Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 225
August 20, 2013
Another School Shooting
UPDATE True, no one hurt, but see tonight's NYT story on how it could have been much worse. 1) he had an AK-47 and seemed like he wanted to kill many 2) only a brave school staffer kept him from maybe getting started before police came 3) he had explosives in his car.
Earlier: Reports from DeKalb, Ga. of shots fired at McNair Elementary School--and an "active shooter" still "on campus" at the charter school or missing. Local TV report. SWAT team there. No word on injuries yet. A little more here. Students evacuated. Update: Report of one person in custody. He had "demands." Students all accounted for--though unconfirmed.
Earlier: Reports from DeKalb, Ga. of shots fired at McNair Elementary School--and an "active shooter" still "on campus" at the charter school or missing. Local TV report. SWAT team there. No word on injuries yet. A little more here. Students evacuated. Update: Report of one person in custody. He had "demands." Students all accounted for--though unconfirmed.
Catcher of the Wry
Great mysteries surrounded J.D. Salinger after he semi-disappeared, back in the mid-1960s, and then in the past year, re: an upcoming documentary about him, the first of its kind. What exactly did the film-makers discover? Secrecy has been the key. I know this terrain well, as a Salinger reader back in the '60s, then as an editor at Crawdaddy in the '70s when we assigned the ritual "find Salinger" cover story (more about that in my upcoming memoir). Anyway: I happened to see the trailer for the film last night and here it is. Also: Speaking of novelists popular with young people, my new ebook on Kurt Vonnegut.
Blue Moon Tonight and Tomorrow
Up in the sky. Until then, Elvis's landmark 1954 recording of "Blue Moon of Kentucky." Also see: Bill Monroe. Below that, often-mocked Dylan version of "Blue Moon" from his Nashville days, resurrected in his upcoming release of Self-Portrait and New Morning outtakes.
Will Sgt. Bales, Mass Killer, Serve Less Time Than Bradley Manning?
Far from the courtroom in Virginia where a judge will decide Pfc. Bradley Manning's fate today or tomorrow--the government officially asked for a 60-year sentence yesterday--another sentencing procedure has begun. It's out in the state of Washington and the Army man in trouble in this case is Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. Oh, you remember him, he pleaded guilty (to avoid the death penalty) to killing 16 innocent Afghans, mainly women and children. Prosecutors promise to play a tape of his phone chat with his wife where they laughed about the charges. Still, it's not inconceivable that his sentence will be no longer, and possibly less, than the one for Manning, if that latter does indeed get virtually life in prison. The worst case scenario for Bales still makes him eligible for parole in 20 years.After the killing, the U.S. had to halt operations in the country for weeks, and there were many other ill effects--far more than documented in the Manning case, it seems.
August 19, 2013
Threat to Journalism
Jay Rosen on Twitter just called the revelations in this column, starting in the 9th paragraph, the most significant journalism news in a long time. It's a piece just posted at The Guardian by its editor Alan Rusbridger. He opens by recounting a famous WikiLeaks episode--as depicted in the upcoming feature movie--that he was involved in, and then moves on to the detention of Glenn Greenwald's partner Daivd Miranda at Heathrow yesterday--and then reveals what happened in his own dramatic dealings with the UK government in the past two months over the paper's Snowden reporting, smashing a laptop, and the perilous future of such reporting. Read it and weep.
Plus David Miranda's first interview since Heathrow incident.
My book on Bradley Manning (with Kevin Gosztola) is the only one that covers the full story--from the leaks to current trial. My new ebook on Kurt Vonnegut has just been published.
Plus David Miranda's first interview since Heathrow incident.
“They were threatening me all the time and saying I would be put in jail if I didn’t co-operate,” said Miranda. “They treated me like I was a criminal or someone about to attack the UK … It was exhausting and frustrating, but I knew I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”...
“They got me to tell them the passwords for my computer and mobile phone,” Miranda said. “They said I was obliged to answer all their questions and used the words ‘prison’ and ‘station’ all the time.”
My book on Bradley Manning (with Kevin Gosztola) is the only one that covers the full story--from the leaks to current trial. My new ebook on Kurt Vonnegut has just been published.
Trayvon and New PSA
It reenacts crime, using phone calls, with twist at end, to hit Stand Your Ground laws.
When U.S. Troops Were Exposed to Atomic Bomb in Japan--Weeks Later
As usual at this time of year, I've posted dozens of pieces about the atomic bombing (before and after) of Japan in August 1945. Here's a story, from my book Atomic Cover-Up, on what happened, a month later, when the first U.S. troops arrived.
On September 8, General Thomas F. Ferrell arrived in Hiroshima with a radiologist and two physicists from Los Alamos, ordered by Manhattan Project chief General Leslie Groves to return to Tokyo the following day with preliminary findings. There was some urgency. It was one thing if the Japanese were dying of radiation disease; there was nothing we could do about that. But sending in American soldiers if it was unsafe was another matter.
Three days later, Farrell announced that “no poison gases were released” in Hiroshima. Vegetation was already growing there.
The first large group of US soldiers arrived in Nagasaki around September 23, about the time the Japanese newsreel teams started filming, and in Hiroshima two weeks later. They were part of a force of 240,000 that occupied the islands of Honshu (where Hiroshima is located) and Kyushu (Nagasaki). Many more landed in Nagasaki, partly because its harbor was not mined. Marines from the 2nd Division, with three regimental combat teams, took Nagasaki while the US Army’s 24th and 41st divisions seized Hiroshima. The US Navy transported Marines and evacuated POWs, but its role ashore (beyond medical services) was limited.
Most of the troops in Hiroshima were based in camps on the edge of the city, but a larger number did set up camps inside Nagasaki. Because of the alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take precautions. Some bunked down in buildings close to ground zero, even slept on the earth and engaged in cleanup operations, including disposing bodies, without protective gear. Few if any wore radiation detection badges. “We walked into Nagasaki unprepared…. Really, we were ignorant about what the hell the bomb was,” one soldier would recall. Another vet said: “Hell, we drank the water, we breathed the air, and we lived in the rubble. We did our duty.”
A marine named Sam Scione, who had survived battles on Guadacanal, Tarawa and Okinawa, now arrived in Nagasaki, sleeping first in a burned-out factory, then a schoolhouse. “We never learned anything about radiation or the effects it might have on us,” he later said. “We went to ground zero many times and were never instructed not to go there.” A year later, on his return to the United States, his hair began to fall out and his body was covered in sores. He suffered a string of ailments but never was awarded service-related disability status.
The occupying force in Nagasaki grew to more than 27,000 as the Hiroshima regiments topped 40,000. Included were many military doctors and nurses. Some stayed for months. The US Strategic Bomb Survey sent a small group of photographers to take black-and-white photos of blast effects. By all accounts the Americans were charmed by the Japanese, thankful that the bomb might have helped end the war and profoundly affected by what they witnessed. “In the back of our minds, every one of us wondered: What is this atomic bomb?” a Nagasaki veteran later testified. “You had to be there to rea1ize what it did.” After describing the horrors, he added: “We did not drop those two [bombs] on military installations. We dropped them on women and children…. I think that is something this country is going to have to live with for eternity.”
Not every American felt that way, of course. A staff sergeant who served in Hiroshima named Edwin Lawrence later recalled thinking, “The Japs got what they deserved.” What he remembered most vividly was the constant smell of charcoal in the air. Mark Hatfield, a young naval officer in 1945 and later a longtime US senator (known for his opposition to the Vietnam war), would reflect on his “searing remembrances of those days” in Hiroshima when a “shock to my conscience registered permanently within me.” Much of his legislative and personal philosophy was “shaped by the experience of walking the streets of your city,” he wrote to the mayor of Hiroshima in 1980, adding that he was “deeply committed to doing whatever I can to bring about the abolition of nuclear weapons.”
The biologist Jacob Bronowski revealed in 1964 that his classic study Science and Human Values was born at the moment he arrived in Nagasaki in November 1945 with a British military mission sent to study the effects of the bomb. Arriving by jeep after dark he found a landscape as desolate as the craters of the moon. That moment, he wrote, “is present to me as I write, as vividly as when I lived it.” It was “a universal moment…civilization face to face with its own implications.” The power of science to produce good or evil had long troubled other societies. “Nothing happened in 1945,” he observed, “except that we changed the scale of our indifference to man.“
When Bronowski returned from Japan he tried to persuade officials in the British government and at the United Nations that Nagasaki should be preserved exactly as it was. He wanted all future conferences on crucial international issues “to be held in that ashy, clinical sea of rubble…only in this forbidding context could statesmen make realistic judgments of the problems which they handle on our behalf.” His colleagues showed little interest, however; they pointed out delegates “would be uncomfortable in Nagasaki,” according to Bronowski.
More than 9,000 Allied POWs were processed through Nagasaki, but the number of occupation troops dropped steadily every month. By April 1946, the United States had withdrawn military personnel from Hiroshima, and they were out of Nagasaki by August. An estimated 118,000 personnel passed through the atomic cities at one point or another. Some of them were there mainly as tourists, and wandered through the ruins, snapping photos and buying artifacts. When the servicemen returned to the United States, many of them suffered from strange rashes and sores. Years later some were afflicted with disease (such as thyroid problems and leukemia) or cancer associated with radiation exposure.
Little could be proven beyond a doubt, and all of their disability and compensation claims were denied, despite the efforts of a new group, the Committee for US Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Killing Their Own, a book published in 1982, charged that their experience “closely resembles the ordeals of a wide range of American radiation victims, consistently ignored and denied at every turn by the very institutions responsible for causing their problems.” The military had long declared that radiation dissipated quickly in the atomic cities and posed little threat to the soldiers. A 1980 Defense Nuclear Agency report concluded, “Medical science believes multiple myeloma has a borderline relationship with exposure to ionizing radiation. That is, there are some indications that exposure to radiation may increase the risk of this disease, but science cannot yet be sure.”
In the years that followed, thousands of other “atomic vets,” among the legion who participated in hundreds of US bomb tests in Nevada and in the Pacific, would raise similar issues about exposure to radiation and the medical after-effects. The costs of the superpower arms race after Hiroshima can be measured in trillions of dollars, but also in the countless number of lives lost or damaged due to accidents and radiation exposure in the massive nuclear industry that grew to astounding proportions throughout the country in the 1950s and 1960s.
But the long-overlooked military personnel who entered Hiroshima and Nagasaki—key players in one of the last largely untold stories of World War II—were truly the first “atomic soldiers,” and how many may still be suffering from their experience remains unknown.
For more, see Atomic Cover-up .
On September 8, General Thomas F. Ferrell arrived in Hiroshima with a radiologist and two physicists from Los Alamos, ordered by Manhattan Project chief General Leslie Groves to return to Tokyo the following day with preliminary findings. There was some urgency. It was one thing if the Japanese were dying of radiation disease; there was nothing we could do about that. But sending in American soldiers if it was unsafe was another matter.
Three days later, Farrell announced that “no poison gases were released” in Hiroshima. Vegetation was already growing there.The first large group of US soldiers arrived in Nagasaki around September 23, about the time the Japanese newsreel teams started filming, and in Hiroshima two weeks later. They were part of a force of 240,000 that occupied the islands of Honshu (where Hiroshima is located) and Kyushu (Nagasaki). Many more landed in Nagasaki, partly because its harbor was not mined. Marines from the 2nd Division, with three regimental combat teams, took Nagasaki while the US Army’s 24th and 41st divisions seized Hiroshima. The US Navy transported Marines and evacuated POWs, but its role ashore (beyond medical services) was limited.
Most of the troops in Hiroshima were based in camps on the edge of the city, but a larger number did set up camps inside Nagasaki. Because of the alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take precautions. Some bunked down in buildings close to ground zero, even slept on the earth and engaged in cleanup operations, including disposing bodies, without protective gear. Few if any wore radiation detection badges. “We walked into Nagasaki unprepared…. Really, we were ignorant about what the hell the bomb was,” one soldier would recall. Another vet said: “Hell, we drank the water, we breathed the air, and we lived in the rubble. We did our duty.”
A marine named Sam Scione, who had survived battles on Guadacanal, Tarawa and Okinawa, now arrived in Nagasaki, sleeping first in a burned-out factory, then a schoolhouse. “We never learned anything about radiation or the effects it might have on us,” he later said. “We went to ground zero many times and were never instructed not to go there.” A year later, on his return to the United States, his hair began to fall out and his body was covered in sores. He suffered a string of ailments but never was awarded service-related disability status.
The occupying force in Nagasaki grew to more than 27,000 as the Hiroshima regiments topped 40,000. Included were many military doctors and nurses. Some stayed for months. The US Strategic Bomb Survey sent a small group of photographers to take black-and-white photos of blast effects. By all accounts the Americans were charmed by the Japanese, thankful that the bomb might have helped end the war and profoundly affected by what they witnessed. “In the back of our minds, every one of us wondered: What is this atomic bomb?” a Nagasaki veteran later testified. “You had to be there to rea1ize what it did.” After describing the horrors, he added: “We did not drop those two [bombs] on military installations. We dropped them on women and children…. I think that is something this country is going to have to live with for eternity.”
Not every American felt that way, of course. A staff sergeant who served in Hiroshima named Edwin Lawrence later recalled thinking, “The Japs got what they deserved.” What he remembered most vividly was the constant smell of charcoal in the air. Mark Hatfield, a young naval officer in 1945 and later a longtime US senator (known for his opposition to the Vietnam war), would reflect on his “searing remembrances of those days” in Hiroshima when a “shock to my conscience registered permanently within me.” Much of his legislative and personal philosophy was “shaped by the experience of walking the streets of your city,” he wrote to the mayor of Hiroshima in 1980, adding that he was “deeply committed to doing whatever I can to bring about the abolition of nuclear weapons.”
The biologist Jacob Bronowski revealed in 1964 that his classic study Science and Human Values was born at the moment he arrived in Nagasaki in November 1945 with a British military mission sent to study the effects of the bomb. Arriving by jeep after dark he found a landscape as desolate as the craters of the moon. That moment, he wrote, “is present to me as I write, as vividly as when I lived it.” It was “a universal moment…civilization face to face with its own implications.” The power of science to produce good or evil had long troubled other societies. “Nothing happened in 1945,” he observed, “except that we changed the scale of our indifference to man.“
When Bronowski returned from Japan he tried to persuade officials in the British government and at the United Nations that Nagasaki should be preserved exactly as it was. He wanted all future conferences on crucial international issues “to be held in that ashy, clinical sea of rubble…only in this forbidding context could statesmen make realistic judgments of the problems which they handle on our behalf.” His colleagues showed little interest, however; they pointed out delegates “would be uncomfortable in Nagasaki,” according to Bronowski.
More than 9,000 Allied POWs were processed through Nagasaki, but the number of occupation troops dropped steadily every month. By April 1946, the United States had withdrawn military personnel from Hiroshima, and they were out of Nagasaki by August. An estimated 118,000 personnel passed through the atomic cities at one point or another. Some of them were there mainly as tourists, and wandered through the ruins, snapping photos and buying artifacts. When the servicemen returned to the United States, many of them suffered from strange rashes and sores. Years later some were afflicted with disease (such as thyroid problems and leukemia) or cancer associated with radiation exposure.
Little could be proven beyond a doubt, and all of their disability and compensation claims were denied, despite the efforts of a new group, the Committee for US Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Killing Their Own, a book published in 1982, charged that their experience “closely resembles the ordeals of a wide range of American radiation victims, consistently ignored and denied at every turn by the very institutions responsible for causing their problems.” The military had long declared that radiation dissipated quickly in the atomic cities and posed little threat to the soldiers. A 1980 Defense Nuclear Agency report concluded, “Medical science believes multiple myeloma has a borderline relationship with exposure to ionizing radiation. That is, there are some indications that exposure to radiation may increase the risk of this disease, but science cannot yet be sure.”
In the years that followed, thousands of other “atomic vets,” among the legion who participated in hundreds of US bomb tests in Nevada and in the Pacific, would raise similar issues about exposure to radiation and the medical after-effects. The costs of the superpower arms race after Hiroshima can be measured in trillions of dollars, but also in the countless number of lives lost or damaged due to accidents and radiation exposure in the massive nuclear industry that grew to astounding proportions throughout the country in the 1950s and 1960s.
But the long-overlooked military personnel who entered Hiroshima and Nagasaki—key players in one of the last largely untold stories of World War II—were truly the first “atomic soldiers,” and how many may still be suffering from their experience remains unknown.
For more, see Atomic Cover-up .
Choking Off Executions
Great NYT story by Rick Lyman on move I must applaud: Drug manufacturers refusing to supply their products to states who intend to use them to kill people, i.e., inmates on Death Row. Has been building for awhile and already having big effect. Of course, some upset that his is roundabout way of stopping capital punishment in the USA. For my ebook on the history of the death penalty in the U.S., and current issues, go here.
Excerpt from My New Book on Vonnegut
My new e-book,
Vonnegut and Me
, was published a couple of days ago, detailing (often in a witty way) my "conversations and close encounters of a weird kind" with the famed novelist, starting in 1970 and then over the years. It's just $2.99 for Kindle, iPads, etc. Here's an excerpt. Note: The entire copy of my infamous and quite lengthy 1974 profile/interview is included in the book.***
Following up on my exclusive Joseph Heller interview, I attempted to wrangle an invitation from Kurt Vonnegut Jr. to come to his Upper East Side apartment (where he was now living with famed photographer Jill Krementz) for a rare sit-down interview. His recent book Breakfast of Champions had not exactly thrilled the critics, but it was selling well. In response to my letter, Vonnegut wrote, “I'll be teaching at CCNY next fall, along with your friend and mine, Joe Heller. Let's see what sort of wisdom, if any, is shaped by that teaching experience. You might find me wise about life instead of shrewd about publishing."
I’d profiled him over three years earlier, as we've seen, but since it was for Zygote he probably never saw it.
Now, in February 1974, it was fun to sit across from him in his East Side living room for an hour or so, but he kept getting interrupted by students—he was teaching this semester—or his quite alarming cigarette cough. Also, his phone rang off and on and I learned that, amazingly, he still had a listed phone number. (His favorite calls came from drunks halfway across the country late at night.) His daughter had married Geraldo Rivera, which didn’t seem to thrill him in the least. The recent film adaptation of his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June? “One of the most embarrassing movies ever made.” And so on.
When I transcribed the interview and realized it was so-so at best, I took the risky step of writing a lengthy account of my visit under the byline “Kilgore Trout.” Vonnegut had just set his most famous recurring character free in Breakfast of Champions, and so I (rather cleverly, I thought) adopted him myself as a pen name. I also assembled some of Vonnegut’s other characters, such as Bokonon, Howard W. Campbell, and Eliot Rosewater, for a fanciful reunion at his townhouse, with bear hugs and wacky anecdotes all-around. Then, borrowing a Vonnegut trick, I reported the end of the world at the finish.
While I resurrected and re-cast some of Vonnegut’s best lines from his novels, most of his quotes were from our interview, so it maintained an air of reality. Then I got Krementz to lend us some photos—including one of Vonnegut in old man make-up, a portrait of Trout, or so I claimed--and famed illustrator Edward Sorel contributed the cover. One excerpt, in the voice of Trout:
I had spent the previous night in a movie theater on 42nd Street. It was much cheaper than a night in a hotel. I had never done it before, but I knew sleeping in movie houses was the sort of thing really dirty old men did. I was in town to take part in a symposium entitled "The Future of the American Novel in the Age of McLuhan."As for a second character:
As I walked east on 38th Street I decided that what I wished to say at that symposium was this: "I don't know who McLuhan is, but I know what it's like to spend the night with a lot of other dirty old men in a movie theater in New York City." And: "Does this McLuhan, whoever he is, have anything to say about the relationship between wide-open beavers and the sales of books?"
Campbell, who had served too enthusiastically the Nazi cause during World War II as an American agent and had hanged himself in an Israeli jail 20 years later (before the Jews could) only to have Vonnegut cut the rope with his Emancipation Proclamation, explained quickly that he had revived the Iron Guard of the White Sons of the American Constitution. Apparently he had taken yet another turn for the worse.And then, based on the actual interview:
I asked Vonnegut if he had been able to figure out yet why he's the best-selling author on campus. "Well, I'm screamingly funny," he obliged. "I really am in the books. And I talk about stuff Billy Graham won't talk about, for instance, you know, is it wrong to kill?”Somehow the whole package worked and after Vonnegut read the galleys he would tell me it was the best profile about him he’d ever read (it was later re-published in the first collection of pieces about him). Then my career high turned to humiliation.
"I see nothing wrong with being sophomoric. I mean, my books deal with subjects that interest sophomores. I fault my fraternity brothers from Cornell. Not only do they not read anymore but they're not interested in the Big Questions, and I don't regard that as mature -- I regard it as a long step toward the grave."
"When you get to be our age," he added, "you all of a sudden realize that you are being ruled by people you went to high school with. You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school -- class officers, cheerleaders, and all.”
"As I get older, I get more didactic. I say what I really think. If I have an idea I don't embed it in a novel, I simply write it in an essay as clearly as I can....The big trouble with print, of course, is that it is an elitist art form. Most people can't read very well."
Updates on Heathrow Incident
I reported yesterday at The Nation on detention of Glenn Greenwald's partner/spouse at Heathrow Airport, and seizure of his electronic equipment. Now a bunch of updates.
