deserve Nader
Dave Lindorff
Back to the 19th Century: Globalization's Coming!
Mike Whitney
Control Room: Inside Al Jazeera
Ali, Anderson, Bello, et al.
If We Were Venezuelan, We'd Vote for Chavez
Stefan Wray
Texas Plan to Grab Los Alamos Takes Hold, as DOE Shuts Down Labs
Louis Proyect
Reflections on Nicaragua: First Came the Contra Butchers, Then
the Sweatshops
Rick Giombetti
Faith in Freedom: the Challenge of Thomas Szasz
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
The
9/11 Report and Its Weak-Kneed Consensus: Dogding Israel/Palestine;
Blinkered on Causes of Terrorism
July 26, 2004
Todd Chretien
Green
Resistance: a Reply to Normon Solomon & Medea Benjamin
Robert Fisk
Terror
by Video
Richard Forno
Security
Theater in Boston: Security Expert Harrassed by DHS for Exposing
Flaws at the Fleet Center
Mitchel Cohen
Report from a Boston Demo: Arresting the Curious
Richard Moreno
Rockers
for Justice: an Interview with Tom Morello and Serj Tankian
Alexander Cockburn
Boston
Awaits a Dead Party
July
24 / 25, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The Democrats and Their Conventions:
Part One
Dennis
Hans
Those 16 Words Still Smell, Mr. Bush
Patrick
Cockburn
The Struggle for Iraq is Only Beginning
Josh
Frank
The War Path of Unity: Dems Reject
the Peace Movement
Justin
E.H. Smith
Christianity and the Left: the Latin
American Experience
Tariq
Ali
What's at Stake in Venezuela
Fred
Gardner
The Politics of Pot: Year of the
Antagonist
Mark
Scaramella
There's Dope and There's Dope
Ron
Jacobs
The Weather Underground's Prairie
Fire Statement...35 Years On
July
23, 2004
Lee
Sustar
Revolution in Nicaragua: 25 Years
On
Dave
Lindorff
Battle for NYC: Bush 1, Protesters
0
Saul
Landau
Zaniest President in US History: Bush
Beats Reagan
Mike
Whitney
The 9/11 Whitewash: Blaming No One
Mickey
Z
Get On the Bus: 150 Years After Elizabeth
Jennings
Gary
Leupp
The 9/11 Commission and the Looming
War on Iran
July
22, 2004
M.
Junaid Alam
Ten Ways to Build a Better Democrat
Brian
McKinlay
Rusted On Down Under: Howard, Bush and Sharon
Jason
Leopold
Cheney Lobbied for Easing of Sanctions on Terrorist Regimes While
CEO of Halliburton
Chris
Floyd
Mob Rule: Ripping the Lid Off of America's Pious Myths
Uri
Avnery
Chirac v. Sharon
July
21, 2004
Paula
J. Caplan
The Emotional Casualities of War: Psychologists
Can't Heal All the Damage
Joshua
Frank
Nader Sleeping with the Enemy? Let's be Fair
Ron
Jacobs
American Exceptionalism
Reza
Ghorashi
The Elections, Iran and al-Qaeda
Amy
Martin
Will Congress Rearm the Guatemalan Generals?
John
Ross
Bush May Lose, But His Wars Will Go On and On
|
August 4, 2004
59 Years
After Hiroshima
Two Traditions:
WMD and Disinformation
By
MICKEY Z.
"It
is an atomic bomb. It is the greatest thing in history."
-President
Harry S. Truman, August 6, 1945
"Congress
should endorse the use of all necessary means to eliminate the
threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."
-John
Edwards, September 2002
We
are approaching August 6, 2004, the 59th anniversary of the U.S.
terror bombing of Hiroshima, and it's apparent that the history
and use of WMD is still not fully understood.
With
"Good War" references and rhetoric bandied about by politicians
and pundits of all stripes, it's instructive to consider how the
U.S. and its allies, 60 years ago, allegedly engaged in a life-and-death
battle to prevent a tyrant from wielding WMD. "Working at Los
Alamos, New Mexico," writes historian Kenneth C. Davis, "atomic
scientists, many of them refugees from Hitler's Europe, thought
they were racing against Germans developing a 'Nazi bomb.'"
Surely,
if it were possible for the epitome of evil to produce such a weapon,
it would be the responsibility of the good guys to beat der Führer
to the plutonium punch. While such a desperate race makes for excellent
melodrama, the German bomb effort, it appears, fell far short of
success.
Thanks
to the declassification of key documents, we now have access to
"unassailable proof that the race with the Nazis was a fiction,"
says Stewart Udall, who cites the work of McGeorge Bundy and Thomas
Powers before adding that, "According to the official history
of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), those agents maintained
'contacts with scientists in neutral countries.'" These contacts,
by mid-1943, provided enough evidence to convince the SIS that the
German bomb program simply did not exist.
Despite
such findings, U.S. General Leslie Groves, military commander of
the Manhattan Project, got permission in the fall of 1943 to begin
a secret espionage mission known as Alsos (Greek for "grove").
The mission saw Groves' men following the Allies' armies throughout
Europe with the goal of capturing German scientists involved in
the manufacture of atomic weapons.
While the data uncovered by Alsos only served to reinforce the prior
reports that the Third Reich was not pursuing a nuclear program,
Groves was able to maintain enough of a cover-up to keep his pet
project alive. In the no-holds-barred religion of anti-communism,
the "Good War" enemy was never fascism. Truman's daughter,
Margaret, remarked about her dad's early presidential efforts after
the death of FDR in April 1945, "My father's overriding concern
in these first weeks was our policy towards Russia."
What will Bush daughters be confessing about their Dad one day?
*
* * *
The
most commonly evoked justification for the dropping of atomic bombs
on Japan was to save lives, but was it true? Would such an invasion
even have been necessary? Finally, were the actions of the United
States motivated by an escalating Cold War with the Soviet Union?
Here are the facts that don't mesh with the long-accepted storyline:
Although
hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives were lost in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the bombings are often explained away as a "life-saving"
measure-American lives. Exactly how many lives saved is, however,
up for grabs. (We do know of a few U.S. soldiers who fell between
the cracks About a dozen or more American POWs were killed in Hiroshima,
a truth that remained hidden for some 30 years.) In defense of the
U.S. action, it is usually claimed that the bombs saved lives. The
hypothetical body count ranges from 20,000 to "millions."
In an August 9, 1945 statement to "the men and women of the
Manhattan Project," President Truman declared the hope that
"this new weapon will result in saving thousands of American
lives."
"The
president's initial formulation of 'thousands," however, was
clearly not his final statement on the matter to say the least,"
remarks historian Gar Alperovitz. In his book, "The Decision
to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth,"
Alperovitz documents but a few of Truman's public estimates throughout
the years:
*December
15, 1945: "It occurred to me that a quarter of a million
of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese
cities . . ."
*Late
1946: "A year less of war will mean life for three hundred
thousand-maybe half a million-of America's finest youth."
*October
1948: "In the long run we could save a quarter of a million
young Americans from being killed, and would save an equal number
of Japanese young men from being killed."
*April
6, 1949: "I thought 200,000 of our young men would be saved."
*November
1949: Truman quotes Army Chief of Staff George S. Marshall as
estimating the cost of an Allied invasion of Japan to be "half
a million casualties."
*January
12, 1953: Still quoting Marshall, Truman raises the estimate to
"a minimum one quarter of a million" and maybe "as
much as a million, on the American side alone, with an equal number
of the enemy."
*Finally,
on April 28, 1959, Truman concluded: "the dropping of the
bombs . . . saved millions of lives."
Fortunately,
we are not operating without the benefit of official estimates.
In
June 1945, Truman ordered the U.S. military to calculate the cost
in American lives for a planned assault on Japan. Consequently,
the Joint War Plans Committee prepared a report for the Chiefs of
Staff, dated June 15, 1945, thus providing the closest thing anyone
has to "accurate": 40,000 U.S. soldiers killed, 150,000
wounded, and 3,500 missing.
While
the actual casualty count remains unknowable, it was widely known
at the time that Japan had been trying to surrender for months prior
to the atomic bombing. A May 5, 1945 cable, intercepted and decoded
by the U.S., "dispelled any possible doubt that the Japanese
were eager to sue for peace." In fact, the U.S. Strategic Bombing
Survey reported shortly after the war, that Japan "in all probability"
would have surrendered before the much-discussed November 1, 1945
Allied invasion of the homeland.
Truman himself eloquently noted in his diary that Stalin would "be
in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini (sic) Japs when that comes about."
Many
post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki sentiments questioned the use of the bombs.
"I
thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use
of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory
as a measure to save American lives," said General Dwight D.
Eisenhower while, not long after the Japanese surrender, New York
Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, "The enemy, in
a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position. Such then,
was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Need
we have done it? No one can, of course, be positive, but the answer
is almost certainly negative."
Was
it the cold logic of capitalism that motivated the nuking of civilians?
As far back as May 1945, a Venezuelan diplomat was reporting how
Assistant Secretary of State Nelson Rockefeller "communicated
to us the anxiety of the United States government about the Russian
attitude." U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes seemed to
agree when he turned the anxiety up a notch by explaining how "our
possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable
in the East . . . The demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia
with America's military might."
General
Leslie Groves was less cryptic: "There was never, from about
two weeks from the time I took charge of this Project, any illusion
on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted
on that basis."
During
the same time period, President Truman noted that Secretary of War
Henry Stimson was "at least as much concerned with the role
of the atomic bomb in the shaping of history as in its capacity
to shorten the war." What sort of shaping Stimson had in mind
might be discerned from his Sept. 11, 1945 comment to the president:
"I consider the problem of our satisfactory relations with
Russia as not merely connected but as virtually dominated by the
problem of the atomic bomb."
Stimson
called the bomb a "diplomatic weapon," and duly explained:
"American statesmen were eager for their country to browbeat
the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip."
"The
psychological effect [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] on Stalin was twofold,"
proposes historian Charles L. Mee, Jr. "The Americans had not
only used a doomsday machine; they had used it when, as Stalin knew,
it was not militarily necessary. It was this last chilling fact
that doubtless made the greatest impression on the Russians."
It also made an impression on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific
director at Los Alamos. After learning of the carnage wrought upon
Japan, he began to harbor second thoughts and he resigned in October
1945.
In
March of the following year, Oppenheimer told Truman:
"Mr.
President, I have blood on my hands."
Truman's
reply: "It'll come out in the wash."
Later,
the president told an aide, "Don't bring that fellow around
again."
"Why
did we drop [the bomb]?" pondered Studs Terkel at the time
of the fiftieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
"So
little Harry could show Molotov and Stalin we've got the cards,"
he explained. "That was the phrase Truman used. We showed the
goddamned Russians we've got something and they'd better behave
themselves in Europe. That's why it was dropped. The evidence is
overwhelming. And yet you tell that to 99 percent of Americans and
they'll spit in your eye."
They'll
also spit in your eye if you point out that the U.S. has waged several
nuclear wars...against Japan in 1945, against Iraq from 1991 to
present, in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and on military bases like
Vieques. Or if you point out that the US and Britain did not call
for a military strike after Saddam's infamous gassing of Kurds*
at Halabja in March 1988...in fact, both nations continued support
for Hussein. Some will still spit in your eye if you mention the
absence of WMD in Iraq today.
Americans
are rather fussy about their WMD. We, of course, can have them,
a few allies can openly possess such weapons, and we'll deftly look
the other way when Israel's plutonium slip shows. Russia? Well,
as long as they stay away from that communist stuff.
As for tyrants like Hitler and Hussein: no way. The world simply
can't risk having WMD in the hands of those likely to use them,
right?
(*Commonly
referred to as the gassing of his own people, it's essential to
clarify that if the Kurds were Hussein's people, then the Palestinians
are Sharon's people, the Zapatistas are Vicente Fox's people, the
Tibetans are Hu Jintao's people, the Chechens are Putin's people,
the Seminoles were Andrew Jackson's people, and the Puerto Ricans
who were bombed and radiated with depleted uranium are Bush's people.)
Mickey
Z. is the author of two brand new books: "The Seven
Deadly Spins: Exposing the Lies Behind War Propaganda" (Common
Courage Press) and "A Gigantic Mistake: Articles and Essays
for Your Intellectual Self-Defense" (Library Empyreal/Wildside
Press). For more information, please visit: http://mickeyz.net.
Weekend Edition July 17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
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Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
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What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
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Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
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Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
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The George Bush of Africa
Fred
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Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
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Ben
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Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
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John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
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Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
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Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
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David
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A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
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Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
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Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
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Ford, Smith and Albert
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