[Fresh Ink] The Terror America Wrought

Thu Aug 6 21:19:22 CDT 2009

<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090805_truthdig_classic_the_terror_america_wrought/>

The Terror America Wrought

by Robert Scheer

Truthdig (August 05 2009)

Note: This column was originally published in August 2007.

During a week of mayhem in Iraq, in which terrorists have rightly been 
condemned for targeting schoolchildren, it is sobering to recall that this 
week is also the 62nd anniversary of a US attack that deliberately took the 
lives of thousands of children on their way to school in the Japanese cities 
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As noted in the Strategic Bombing Survey 
conducted at President Harry Truman's request, when the bomb hit Hiroshima 
on April 6 1945, "nearly all the school children ... were at work in the 
open", to be exploded, irradiated or incinerated in the perfect firestorm 
that the planners back at the University of California-run Los Alamos lab 
had envisioned for the bomb's maximum psychological impact.

The terror plot worked all too well, as Hiroshima's Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba 
recalled this week: "That fateful summer, 8:15 am. The roar of a B-29 breaks 
the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, 
an enormous blast - silence - hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls 
watching the parachute were melted. Their faces became giant charred 
blisters. The skin of people seeking help dangled from their fingernails ... 
Others died when their eyeballs and internal organs burst from their 
bodies - Hiroshima was a hell where those who somehow survived envied the 
dead."

Like most of the others killed by the two American bombs, neither the 
children nor the adults had any role in Japan's decision to go to war, but 
they were picked as the target instead of an isolated but fortified military 
base whose antiaircraft fire posed a higher risk. The target preferred by US 
atomic scientists - a patch in the ocean or unpopulated terrain - was 
rejected, because the effect of hundreds of thousands of civilians dying 
would be all the more dramatic.

The victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were available soft targets, much like 
the children playing in Iraq, suddenly caught in the crossfire of battles 
waged beyond their control. In "White Light/Black Rain", a devastating HBO 
documentary released this week, there is an interview with the sole survivor 
of a Japanese elementary school of 620 students. The murder of the other 
619, and the 370,000 overall deaths attributed to the bombings, 85 percent 
of which were civilian deaths, has never compelled a widespread examination 
of the "end justifies the means" morality of our own state-sanctioned acts 
of terror. Indeed, the horrifying footage taken by Japanese and American 
cameramen soon after the devastation, and shown in the HBO film, was long 
kept secret by the US government for fear that an informed American public 
might question this nation's incipient nuclear arms race.

Just exactly what distinguishes the United States' use of the 
ever-so-cutely-named "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" atomic bombs on cities in 
Japan from the car bombs of Baghdad or the planes that smashed into the 
World Trade Center? To even raise the question, as was found in one recent 
university case, can be a career-ending move.

Of course, we had our justifications, as terrorists always do. Truman 
defended his decision to drop the atomic bombs on civilians over the 
objection of leading atomic scientists on the grounds that it was a 
necessary military action to save lives by forcing a quick Japanese 
surrender. He insisted on that imperative despite the objections of top 
military figures, including General Dwight Eisenhower, who contended that 
the war would end quickly without dropping the bomb.

The subsequent release of formerly secret documents makes a hash of Truman's 
rationalization. His White House was fully informed that the Japanese were 
on the verge of collapse, and their surrender was made all the more likely 
by the Soviets' imminent entry into the fight.

At most, the Japanese were asking for the face-saving gesture of retaining 
their emperor, and even that modest demand would likely have been abandoned 
with the shift of massive numbers of Allied troops and firepower from the 
battlefront of a defeated Germany to a confrontation with its deeply wounded 
Asian ally. Instead, the US played midwife to the birth of the nuclear 
monster, the ultimate terrorist weapon that presents a continuing and 
growing threat to the survival of human life on Earth.

This is a lesson to be pondered at a time when President Bush plays power 
games with a nuclear-equipped Russia while coddling Pakistan, the main 
proliferator of nuclear weapons to rogue regimes, and Congress authorizes an 
expansion of the US nuclear program to better fight the war on terror by 
"improving" the ultimate weapon of terror, which the US alone stands guilty 
of using.

Click here to go to HBO's site for "White Light/Black Rain": 
http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/whitelightblackrain/

_____

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion.
Editor, Robert Scheer.
Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.