The Hiroshima Cover-Up

Written by Amy Goodman and David Goodman in 2005 about an article written (but never published) after Uncle Sam nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The story was supressed because the US authorities were terrified of the consequences on public morale if the true nature of tyhe devastation was made known. I've included what I could find of the dispatches from the Guardian. I dont' normally print the full piece but it's almost impossible to find online so I want to save it, more for my referent than anything else. It's worth a read simply to remind oneself of the utter horror of these weapons. Anyone even contemplating using them should be considered a pathological nut-case and locked up indefinitely!

A story that the U.S. government hoped would never see the light of day finally has been published, 60 years after it was spiked by military censors. The discovery of reporter George Weller's firsthand account of conditions in post-nuclear Nagasaki sheds light on one of the great journalistic betrayals of the last century: the cover-up of the effects of the atomic bombing on Japan.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; three days later, Nagasaki was hit. Gen. Douglas MacArthur promptly declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the news media. More than 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of the cities, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. Instead, the world's media obediently crowded onto the battleship USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the Japanese surrender.

A month after the bombings, two reporters defied General MacArthur and struck out on their own. Mr. Weller, of the Chicago Daily News, took row boats and trains to reach devastated Nagasaki. Independent journalist Wilfred Burchett rode a train for 30 hours and walked into the charred remains of Hiroshima.

Both men encountered nightmare worlds. Mr. Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: "In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly - people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague."

He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: "Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world."

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Saturday September 8

A general alert had been sounded at seven in the morning, four hours before two B-29s appeared [on August 9], but it was ignored by the workmen [of the Mitsubishi plant] and most of the population. The police insist that the air-raid warning was sounded two minutes before the bomb fell, but most people say they heard none.

As one whittles away at embroidery and checks the stories, the impression grows that the atomic bomb is a tremendous, but not a peculiar weapon. The Japanese have heard the legend from American radio that the ground preserves deadly irradiation. But hours of walking amid the ruins where the odour of decaying flesh is still strong produces in this writer nausea, but no sign of burns or debilitation.

Nobody here in Nagasaki has yet been able to show that the bomb is different than any other, except in a broader extent flash and a more powerful knockout.

September 8

In swaybacked or flattened skeletons of the Mitsubishi arms plants is revealed what the atomic bomb can do to steel and stone, but what the riven atom can do against human flesh and bone lies hidden in two hospitals of downtown Nagasaki. Look at the pushed-in facade of the American consulate, three miles from the blast's centre, or the face of the Catholic cathedral, one mile in the other direction, torn down like gingerbread, and you can tell that the liberated atom spares nothing in the way. The human beings whom it has happened to spare sit on [illegible].

Showing them to you, as the first American outsider to reach Nagasaki since the surrender, your propaganda-conscious official guide looks meaningfully in your face and wants to know: "What do you think?" What this question means is: do you intend saying that America did something inhuman in loosing this weapon against Japan? That is what we want you to write.

Several children, some burned and others unburned but with patches of hair falling out, are sitting with their mothers. Yesterday Japanese photographers took many pictures with them. About one in five is heavily bandaged, but none [shows] signs of pain.

Some adults are in pain as they lie on mats. They moan softly. One woman caring for her husband shows eyes dim with tears. It is a piteous scene and your official guide studies your face covertly to see if you are moved.

Visiting many litters, talking lengthily with two general physicians and one x-ray specialist, gains you a large amount of information and opinion on the victims. Statistics are variable and few records are kept. But it is ascertained that this chief municipal hospital had about 750 atomic patients until this week and lost by death approximately 360.

About 70% of the deaths have been from plain burns ... But most of the patients who were gravely burned have now passed away and those on hand are rapidly curing. Those not curing are people whose unhappy lot provides the mystery aura around the atomic bomb's effects. They are victims of what Lt Jakob Vink, Dutch medical officer and now allied commandant of prison camp 14 at the mouth of Nagasaki harbour, calls "disease". Vink himself was in the allied prison kitchen abutting the Mitsubishi armour plate department when the ceiling fell in but he escaped this mysterious "disease X" which some allied prisoners and many Japanese civilians got.

Vink points out a woman on a yellow mat in hospital. She fled the atomic area but returned to live. She was well for three weeks except for a small burn on the heel. Now she lies moaning with a blackish mouth, stiff as though with lockjaw and unable to utter clear words. Her exposed legs and arms are speckled with tiny red spots in patches.

Near her lies a 15-year-old fattish girl who has the same blotchy red pinpoints and a nose clotted with blood. A little farther on is a widow lying down with four children, from one to about eight, around her. The two smallest children have lost some hair. Though none of these people has either a burn or a broken limb, they are presumed victims of the atomic bomb.

Dr Uraji Hayashida shakes his head sombrely and says that he believes there must be something to the American radio report about the ground around the Mitsubishi plant being poisoned. But his next statement knocks out the props from under this theory because it develops that the widow's family has been absent from the wrecked area ever since the blast, yet shows symptoms common with those who returned.

According to Japanese doctors, patients with these late-developing symptoms are dying now, a month after the bombs fell, at the rate of about 10 daily. The three doctors calmly stated that the disease has them nonplussed and that they are giving no treatment whatever but rest. Radio rumours from America received the same consideration with the symptoms under their noses. They are licked for cure and do not seem very worried about it.

September 9

The atomic bomb's peculiar "disease", uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is not diagnosed, is still snatching away lives here.

Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around three or four weeks thinking they have escaped.

The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed in talking to the writer ... that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients, though their skin is whole, are all passing away under their eyes.

Kyushu's leading x-ray specialist, who arrived today from the island's chief city, Fukuoka, elderly Dr Yosisada Nakashima, told the writer that he is convinced that these people are simply suffering from the atomic bomb's beta gamma, or the neutron ray is taking effect.

"All the symptoms are similar," said the Japanese doctor. "You have a reduction in white corpuscles, constriction in the throat, vomiting, diarrhoea and small haemorrhages just below the skin. All of these things happen when an overdose of roentgen rays is given. Bombed children's hair falls out. That is natural because these rays are used often to make hair fall artificially and sometimes takes several days before the hair becomes loose."

Nakashima differed with general physicians who have asked the regiment to close off a bombed area claiming that returned refugees are infected from the ground by lethal rays.

At emergency hospital No 2, young commanding officer Lt Col Yoshitaka Sasaki, with three rows of campaign ribbons on his breast, stated that 200 patients died of 343 admitted and that he expects about 50 more deaths.

Most severe ordinary burns resulted in the patients [sic] deaths within a week after the bomb fell. But this hospital began taking patients only from one to two weeks afterward. It is therefore almost exclusively "disease" cases and the deaths are mostly therefrom.

Twenty-five Americans are due to arrive Sept 11 to study the Nagasaki bombsite. Japanese hope that they will bring a solution for Disease X.

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Prospects of Armageddon

Abbas Edalat and Mehrnaz Shahabi writing about the insanity of certain humans who seem to see nuclear weapons as a legitimate tool of foreign policy. The people who start wars are never the ones who fight them (or die in them). The US leadership is safe in their underground bunkers so they don't seem to mind the idea of making parts of the planet uninhabitable - it's easier than admitting their ideology is a load of crap. Talk about the lunatics running the asylum! I'm not a violent person but I wish evil things on anyone who considers the use of nukes! If they are not stopped somehow then this species is up Shit Creek without a paddle.

It is appalling, if unsurprising, to read the neoconservative cheerleader Oliver Kamm arguing in these pages that the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki 62 years ago saved lives and ended suffering. The subtext is plain. The same camp whose vocal endorsement led to the present catastrophe in Iraq are now hawkishly gazing at Iran. The same absurd and dangerous logic that defends the nuclear atrocities of 1945 can now be used to support the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons against Iran - the threat of which in turn makes the idea of a conventional attack appear more palatable. Now, more than ever, we should be unequivocal in our moral position: as Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has said, the mere possession of nuclear weapons today should be viewed with the same condemnation and horror as we have regarded slavery and genocide in our modern civilized world.

Astonishingly, the calamity of Iraq has failed to dampen the belligerent clique within the White House. The arrival of an IAEA team in Tehran yesterday to discuss inspections is equally unlikely to dissuade advocates of a strike, nuclear or conventional. Such an assault would be in flagrant breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but it would hardly be the first time the US has disregarded the 1968 accord.

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The Persecution Of David Irving

Nation-States Gone Wild

by Mark Hand - PressAction.com

Will the European governments that ban any talk about the Nazis not having murdered 6 million Jews start rounding up the newspaper editors who published the Muhammad cartoons and start putting them on trial for crimes against Islam? European governments and their media mouthpieces appear to use the mantle of free speech to justify publishing supposed insults against Muslims. But what about the free speech rights of people who dare to go against conventional thinking of Nazi atrocities committed against Europe?s Jews?

These Holocaust deniers, revisionists and skeptics don?t have any rights to free speech in many European countries (and Canada), unlike their brethren who dare to publish images of the Prophet Muhammad but don?t face criminal charges. David Irving now must spend the next three years in prison for giving two speeches in Austria in 1989. Ernst Zundel faces up to five years in prison for publishing his opinions on the Zundelsite website while living in Canada.

Should people who downplay the Confederate States of America?s treatment of slaves and the U.S. government?s treatment of Native Americans face criminal charges? Should the people who publicly contend that the U.S. government was justified in killing hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki face criminal charges? Should the people who deny the wickedness of the U.S. invasions of Vietnam and Iraq faces criminal charges? Should the people who deny the wickedness of Israel?s conduct against Palestinians face criminal charges? Of course not!

We are dealing with a simple yet extremely dangerous case of nation-states gone wild. Instead of addressing their complicity in modern-day atrocities?such as providing either unabashed logistical support for or tacit approval of the U.S. government?s crimes around the world?these governments arrest people for public speech.

Irving, Zundel and others who face criminal charges of ?denying the Holocaust? have not committed violence against anybody. They have not given orders to soldiers to invade and occupy another country. They have not given orders to police or soldiers to arrest and imprison individuals without charges. They have not given approval to secret police, soldiers or prison guards to torture individuals.

Irving, Zundel and others have expressed their opinions about one of the most despicable periods in our world?s history. These expressions might anger people. But these people are not in positions of power today that would give them the means to implement policies that mimic the conduct of the Nazis.

Today, the leaders of liberal democratic governments are the ones with the authority (and police and military firepower) to mimic selected policies of the Nazis and the policies of other notorious regimes in our world?s history without fear they will face the consequences of their deadly actions.

If one does not like what some people might say or write about the Holocaust, then that person should ignore it. If one does not like images of the Prophet Muhammad published in newspapers, then that person should ignore them.

What we should not ignore is when nation-states, with their monopoly on violence, lock up people for expressing their opinions about government atrocities committed 60 years ago. More important, we should not ignore the fact that the governments that are locking up individuals for speaking their mind about the actions of the Nazis are the same governments aiding and abetting (or refusing to denounce and stop) the atrocities committed today by the world?s only superpower and its confederates.

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Hiroshima mayor says world moving to war on A-bomb anniversary

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
- Albert Einstein

Doesn't it make you feel good to know that the most powerful man in the world is also the Heir to the Throne of the Kingdom of Idiots? The Forces of Evil want war because to them war is the goose that lays golden eggs, they use it as an instrument of global control and they don't care who suffers as a result of their avarice and megalomania. Follow the money and you'll understand what I mean.

Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba warned that the world is moving toward war and accused Washington of "worshipping" nuclear weapons during Wednesday's ceremony marking the 58th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city.

Some 40,000 people, including Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Ito and British Labour MP George Galloway, attended the ceremony at Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park and observed a minute of silence from 8:15 a.m., the time a U.S. atomic bomb devastated the city on Aug. 6, 1945.

In his peace declaration, the Hiroshima mayor blamed the United States for making the world a more uncertain place through its policy of undermining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

"A world without nuclear weapons and war that the victims of the atomic bomb have long sought for is slipping into the shadows of glowing black clouds that could turn into mushroom clouds at any moment," Akiba said. "The chief cause of this is the United States' nuclear policy which, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and by starting research into small 'useable' nuclear weapons, appears to worship nuclear weapons as God."

He also criticized the growing sentiment in Japan and elsewhere that war is acceptable.

"Nuclear weapons are not the only problem. Some people are acting as if the United Nations Charter and the (pacifist) Constitution don't even exist and they are gaining support for this stance. The world has suddenly veered sharply away from post-war thinking toward a pre-war mentality," Akiba warned.

The peace declaration also attacked the recent Iraq war, saying that the U.S.-led war ignored people's wishes demanding a peaceful solution and "slaughtered" innocent women, children, and the elderly while spreading radioactive contamination through the use of depleted uranium ammunition.

Emphasizing the Hiroshima a-bomb victims' belief that peace can only be achieved through reconciliation and not retaliation, Akiba invited the leaders of the nuclear powers, including U.S. President George W. Bush and Kim Jong Il of North Korea, to visit the city and to "confront the reality" of nuclear war.

Akiba was also critical of the Japanese government, which has refused to provide support for the majority of non-Japanese A-bomb victims.

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War - The Final Solution

The continuing escalation of the never-ending Israeli war against the entire non-Jewish population of mandated Palestine has become the model for the Bush administration's never-ending war against all those who stand in the way of U.S. economic and military hegemony around the world.

With the passive support of the majority of its non-Arab citizens, the Israeli state continues to tag along behind the simple logic of its incredibly deadly military forces. Given its bloated military capability to carry out increasingly vicious campaigns of mass harassment, impoverishment, imprisonment, torture and murder of the Palestinian population, there is little motivation for Israelis to even consider other approaches to the Palestinian resistance. Especially considering the protection provided by its partner in repression, the United States, from the threat of enforcement of any U.N. resolutions.

Moron that he is, George Bush (with the continuing coaching of his handlers) still remains highly aware that the "success" of the Israeli military escalations depends upon a combination of its overwhelming superiority in weapons (including "weapons of mass destruction"), its ability to circumvent any threats of international intervention, and its massive international propaganda campaigns. The Bush administration has made these three planks the center of its own terrorist war on (non-US-backed forms of) "Terrorism." With its "Death Star" military programs, its neutering of the U.N., and its increasingly well-orchestrated Hollywood-PR-intelligence/psywar-military complex, the U.S. state can afford to sink its own economy, while intensifying the exploitation of international resources, and sowing mass social destruction around the world-all in the pursuit of short-term oil and armament industry profits, even shorter-term Republican Party political gains, and a likely chimerical longer-term plan of Russian and Chinese encirclement and neutralization. As long as the Israelis-with massive U.S. help-continue to get away with murder, the U.S. won't be far behind.

It doesn't matter much that even arch-ally Britain's ambassador to Israel recently angered Israelis by describing the Palestinian territories as "the largest detention camp in the world" (according to Alan Philips in the October 15th Telegraph in England). It doesn't matter that Israel is only able to pursue its never-ending war against an entire population through the generous funding of the U.S. government-at a current total rate of as much as $5.5 billion per year according to a recent Washington Report on Middle East Affairs report ($5,525,800,000 for 1997). It doesn't matter that this never-ending war requires the creation of an ever-widening list of civilian targets for assassination ("targeted killings" of civilian "suspects" in U.S./Israeli propaganda-speak.)

It doesn't seem to matter that these never-ending wars require the day-by-day, increasing Nazification of both the Israeli and the U.S. states. The semi-racist, semi-religious, apartheid state of Israel has been compared with Nazi Germany for years for a variety of reasons confirmed over and over in its brutally devastating invasions, annexations, expulsions and occupations over the last half century. The U.S. state has also earned its own comparisons to the Nazis-from the invasion, defoliation and genocidal bombings in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to its seemingly insuppressible penchant for terrorizing and invading tiny countries, including the repeated organization and funding of proxy death squads to torture, assassinate and "disappear" its opponents, including teachers, union organizers, students and health-care workers.

This increasing Nazification can be seen in the prospective US-planned massacre in Iraq ("war" is a gross misnomer) which promises to reach new levels of carnage, depravity and brutality with a proposed "Shock and Awe" strategy. It calls for the launching of 3000 precision-guided bombs and missiles during the first 48 hours of attack to produce a Hiroshima-style effect on the Iraqi civilian population. According to military strategist Harlan Ullman: "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."

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Orwell's Bastards - Lies and Shameless Pretence

We ordinary earthlings, were informed by George Bush Senior in his 1991 State of union Address, are living under a new world order. Over the past decade, from the highway of death between Kuwait and Iraq, in Kosovo, in Jallalabad and the hills of Afghanistan, in the alleys of West bank and cafes of Tel Aviv, and the ruins of the twin towers of New York, the face of this new order has become more and more evident. We are caught in a terrible and twisted Groundhog's day, standing on the eve of yet another war in the Iraqi desert presided over by another George Bush. Pentagon spokespeople assure us that they have prepared a shower of missiles on Baghdad that will rival Hiroshima. The U.N. estimates up to half a million Iraqi civilian casualties will occur, and up to 1.5 million civilians will be rendered refugees, in a war that will 'liberate' them. This is a war that the majority of British, European, Arab, African, Asian and Latin American people are opposed to. There is growing evidence that a remarkable number of U.S. citizens are also opposed to this war about to be fought allegedly for both their security and the 'liberation' of Iraq. As governments take the lead in spinning and counter spinning propaganda and lies with literally mass murderous consequences, this is the hour we desperately needed a clear, searching, analytical voice like that of George Orwell (1903-1950). What we have instead are Orwell's bastards, pretending to offer objective, 'no-bullshit' defence of democracy, sullying instead their master's name with lies and half-truths in feeble parodies of his voice.

How does one recognise Orwell's bastards? Whereas Orwell himself was acutely aware of historical complexities and constantly tested himself with searching criticism (perhaps most painfully in Homage to Catalonia), our new Orwellians deliberately twist facts, maintain selective silences, resort to outright lies, and are generally marked by a shameless pretence of piety and moral high-handedness. Take their chief, Christopher Hitchens's recent rant in the British Daily Mirror against the historic peace march in London (15.2.03) as an example. Lamenting the fact that it did not rain on this parade, Hitchens sees two kinds of people in the largest ever political rally in Britain ­ those belonging to the sinister Marxist-Muslim Fundamentalist cabal (leading), and the generally deluded well meaning middle Englanders (the herd). He says it was a shame that even half this number wouldn't bother to turn up in a rally in favour of the Kurds who have been fighters for democracy in Iraq and basically accuses the peace marchers as fifth columnist appeasers working to keep the Iraqi dictator in power. Hitchens is a self-confessed disciple of Orwell (he has recently published a book on him) and takes pride in his alleged ability to speak unpopular truths to lift the gloom of mass ignorance. What is wrong with this analysis of the current peace movement? In short, everything. Worse, his own position is compromised by his deliberately dishonest interpretation of facts.

First, peace movement is not a political party, there are no leaders who hand down programmes to the led. It is a network. There are organisers who take feedback from the widest coalition in Britain, and help them come together for demonstrations, discussions, rallies and in near future, if need be ­ direct action. Debate, dissent, even open derision of some of the speakers marked the crowd's behaviour in the rally. But all were united in a powerful expression of democratic will ­ enough of this game of death played by Bush-Blair and Bin-Laden/Saddam, purveyors of two kinds of fundamentalist evil that threatens to give us the gift of never-ending war. We will fight them with weapons of peace.

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Why Hiroshima Was Bombed: The 'Utopians' Duped a Nation

"The United States decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved over one million American lives which would have been sacrificed by an invasion of Japan."

How often has this claim been restated whenever that horrendous event is mentioned on TV or in newspapers. And yet, it remains to this day a total fiction. Not only the figure of "one million"—which was gratuituously added in the cover story published later to enhance the much lower figures actually predicted by the War Department had the United States been forced to invade Japan—but even the lower, more accurate estimates, represented a complete fallacy. There would have been no casualties in a land invasion of Japan because there would not have been any land invasion of Japan. By mid-May 1945 it was clear to all who wished to see: Japan was on the brink of surrendering.

It is the merit of Gar Alperovitz's work that he documented the facts available as of 1995 by using the then-latest declassified records from the war period. The real purpose of the atomic bomb was not to win the war, but rather to shape the contours of the post-war world. Alperowitz had an entire team working the files on this subject, with excellent results. The "team" aspect of the work leads, however, to a good deal of repetition. The recent biography by Robert Norris of one of the key players in that policy decision, Gen. Leslie Groves, helps to fill out the picture of the real scope and purposes of the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japanese cities.

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