Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 67
July 15, 2014
Birthday Girl
Happy birthday--and best wishes on her health--to Linda Ronstadt. And for those who think Ronstadt couldn't rock:
Still Germany's Greatest Hero
Soccer team honored by huge crowd at Brandenburg Gate right now (watch). During our recent visit we found about one mile away in the Tiergarden this monument for the country's (still) greatest native son (left, with Haydn).
July 14, 2014
Dead and Not Loving It
David Frum in a disgraceful tweet today declared, "Never enough dead Jews for some. RT
@
Max_Fisher
: Israel-Palestine conflict has killed 14 times more Palestinians than Israelis since 2000." Here's the study Fisher referenced, showing 87% of deaths since 2000 have been on the Palestinian side.
Paul, Warren and Me
You've seen the photo, probably, now here's the inside story of how teen got picture taken with his hero Paul McCartney--and Warren Buffett--on a bench in Omaha. Not photoshopped!Neil Young Concert in Israel Canceled
Neil had been getting flak for scheduling the show this Thursday to begin with, in Tel Aviv, but now it's been called off by police there allegedly due to threat of rocket fire (though virtually no Hamas rockets hit there). Neil says he's going ahead with donations to two groups that provide music training for Israelis and Palestinians.
Many activist groups had criticised Young's announcement of an Israeli concert, including a notable campaign by Pink Floyd's Roger Waters. After Waters' letter to Young, sent via the singer's manager, received no response, Waters published it on his Facebook page. "Woody Guthrie would turn in his grave. Neil Young!" Waters wrote. "[Y]our songs have always been redolent of love and humanity and compassion for your fellow man and woman. I find it hard to believe that you would turn your back on the indigenous people of Palestine."
Harding Topped Clinton in One Thing
Long before Bubba, Warren G. Harding famously had a mistress--or two--in or around the White House. And unlike Bill, he wrote her dirty mash notes. We noted last week NYT printing some of them. Last night John Oliver read highlights....
69 Years Ago: Unholy Trinity and the Birth of the Atomic Age
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While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its sixty-ninth anniversary will be marked—or mourned, if you will—this Wednesday, July 16.
Entire books have been written about the test, so I’ll just touch on one key issue here briefly (there’s much more in my book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America, and my own recent book and ebook Atomic Cover-Up). It’s related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era.
In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren’t sure exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, “The Father of the Bomb,” worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain.
Indeed, scientists warned of danger to those living downwind from the Trinity site but, in a pattern-setting decision, the military boss, General Leslie Groves, ruled that residents not be evacuated and kept completely in the dark (at least until they spotted a blast brighter than any sun). Nothing was to interfere with the test. When two physicians on Oppenheimer’s staff proposed an evacuation, Groves replied, “What are you, Hearst propagandists?”
Admiral Williams Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff—who opposed dropping the bomb on Japan—placed the bomb in the same category as “poison gas.” And, sure enough, soon after the shot went off before dawn on July 16, scientists monitored some alarming evidence. Radiation was quickly settling to earth in a band thirty miles wide by 100 miles long. A paralyzed mule was discovered twenty-five miles from ground zero.
Still, it could have been worse; the cloud had drifted over loosely-populated areas. “We were just damn lucky,” the head of radiological safety for the test later affirmed.
The local press knew nothing about any of this. When the shock wave had hit the trenches in the desert, Groves’ first words were: “We must keep the whole thing quiet.” This set the tone for the decades that followed, with tragic effects for “downwinders” and others tainted across the country, workers in the nuclear industry, “atomic soldiers,” those who questioned the building of the hydrogen bomb and an expanding arms race, among others.
Naturally, reporters were curious about the big blast, however, so Groves released a statement written by W.L. Laurence (who was on leave from the New York Times and playing the role of chief atomic propagandist) announcing that an ammunition dump had exploded.
In the weeks that followed, ranchers discovered dozens of cattle had odd burns or were losing hair. Oppenheimer ordered post-test health reports held in the strictest secrecy. When W.L. Laurence’s famous report on the Trinity test was published just after the Hiroshima bombing he made no mention of radiation at all.
Even as the scientists celebrated their success at Alamagordo on July 16, the first radioactive cloud was drifting eastward over America, depositing fallout along its path. When Americans found out about this, three months later, the word came not from the government but from the president of the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, who wondered why some of his film was fogging and suspected radioactivity as the cause.
Fallout was absent in early press accounts of the Hiroshima bombing as the media joined in the triumphalist backing of The Bomb and the bombings. When reports of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki afflicted with a strange and horrible new disease emerged, General Groves, at first, called it all a “hoax” and “propaganda” and speculated that the Japanese had different “blood.” Then the military kept reporters from the West from arriving in the atomic cities, until more than a month after the blasts, when it controlled access in an early version of today’s “embedded reporters” program.
When some of the truth about radiation started to surface in the U.S. media, a full-scale official effort to downplay the Japanese death toll—and defend the decision to use the bomb—really accelerated, leading to an effective decades-long “Hiroshima narrative.” But that’s a story for my Atomic Cover-Up book—which also covers the suppression of film shot by the US Army in Hirohsima and Nagasaki—and for another day here.
Entire books have been written about the test, so I’ll just touch on one key issue here briefly (there’s much more in my book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America, and my own recent book and ebook Atomic Cover-Up). It’s related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era.
In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren’t sure exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, “The Father of the Bomb,” worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain.
Indeed, scientists warned of danger to those living downwind from the Trinity site but, in a pattern-setting decision, the military boss, General Leslie Groves, ruled that residents not be evacuated and kept completely in the dark (at least until they spotted a blast brighter than any sun). Nothing was to interfere with the test. When two physicians on Oppenheimer’s staff proposed an evacuation, Groves replied, “What are you, Hearst propagandists?”
Admiral Williams Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff—who opposed dropping the bomb on Japan—placed the bomb in the same category as “poison gas.” And, sure enough, soon after the shot went off before dawn on July 16, scientists monitored some alarming evidence. Radiation was quickly settling to earth in a band thirty miles wide by 100 miles long. A paralyzed mule was discovered twenty-five miles from ground zero.
Still, it could have been worse; the cloud had drifted over loosely-populated areas. “We were just damn lucky,” the head of radiological safety for the test later affirmed.
The local press knew nothing about any of this. When the shock wave had hit the trenches in the desert, Groves’ first words were: “We must keep the whole thing quiet.” This set the tone for the decades that followed, with tragic effects for “downwinders” and others tainted across the country, workers in the nuclear industry, “atomic soldiers,” those who questioned the building of the hydrogen bomb and an expanding arms race, among others.
Naturally, reporters were curious about the big blast, however, so Groves released a statement written by W.L. Laurence (who was on leave from the New York Times and playing the role of chief atomic propagandist) announcing that an ammunition dump had exploded.
In the weeks that followed, ranchers discovered dozens of cattle had odd burns or were losing hair. Oppenheimer ordered post-test health reports held in the strictest secrecy. When W.L. Laurence’s famous report on the Trinity test was published just after the Hiroshima bombing he made no mention of radiation at all.
Even as the scientists celebrated their success at Alamagordo on July 16, the first radioactive cloud was drifting eastward over America, depositing fallout along its path. When Americans found out about this, three months later, the word came not from the government but from the president of the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, who wondered why some of his film was fogging and suspected radioactivity as the cause.
Fallout was absent in early press accounts of the Hiroshima bombing as the media joined in the triumphalist backing of The Bomb and the bombings. When reports of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki afflicted with a strange and horrible new disease emerged, General Groves, at first, called it all a “hoax” and “propaganda” and speculated that the Japanese had different “blood.” Then the military kept reporters from the West from arriving in the atomic cities, until more than a month after the blasts, when it controlled access in an early version of today’s “embedded reporters” program.
When some of the truth about radiation started to surface in the U.S. media, a full-scale official effort to downplay the Japanese death toll—and defend the decision to use the bomb—really accelerated, leading to an effective decades-long “Hiroshima narrative.” But that’s a story for my Atomic Cover-Up book—which also covers the suppression of film shot by the US Army in Hirohsima and Nagasaki—and for another day here.
Updates on Gaza-Israel Tragedy
Latest figures from U.N. find 174 deaths and 1,100 injuries in Gaza in recent days, with "sizeable" number of women and children (earlier non-combatants were said to be 70 to 80 percent). Israel has shot down a small, unarmed, Hamas drone. "With a price tag of well over $1 million each, 'using a Patriot to shoot down a UAV is like using a shotgun to kill a fly,' ABC News military consultant Steve Ganyard said." But when the U.S. is basically paying....Note NYT at end of story relating that rockets from Gaza have caused injuries and property damage without delineating--which would mean disclosing only a handful of injuries and very little property damage. Also, Israeli police have shot and killed a young Palestinian man in the restive West Bank, no doubt inspiring more outrage there. (Photo a left: graves dug for 17 in one Gaza family over the weekend.)
July 13, 2014
Still Searching
Lenght Guardian probe of surprising suicide of director of Oscar-winning Searching for Sugarman ends...with no answers, hardly even any clues. Guy seemed to have it all, including girlfriend, but decided to jump in front of a train. Read the piece but don't expect resolution.
Knocking on Heaven's Door
First video that apparently captures Israel's hyped "roof-knocking" technique--"warning" Gaza home dwellers, with a small explosion up top, that their house is about to be obliterated. Amnesty International has condemned this as an effective warning. In the video you'll see the first small blast and then the massive missile strike. Some have pointed out an edit that makes them appear closer together. More likely about 15 minutes passed. Still, a graphic display.
![[image error]](http://phillyimc.org/files/Trinity%20Test%20nuclear-explosion_0.jpg){kind=link}