Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: ancora oggi si ripetono balle su Hiroshima e Nagasaki per  giustificare il futuro uso dello sterminio di massa

In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation
authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted
that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It
was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the
front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and
journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred
Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a
warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having
reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to
dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible
injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague."
For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was
pilloried and smeared--and vindicated.
THE ATOMIC bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an
epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of
intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought
refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war," whose "ethical
bath," as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the West not only to
expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious
war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the
war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing
attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of
1946,
    air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to
bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by
the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the
Survey's opinion that...Japan would have surrendered even if the
atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the
war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
The National Archives in Washington contain U.S. government documents
that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was
pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945, by the German ambassador in
Tokyo and intercepted by the U.S. dispels any doubt that the Japanese
were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the
terms were hard."
Instead, U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson told President Truman he
was "fearful" that the U.S. air force would have Japan so "bombed out"
that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength." He later
admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered,
to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb."
His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians
with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip." General Leslie
Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb,
testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was
our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day
after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his
satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment."
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of
using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war
on terror," the present governments in Washington and London have
declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes
against non-nuclear states.
With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies
of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat."
But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is
planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-
sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK--just as the lies about
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi
National Congress, set up by Washington.
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical.
That America's Defense Intelligence Estimate says "with high
confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons program in 2003 has
been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no
interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that, in
his recent obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament,
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened
Iran, yet again.
THIS PROGRESSION of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous
nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost
unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the
media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and
that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in
1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as
200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of United Nations resolutions,
Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new
American administration might, just might, conduct genuine
negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and
America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.
In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris,
once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country's
political and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into
a nuclear wasteland." This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony
cries out.
The question begs: Are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming,
as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more
behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/
moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence
portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted
violence"?
Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands
in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not?
The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/06/secondworldwar.warcrimes

la guerra è finita velocemente, quali balle?