Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 212

Another 'Steubenville' at Vanderbilt?

Finally getting some much-needed attention is the sexual assault case featuring, yes, football players, at Vanderbilt, with four indicted, charges of cover-up, sharing of visual images, claims that the coach ordered a video to be deleted, and more.  Alleged similarities to the Steubenville case include: "The alleged assault took place after the unconscious victim was moved to another location, presumably without her consent. The high schoolers convicted in the Steubenville case were originally charged with kidnapping because they transported their unconscious victim to other parties without her consent. The same thing may have happened at Vanderbilt."

Neil Young: Living with Tar

With the Keystone XL pipeline issue still hot, one of my favorite rockers, Mr. Neil Young, Canada native, visited the tar sands in Alberta and lent this quote for activist distribution.  Hello cowgirl in the tar sand?  UPDATE:  Local radio station up there bans Neil's songs for awhile for dissing the tar sands--he said it "looks like Hiroshima."  Meanwhile unannounced he debuted a new, possibly related song in small club in Somerville, MA, last night,  a slashing "I Want to Drive My Car" or some such.

Hitchens on Kissinger

Well, you may have seen the photos of John Kerry with Henry Kissinger yesterday, which also happened to be the 40th anniversary of the U.S.-backed (that is, Kissinger-backed) coup in Chile.  As you may know, Christopher Hitchens often wrote about Henry as a war criminal for that and other crimes.  Here's a piece from The Nation in 2001, and excerpt, on the disruption of his tourist plans:

What a rat. And such a trap. It was in this fashion that the front page of the Paris daily Le Monde informed its readers that on Memorial Day the gendarmes had gone round to the Ritz Hotel-flagship of Mohamed Al Fayed's fleet of properties-with a summons from Judge Roger Le Loire inviting the famous rodent to attend at the Palace of Justice the following day. In what must have been one of the most unpleasant moments of his career, noted Le Monde, the hotel manager had to translate the summons to his distinguished guest. Kissinger left the hotel, surrounded by bodyguards, and later announced that he had no desire to answer questions about Operation Condor. He then left town.

Jon Stewart, After 9/11

If you haven't seen for awhile his monologue when his show returned after the 9/11 trauma.

New Photos of 9/11 Hijacker--Probably on a U.S. Plane

Amazing, mysterious story of the day--via Gawker, which has discovered that the feds have had for over a decade two photos of lead 9/11 hijacker Atta apparently on a flight from Florida to Newark, just three weeks before 9/11.  The photos are still classified, for some reason.  Who took them and why unknown.  Yikes.  It's even possible that the photos were taken by a passanger on the flight, but show Atta somewhere other than the plane.  Expert writers such as Lawrence Wright and Mark Mazzetti say this is news to them.

Ground Zero Panorama, 2003

My photo, when the wound was truly raw.

A Foggy Motion

Amazing time-lapse video of fog flowing, like water, over various spots in Northern California.  Fantastic.  Fog as a living thing maybe.

But Dubya's the True American 'Goat' of 9/11

You can still purchase George W. Bush's favorite children's tale, "The Pet Goat" (often inaccurately referred to as "My Pet Goat") at Amazon, part of a collection (as it always was), but long ago they scrubbed the hundreds of sarcastic reviews after they gained wide notice.  Only one such review remains today since the story's place in 9/11 lore has started to fade into history.  "Well, after my friend Andy came in and interrupted me, I still kept reading this book because, one, I know when I have a good book in my hands...."  Here's one summary of the tale's history and 9/11.  Below the usually edited (even by Michael Moore) minutes of Bush silence on 9/11.

When Famed 'NYT' Reporter, W.L. Laurence, Promoted Radiation Cover-up

William L. Laurence earned the nickname “Atomic Bill” several times over. As I’ve explored here in the past, he was Pulitzer-winning New York Times science reporter who became embedded with the Manhattan Project and followed its creation of the first atomic bombs at several sites around the United States. As the first use of the new weapon against Japan neared, he wrote several lengthy articles glorifying the Bomb and the men who made it, which were published, with overwhelming impact, by his paper (and others) starting on August 7, 1945.

Then, on August 9, he observed the atomic bombing of Nagasaki from one of the support planes. Sixty-six years ago this week, he wrote about that for the Times—again, an account that expressed wonderment and pride in the death-dealing device. As always, Laurence provided colorful depictions of the bomb’s blast and visual effects with little focus on its startling radiation dangers.

Less well-known is another Laurence project, which also took place sixty-eight years ago this week.

To that point, US officials had downplayed Japanese casualties in the two atomic cities and largely pooh-poohed Japanese “propaganda” claims on the lingering effects of radiation exposure and accounts of thousands perishing from some new “plague.”  A U.S. general, Thomas Farrell, had toured the ruins in Hiroshima and wrongly  claimed Japanese reports of up to 100,000 killed there were wildly inflated--and that only a handful died due to radiation effects.  It was the beginning of the decades-long suppression of key evidence, including all film footage shot in the two cities(as I probe in my book Atomic Cover-up).

A confluence of events on September 9, 1945, suggests that American officials, right up to the White House, had indeed initiated a public-relations campaign to counter the first rumors from Hiroshima. The War Department, after weeks of delay, finally allowed the New York Times to publish the exultant first-person account of the Nagasaki bombing mission by W.L. Laurence. 

The same day, Laurence happened to be touring the Trinity test site, where the United States tested its first atomic weapon on July 16, with General Leslie Groves and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (left, on that day, in the crater). The top-secret area finally had been opened to journalists.

Two weeks earlier, President Truman’s secretary, Charles G. Ross, had sent a memo to the War Department urging the military to recruit a group of reporters to explore the test site. “This might be a good thing to do in view of continuing propaganda from Japan,” Ross wrote.

Now General Groves, who believed the reports of radiation disaease from Japan were a "hoax,"  was personally escorting some of the newsmen near ground zero. His driver, a young soldier named Patrick Stout, spent several minutes in the crater of the blast and was photographed, smiling.

Laurence’s account of this visit (delayed three days until September 12  due to a censorship review) disclosed quite frankly why he and thirty other journalists had been invited: to “give lie to” Japanese "propaganda" that " radiations were responsible for deaths even after” the Hiroshima attack, as he wrote.   He quoted General Groves calling any deaths by radiation in Japan as "very small." (In truth, the total was probably 20,000 or more in the two bombed cities.)

General Groves had expressly asked the reporters to assist him in this effort, and they did not disappoint him. Geiger counters showed that surface radiation, after nearly two months, had “dwindled to a minute quantity, safe for continuous human habitation,” Laurence asserted. He did introduce one bit of contrary information: the reporters had been advised to wear canvas overshoes to protect against radiation burns.

But Laurence was keeping a lot to himself. Embedded with the Manhattan Project for months, he was the only reporter who knew about the fallout scare surrounding the Trinity test: scientists in jeeps chasing a radioactive cloud, Geiger counters clicking off the scale, a mule that became paralyzed. Here was the nation’s leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time.   Read his Sept. 12, 1945 story here and note repeated use of word "propaganda" to describe Japan's claims, the debunking of reported symptoms of radiation disease, the explicit claim that the bomb had to be dropped to end the war. 

The press tour, in fact, had “an oddly reassuring effect,” the New York Times observed in an editorial. Later, a scientist informed the young soldier, Patrick Stout, who stood in the crater during the press tour, that he had been exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity. Twenty-two years later Stout became ill and was diagnosed with leukemia. The military, apparently acknowledging radiation as the cause, granted him “service-connected” disability compensation. Stout died in 1969.

W.L. Laurence would win another Pulitzer for his Bomb-related reporting in 1945.

Greg Mitchell’s book and e-book is Atomic Cover-up.  He also co-authored with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America.

Condi's Lies About August 2001 Memo Warning of Terror Attack

To refresh your memory: