main reason it was classified was because of the horror, the devastation

understandinglife

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Tue Aug-02-05 07:35 PM
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main reason it was classified was because of the horror, the devastation

Edited on Tue Aug-02-05 07:37 PM by understandinglife

More recently, McGovern declared that Americans should have seen the damage wrought by the bomb. "The main reason it was classified was ... because of the horror, the devastation," he said. "The medical effects were pretty gory. ... The attitude was: do not show any medical effects. Don't make people sick." Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.

The atomic cover-up also reveals what can happen in any country that carries out deadly attacks on civilians in any war and then keeps images of what occurred from its own people.

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In the mid-1990s, researching "Hiroshima in America," a book I would write with Robert Jay Lifton, I discovered the deeper context for suppression of the U.S. Army film: it was part of a broad effort to suppress a wide range of material related to the atomic bombings, including photographs, newspaper reports on radiation effects, information about the decision to drop the bomb, even a Hollywood movie.

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"Original Child Bomb" went on to debut at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, win a major documentary award, and this week, on Aug. 6 and 7, it will debut on the Sundance cable channel. After 60 years at least a small portion of that footage will finally reach part of the American public in the unflinching and powerful form its creators intended. Only then will the Americans who see it be able to fully judge for themselves what McGovern and Sussan were trying to accomplish in shooting the film, why the authorities felt they had to suppress it, and what impact their footage, if widely aired, might have had on the nuclear arms race -- and the nuclear proliferation that plagues, and endangers, us today.

From Hiroshima Cover-up Exposed by Greg Mitchell on August 1, 2005

Much more at the link:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001001583

Try as they have to distort the extent of torture, Bush and his neoconster fellow criminals are not going to be able to hide their evil deeds for 60 years.

A former London schoolboy accused of being a dedicated al-Qaida terrorist has given the first full account of the interrogation and alleged torture endured by so-called ghost detainees held at secret prisons around the world.

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Recruits to some groups connected to al-Qaida are thought to be instructed to make allegations of torture after capture, and most of Mohammed's claims cannot be independently verified. But his description of a prison near Rabat closely resembles the Temara torture centre identified in a report by the US-based Human Rights Watch last October.

Furthermore, this newspaper has obtained flight records showing executive jets operated by the CIA flew in and out of Morocco on July 22 2002 and January 22 2004, the dates he says he was taken to and from the country.

If true, his account adds weight to concerns that the US authorities are torturing by proxy. It also highlights the dilemma of British authorities when they seek information from detainees overseas who they know, or suspect, are tortured. The lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, says: "This is outsourcing of torture, plain and simple. America knows torture is wrong but gets others to do its unconscionable dirty work."

From Suspect's tale of travel and torture by Stephen Grey and Ian Cobain on August 2 2005

More at the link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1540558,00.html

Here is an excerpt from the lawyer's 'diary':

For 18 months, there was not one night when I could sleep well. Sometimes I would go 48 hours without sleep. At night, they would bang the metal doors, bang the flap on the door, or just come right in.

They continued with two or three interrogations a month. They weren't really interrogations, more like training me what to say. The interrogator told me what was going on. "We're going to change your brain," he said.

I suffered the razor treatment about once a month for the remaining time I was in Morocco, even after I'd agreed to confess to whatever they wanted to hear. It became like a routine. They'd come in, tie me up, spend maybe an hour doing it. They never spoke to me. Then they'd tip some kind of liquid on me - the burning was like grasping a hot coal. The cutting, that was one kind of pain. The burning, that was another.

In all the 18 months I was there, I never went outside. I never saw the sun, not even once. I never saw any human being except the guards and my tormentors, unless you count the pictures they showed me.

From 'One of them made cuts in my penis. I was in agony'

by The Guardian on August 2, 2005

Full details at the link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1540549,00.html

As one example, a report appeared today in Newsday that makes clear how lame the excuses are for not providing access to the truth and how unflenching Bush, Cheney and the neoconsters are in their intent to continue torturing people.

These are small suggestions, footnotes to the larger question of whether the president has sole authority to sweep people up around the world and throw them forever into the black pit of indefinite confinement. Still, the White House found McCain's amendments and another set by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who wishes to write into law the various executive fiats Bush already has imposed on detainees, too limiting. It dispatched the enforcer, Dick Cheney, to Capitol Hill to demand their withdrawal. The vice president had the Defense Department authorization bill pulled from the Senate floor last week.

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The Pentagon, despite a judge's ruling, is refusing to release 87 pictures and four videos that are the worst of the worst images from the prison scandal. These are pictures Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has described as "blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhumane." Graham, when the Abu Ghraib scandal first exploded, said, "We're talking about rape and murder here."

In their arguments against releasing the photos, government lawyers persisted in repeating the myth that they represent "isolated activity by one military unit." In fact, the military itself has uncovered hundreds of cases of prisoner mistreatment in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Not all are equally malevolent. But neither can they be described any longer as singular missteps by misguided underlings.

The argument now made against releasing the Abu Ghraib pictures is that this would almost certainly spark violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Muslims would be incensed and U.S. troops would be put at greater risk. No doubt.

From Torturing prisoners? Not by the book by Marie Cocco on August 2, 2005
More at the link:

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-opcoc024367606aug02,0,2372094,print.column?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines

Try as they may, Bush, Cheney and the neoconsters are not going to be able to suppress the details of their torture crimes. Just as they are not going to be able to suppress the consequences of depleted uranium and the massive destruction of civilian property and the killing of Iraqi civilians.

Americans are not going to be sheltered for decades from the horrors that their government has conducted, in their name.

Whether the complicit corporate media spreads the truth or not, the truth is spreading.

Whether the ACLU prevails, those videos and pictures are going to be exposed for all the world to see. Much of that world is already appalled that the hope for humanity, the hope for human rights that the USA was supposed to herald and deliver, has been shown to be a monstrous lie.

It's time to suck it up, America, and face the brutal reality that Bush has delivered unto you a culture of death, a culture of torture.

Everyone else on the planet knows the truth.

Go to Washington DC on September 24, 2005 and tell Bush and the neoconsters you know the truth, you are going to hold them legally accountable, and you are going to remove them from any role in our government.

And, get the damn pictures and look at them and don't ever allow your government to tell you what you have the right to see, because as soon as you do, that government is going to start doing things you will regret, or worse.

WATCH IT; SPREAD IT http://www.bushflash.com/right.html

Peace.

www.missionnotaccomplished.us - How ever long it takes, the day must come when tens of millions of caring individuals peacefully but persistently defy the dictator, deny the corporatists their cash flow, and halt the evil being done in Iraq and in all the other places the Bu$h neoconster regime is destroying civilization and the environment in the name of "America."