Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 60

Inversion Version

Terrific Jon Stewart segment last night on U.S. corporations filing to sort of move abroad to save on taxes--backed by GOPers and business journalists.  Fiduciary? "Fi-douchebags."


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Thursday's Updates (From the Top) on Gaza-Israel Tragedy

BBC:  The strikes by Israel's military on UN buildings in Gaza "do not appear to be accidental", the UN human rights chief Navi Pillay has said.  Ms. Pillay also called for international law with "appropriate investigation, prosecution and punishment" to be applied to the incidents.

Another day, another pro-Israel resolution letter led by Sen. Barbara Boxer, this one to the UN protesting its alleged one-side inquiry into war crimes in Gaza/Israel, with 35 Senators on board already, including many top Dems:  Gillibrand, Wyden, Booker and on and on. Typical excerpt: "Over the past two weeks, Hamas has put Palestinians in danger, refused to adhere to multiple cease-fire agreements, and launched more than 2,000 rockets into Israel. What country could sit idly by without responding? Israel has a right to defend itself against these vicious attacks and has worked assiduously to minimize civilian casualties by warning Gaza residents of impending air strikes."

Israel spokeswoman Jodi Rudoren on CNN just now :  Many Israelis "just feel like nobody understands them....nobody outside of Israel really understands what they're going through." Once again: cites tunnels without mentioning not a single Israeli civilian has ever died because of them.

Chris Gunness of UNWRA explains to The Guardian why he broke down on camera in interview: “It was a live interview, and I just about got through it, just about held it together. But what really makes my heart burst is the suffering of children, and I was so moved by the appalling attack on the school in Jabaliya that I couldn’t control myself any longer.”

Greatest soccer midfielder for Palestine ever killed in his bed.  Took no part in politics.   Currently did sports on TV.

Great piece at AFP by reporter on Gaza's children and what she's witnessed in past two weeks. 

Joe Scarborough, longtime major backer of Israel,  today: "This continued killing of women and children in a way that appears to be indiscriminate is asinine...The United States of America — we cannot be associated with this if this continues. This is so bad, not only for the Israeli people, but for us." (If you've lost Joe Scarborough...well, you probably still will never lose the U.S. Congress.)  In update at bottom of Politico piece he claims he's gotten major feedback, most of it "positive."  Doesn't seem to be saying he expressed himself poorly.

Netanyahu calls current actions just "first phase" of invasion, and calls up 16,000 more reserves.  Why?   Amira Hass at Haaretz:  "Based on the scale of the destruction in the evacuated areas, it looks like the army’s goal is not a temporary evacuation, but the creation of a permanent buffer zone devoid of any structure."

Update on death toll in Gaza:  1361 dead, of that over 315 childen, with 2300 kids injured.  No need to update Israeli civilian toll:  still one Bedouin, one Thai worker, one settler.

U.S. television journalism in a nutshell.  Charlie Rose last night had Israeli ambassador to U.S. Ron Derner on for a lengthy rant, including visions of, if need be, "wiping out" Gaza.  Derner then cited  3 UN schools where rockets were found and that UN schools in Gaza are "warehouses" for weapons.   Charlie awakes from his slumber to interject, "Some are not."  There are 245 UN schools in Gaza. 

White House "condemns" latest UN massacre but can't bring itself to name or blame Israel.  Then makes sure to hit UN because a few missiles found in three schools.  It's despicable linkage especially since all of the missiles were found in abandoned schools--not ones where people are taking shelter.    State Dept. spokesman said we still don't know who bombed school--contrary to all evidence.  Also, U.S. has shipped new mortar rounds to replaces ones used today.

Last paragraphs of NYT columnist and Zionist Roger Cohen's latest quite good, if fellow Zionists will ponder it.  Alas, could be deaf ears syndrome.

Amnesty International:  Israel's attack on UN school last night "is a possible war crime and should be independently investigated....If the strike on this school was the result of Israeli artillery fire it would constitute an indiscriminate attack and a likely war crime. Artillery should never be used against targets in crowded civilian areas and its use in such a manner would never be considered a ‘surgical’ strike."  How this is different from so many other Israeli strikes is a bit beyond me, however. 

World Gone Mad

Front page of The Guardian for Thursday just out, on the massacres in Gaza.

Death of a Photo Journalist (and Many Others)

If you can handle this, video shot in the middle of the shelling at the Gaza market--you'll see the journalist, in blue with camera, near the start.  Just horrible, never seen anything quite like it, even in the past two weeks.  Also dead and injured kids on the ground.  Send it to your president and Congress person.  Now wait for the apologists to claim this is fake.  I dare NYT, which ran video of visit to an (unfinished, inoperative) Hamas tunnel yesterday to post this on their site today.  You know, "balance."

David Frum Axes Evil (or So He Thought)

UPDATE  Frum finally says he's sorry.  But then devotes nearly all the space to saying his skepticism was warranted--so much media manipulation of images that make poor Israel look bad.  Links to sites that covered this in past--filled with a few clear cases of photoshopped or staged images but also with much more claims as wacky as they one he cited last week. I followed that rightwing site, and ones like it, very closely years ago at E&P.

Earlier:  As I noted elsewhere, Michael Shaw's always-excellent BagNewsNotes today took apart David Frum's multiple claims--eight times, I think--that the NYT and Reuters had faked photos showing some severe suffering in Gaza.  Frum now says he is looking into, and sure to apologize any minute.  I pointed out earlier that Frum's source was same clown I exposed a few days back for claiming that the viral video showing a young Gaza man shot by a sniper was totally faked.  The young man's father had claimed his body at the morgue.  Now read this piece based on an interview with the perp.  Almost feel sorry for him, he is a kind of tragic figure.  Almost.

When I was editor of E&P from 2002-2009 I went through this a lot.  There were always these idiot rightwingers who were doing "photo analysis" to prove atrocity photos from Iraq or wherever the Israelis were bombing (Lebanon, Gaza) were fake.  Almost always they were clearly real.  They went came up with charges that there was a virtual movie lot in some of these places where the scenes were played out.  Toxic stuff and also so revealing.  They can't handle the truth, to coin a phrase. 

Wednesday Updates (From the Top) on Gaza-Israel Tragedy

4:00 p.m. ET  If you can handle it: death of journalist in Gaza captured today in incredible, horrific, video.

Silence of Arab states on carnage, like the U.S.,  "is deafening." 




3:00 p.m. ET   Jim Sciutto of CNN tweets:  "WH takes aim at Israel on #Gaza, saying made very clear Israel needs to do more' to avoid civilian casualties."  Then adds: "CNN has also confirmed US shipping more ammo to Israel incl 120 mm mortar rounds & 40mm grenade launcher rounds."

No need to update Israeli civilian toll:  still one Bedouin, one Thai worker, one settler. 

12:45 a.m. ET    Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and Pedro Almovodor among artists in Spain signing letter hitting Israel's "genocide" and calling on EU to halt it.

Richard Engel of NBC just tweeted:  "Gaza city was poor & barely functioning even before war. Now struggling to stay out of humanitarian crisis."  Stay out of?

Friends and colleagues ID dead journo as Rami Rayan (above), a young photographer.

UNWRA spokesman on earlier school attack:  "Children killed in their sleep.   This is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame."

8 days since fine NYT public ed posted on Gaza and Israel--and back then it was mainly on criticism of paper being too anti-Israel.

11:25 a.m. ET: AP Breaking: "Palestinian official: 15 dead, more than 150 wounded in strike on busy Gaza market."  NBC's @AymanM:  "Ashraf Al Qedra, Palestinian Health Ministry Spokesman says 15 people killed till now and 160 injured in shelling of # Shejaiya market."  Includes kids. @SharifKouddous:  Horrific footage on TV of bodies strewn in street, many badly wounded, including a journalist wearing helmet and flak jacket in Shejaiya."  The Guardian:  Many shoppers there, since Israel had declared four-hour ceasefire.

Sunjeev Bery of Amnesty International in series of tweets raises something I haven't:  NYT in its daily summary graphic has always listed number of Hamas rockets fired--but does not include number, or tons, of Israeli munitions fired.  Just targets hit. Or, as far as we've seen, any accounting in a story of gross amount fired or dropped.  (h/t Patrick Connors)

NYT's reporter in Gaza, Ben Hubbard, manages to state clearly today that it was Israel that bombed the power station--sharing a byline with Jodi Rudoren he did, or could, not.

9:30 a.m.  ET The usual laughable claims by IDF spokesman on latest massacre (below):  "Lt. Col. Peter Lerner of the Israeli military said no United Nations facility had been targeted during the operation. A military spokeswoman said Palestinian militants had 'opened fire at Israeli soldiers from the vicinity' of the school in the Jabaliya refugee camp Wednesday morning, and that the Israeli troops 'responded by firing toward the origins of the fire.'”

Note NYT headline: "Israeli Shells Said to Hit School."  As if any doubt.  Israel not even claiming--so far--that they were misfired Hamas rockets.  Fox News headline has "Palestinians Claim." But on the brighter side:

8:00 a.m. ET  Well, here we go again.  Another massacre from the air at Gaza school and shelter, at least 15 dead (some say 23 or more),  and again Israel  "looking into it"  etc.   Photo of one victim at left.  Richard Engel just tweeted, "Witnesses tell @ NBCNews there were no militants in school when it was hit, UN says it was struck by israeli artillery."  Gazans have taken shrapnel as evidence.  NYT, of course, lets it go that "Palestinians said" it was Israeli shelling.  UN spokesman:  3300 at school at the time, had been told by Israel to evacuate to that area, and UN gave them coordinates. Another strike killed 10 in one family.  Five mosques hit and possibly two more shelters.

Amazing interview with David Frum's clownish source for his debunked claim of NYT and Reuters faking photos from Gaza.

If you missed  my new lengthy piece on the Hamas "terror tunnels" as main pretext for continuing slaughter, and promotion of this by U.S. media.  How often have they been used for "terror" in the past? Note: Not a single Israeli civilian ever killed by a militant from a tunnel. 

Countdown to Hiroshima: X-Minus 7 Days

Every year at this time, I trace the final days leading up to the first (and so far only) use of the atomic bomb against cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945.   In this way the fateful, and in my view, very tragic, decisions made by President Truman and his advisers can be judged more clearly in "real time."  As many know, this is a subject that I have studied and written about in hundreds of articles and three books (including the recent Atomic Cover-Up on the U.S. suppression of film for decades and another on a Hollywood film)  since the early 1980s with a special emphasis on the aftermath of the bombings, and the government and media reactions in the decades after.

July 30, 1945

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of U.S. troops in Europe, has visited President Truman in Germany, and would recall what happened in his memoir (Mandate for Change): "Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act...

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that 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. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."

In a Newsweek interview, Ike would add: "...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

-- Stimson, now back at the Pentagon, cabled Truman, that he had drafted a statement for the president that would follow the first use of the new weapon--and Truman must urgently review it because the bomb could be used as early as August 1. Stimson sent one of his aides to Germany with two copies of the statement. The Top Secret, six-page typed statement opened: "____ hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on ______ and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT.... It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe." Later, as we will see, the claim that Hiroshima was merely "a military base" was added to the draft.

--After scientists sifted more data from the July 16 Trinity test of the first weapon, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project provided Gen. George Marshall, our top commander, with more detail on the destructive power of atomic weapons. Amazingly, despite the new evidence, Groves recommended that troops could move into the "immediate explosion area" within a half hour" (and, indeed, in future bomb tests soldiers would march under the mushroom clouds and receive harmful doses of radiation). Groves also provided the schedule for the delivery of the weapons: By the end of November more than ten weapons would be available, in the event the war had continued.

--Groves faced a new problem, however. Gen. "Tooey" Spaatz on Guam urgently cabled that sources suggested that there was an Allied prisoner of war camp in Nagasaki just a mile north of the center of the city. Should it remain on the target list?" Groves, who had already dropped Kyoto from the list after Stimson had protested, refused to shift. In another cable Spaatz revealed that there were no POW camps in Hiroshima, or so they believed. This firmed up Groves's position that Hiroshima should "be given top priority," weather permitting. As it turned out, POWs died in both cities from the bombing.

Greg Mitchell, former editor of Nuclear Times and Editor & Publisher, is the author of more than a dozen books, with three on the use of the bomb, including Atomic Cover-Up (on the decades-long suppression of shocking film shot in the atomic cities by the U.S. military) and Hollywood Bomb (the wild story of how an MGM 1947 drama was censored by the military and Truman himself).

Colbert on Palin Channel

That should get you going.


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There Used To Be a Playground Here

Haunting art/photo via Leem Lubany, co-star of great Oscar-nominated film last year, Omar.

Feeling Spacey Again

Well, I brought you the first "Call of Duty" trailer with Kevin Spacey so might as well bring you another released today (courtesy of my genius trailer-making son).