Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 24
November 14, 2014
Bad Nukes Bared
AP with major story on the sad, sorry--dangerous--state of our still much too large nuclear arsenal. A new report for the Pentagon paints and even worse picture than we've seen in bits and pieces in recent years. And:
In the months following Welch's review, 98 missileers were implicated in a cheating scandal and nine midlevel commanders were fired; a leaked email from the commander of the nuclear missile wing at North Dakota's Minot Air Force base complained of "rot" in the missile force; and Gen. Michael Carey was removed as commander of the ICBM program after an official trip to Russia, where he engaged in "inappropriate behavior," including heavy drinking, rudeness to his hosts, and associating with "suspect" women. Just last week, the Air Force fired two high-level commanders in the ICBM program and disciplined a third for various leadership lapses, including the maltreatment of subordinates.
November 12, 2014
Happy Birthday, Forever, Young
Yes, it's Neil's birthday, and the day after Veterans Day, so here he is with one of the greatest antiwar songs of the decade. "Back in the days of Mission Accomplished/Our Chief was landing on the deck/the sun was setting/on a golden photo-op...Thousands of bodies lowered in the ground/lowering boxes to the trumpet's sound."
November 11, 2014
'Glory' For Veterans Day
From Kubrick's Paths of Glory, one of 10 greatest movies ever.
Amazing Footage of 1934 Baseball Tour of Japan
This was an epic event for Japan, when a traveling team of U.S. stars--including Ruth and Gehrig--barnstormed there, with footage shot by the great Jimmie Foxx! I've known about this for a decades, as a fan of Japanese (and U.S.) baseball. Love the shots of future spy, Moe Berg.
Footage recently found at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. And don't miss, see my collection of vintage baseball cards--from years before that.
Footage recently found at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. And don't miss, see my collection of vintage baseball cards--from years before that.
Jon on Media Getting Isis Reports Wrong
Stewart mockery includes 'no boots on the ground' in Iraq.
The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,Daily Show Video Archive
The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,Daily Show Video Archive
For Veterans Day: The Last Soldier to Die for a Mistake
Update: And now we have first from U.S. to die in effort against Isis. Does this mean Hickman is no longer "last"? Earlier: John Kerry famously asked, as a Vietnam vet leader while that war was still going, Who will be the last U.S. soldier to die for that mistake? In regards to the Iraq war, which began 11 years ago tomorrow, we knew the answer back in December 2011, but we've already forgotten. So here he is.
David Hickman was a 23-year-old African-American from North Carolina. "The pain is fresh for people who knew Hickman. But the years have not eased the anguish of those who lost loved ones in the war's earliest days, when funerals were broadcast live on local television, before the country became numb to the casualty count."
Of course, the deaths go on, from lingering injuries, brain trauma--and the many suicides.
Greg Mitchell's book "So Wrong For So Long," on media misconduct and the Iraq war, was published this week in an updated edition and for the first time as an e-book, with preface by Bruce Springsteen.
For Veterans Day: When U.S. Troops Were Exposed to Atomic Bomb in Japan
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, weeks 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 .
For Veterans Day: The Soldier Who Killed Herself After Refusing to Take Part in Torture
The blood on the hands of Bush, Cheney and so many others (including certain members of the media) in the Iraq war comes not just from soldiers and civilians killed in action but the many, many soldier suicides, in the war zone and back at home. Recent reports find high levels remain, even with no U.S. fighting in Iraq and declining combat in Afghanistan. For years I wrote about the suicides almost every week (when no one else was doing this).But one of the most most wrenching stories concerned Spc. Alyssa Peterson, 27. She was one of the first female soldiers to die in that conflict. It was an unusually tough loss for U.S. forces there, as she was one of the few Arabic-speaking interrogators. She had been killed by a bullet from a rifle--11 years ago today. A daily occurrence for U.S. soldiers in Iraq then, but in this case the rifle was her own.
She had committed suicide after refusing to take part in torture. Naturally, a cover-up followed. From a 2009 dissertation by Alan Hensley, Ph.D.
Statements in the post-death investigation (United States Army, 2003) suggested the former Mormon missionary found the human intelligence (HUMINT) interrogation techniques used on Iraqi detainees repugnant and physically, psychologically, and emotionally distressing. Though Peterson was reassigned to other duties at Tal Afar after expressing her distress to her superiors, she continued to be assigned near the building in 9 which she was acutely aware that interrogations continued. She was repeatedly reprimanded for revealing to Iraqi civilians that she both understood and spoke Arabic.I was the first national reporter to write about her case, after a local radio newsman uncovered it. I've updated it since and wherever I write about it the articles draw wide readership and comments. Here's my most recent piece, from The Nation four years ago--it's in two parts, with updates. She was also featured in my new e-book on the war, So Wrong for So Long.
In all of her actions, Peterson demonstrated a strong sense of empathy and altruism. While her personality domains and educational and occupational history would have been ideally suited for public affairs or humanitarian duties, her assigned military duties were immensely incongruent.
Many of her fellow soldiers noted in the weeks prior to her death, Peterson became distant and withdrawn. In the last few days prior to her death, her behavior changed markedly from troubled and withdrawn to pleasant. To professionals trained in suicide prevention, this behavior is an all-too-familiar indicator that, with her strategic coping mechanisms overwhelmed, Alyssa Peterson had made the decision to end her biopsychosocial distress by ending her life.
November 10, 2014
The Thompsons Twined
You may have read the bib NYT Magazine feature over the weekend on Teddy Thompson and the "Family" album coming out w/ dad Richard and mum Linda and sister and others....been a big fan of the parents since mid-1970s and saw Richard and Teddy over in Tarrytown a few weeks back. Here's trailer for album:
