We know that Iraq has tons of uranium hidden in the hole country. For the sake of national security we will not define exact numbers but it's a matter of tons. It is depleted uranium a generous gift from my daddy to Irag citizens used in our projectiles and now a deadly radioactive dust of uranium has covered this hole ugly country. If you are nice and don't pass on the facts we will tell you - there are over 300 tons of radioactive material. So they are able to built a dirty bomb to attack our cities in our nice homeland. Then our born children could look like this iraq children. This we have to avert and therefor we must bomb them as long till nothing will crawl there anymore.

Never forget we are not assholes - we are the good one.

Your World President

ummm...you gonna eat that?

Yes, we the US, in our vaunted wisdom, would never unleash nuclear war on an unsuspecting populace. We are the good guys, right?


http://www.stopnato.org.uk/du-watch/

http://www.movingideas.org/article/full_cite/83.html

http://www.progressive.org/Media%20Project%202/mphd1202.html

good video: http://www.pinholepictures.com/

Marc, how many nuclear wars have we exported?

Iraq, Bosnia, Serbia, Afghanistan, and counting...

Just because there was no nuclear explosion does not mean there has been no nuclear war. The use of depleted uranium shells has left wastelands that will far outlive the American Empire.

Fascinating. Why is it that these nuclear wastelands are only reported in the fever swamps of lefty media? There are high population densities in Bosnia and Serbia, yet I haven't heard complaints to the UN, or seen this discussed anywhere exept here. Wonder why?

'how many nuclear wars have you exported!?!'
you dropped two bombs on Japan for chrissakes!!
and as for the UN and serbia, there have been complaints, inquiries. but when it comes to the yanks not being interested, they get ignored.

We dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to end the war that Japan and her allies started. The bombing was justified, and I might add, successful in it's intent. Millions today are alive that might not be if we were forced to invade and compel the Japanese to surrender.

As for your claims of complaints, not good enough. Serbia and Bosnia are full members of the UN. Where are their complaints to the General Assembly? Where are the investigations by the UN? Until more reputable sources than Ramsey Clark are found, all this is so much hot air.

It's historical fact that the U.S. didn't need to nuke Japan to end the war by August, 1945. The main objective the Japanese sought was to preserve the role of emperor. The U.S. signaled it would not permit this, so negotiations never happened (even though high level discussions were being orchestrated for the U.S. by Russia -- at the U.S. instruction). The ultimate sadness in all this is that Japan was given what they wanted in the end anyway. They kept their emperor, who was given immunity for war crimes.

As I said before, and to which you seem to have reacted quite strongly (touch a cord?): Don't be a windbag. It doesn't mater if you want to present views counter to leftists. I welcome that. I'm not a leftist. But you're way over the top, a blatant propaganda artist. And you consistently demonstrate simplistic understanding of history, SIMPLE Simon

Major Doug Rocke served the U.S. armed forces for over 20 years. He's anything but a leftist (sorry SIMPLE Simon, you'll have to think harder about how to discredit him).

I STRONGLY recommend people familiarize themselves with what Rocke is saying. Once source:

http://www.flashpoints.net/index-2002-12-25.html

But you can find more.

Oh, and SIMPLE Simon, don't waste our time with an attack on Flashpoints as your next salvo. It doesn't matter what Flashpoints does, what their political slant is. What maters is what Rocke is saying.

UN Subcommission condemns DU weapons
http://www.bintjbeil.com/E/un/960904_du.html

IAEA Support to International Efforts
http://www.iaea.or.at/worldatom/Press/Focus/DU/du_main.shtml#radsafe_box
http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/VISIE/J_EATON/j_eaton.html




BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA:
A United Nations Environmental Programme Post-Conflict Environmental Assessment on Depleted Uranium
http://postconflict.unep.ch/actbihdu.htm

Federal Republic of Yugoslavia:
Clean-up of Environmental Hotspots
http://postconflict.unep.ch/actfrycleanup.htm

http://www.uni.edu/ihsmun/archive/sc2003/Safe%20Disposal%20of%20Depleted%20Uranium.htm
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news2001/nn11107.htm

First of all Jack, in matters of history it is frequently illustrative to look at timelines. The first nuclear test explosion (the Trinity test) was detonated on July 16th 1945. Ten days later, the Potsdam Declaration is issued by the allies formally calling for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese. Two days after that the Japanese reject the Potsdam Declaration. Nine days later the first atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.

As you can see, the weapon system was employed as soon as it became available -as all weapon systems are during time of war - against an opponent which had refused the terms of capitulation, and had used more and more desperate measures to stave off defeat. This should put to rest any notion that the United States dropped the bombs for reasons other than ending the war. Stalin was made aware of the existance of these weapons on July 24th at the Potsdam conference, and approved their use on Japan. The fact remains that the Japanese refused to surrender unconditionally before the dropping of the atomic bombs, and acquiesced after they were dropped.

As far as DU is concerned, I do not doubt that targets hit by DU are dangerous to humans and that picking up DU rounds and playing with them would be a bad idea. The claims that all of the deformed babies of Iraq are to be blamed on DU poisoning is overblown, however. Why don't you read the World Health Organization's fact sheet on DU? You'll find a lot less of the Chicken Little 'sky is falling' crap there.

http://www.health.fgov.be/WHI3/krant/krantarch2001/kranttekstjan1/010115m04who.htm

And you can call me all the names you want, Jack. They bounce right off.

I don't know if DU can explain all the malformations of Iraqi children, but with the sanction regime over the last ten years, there has not been a systemic effort to investigate this.

Also, the US formerly advocated the wide-spread usage of Agent Orange, saying it posed no health risks to our soldiers. That was later shown to be inaccurate & misleading. And that there was an effort to conceal the beforehand knowledge from the public.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/forum/1106746.stm

I'll leave verbal assaults to others. It's not my style and not part of my milieu.

Pvt. Fido: "Why is it that these nuclear wastelands are only reported in the fever swamps of lefty media? "

It only gets fevered and swampy when assholes like you show up....

Amazing. You actually didn't address my argument.

Yawn...... Japan didn't submit to unconditional surrender. The point is that we didn't want them to, at the time, submit to surrender with the conditions they were asking for (and for which we ultimately gave, a little fact of history you're not addressing).

Simpletons can't deal with cognitive dissonance.

I will leave you in your stew. Exchanges with you are not discussions.

1945 - The Decision to Drop the Bomb
http://www.nuclearfiles.org/chron/40/1945.html

Proclamation Calling for the Surrender of Japan, Approved by the Heads of Government of the United States, China and the United Kingdom
http://www.nuclearfiles.org/docs/1945/450726-potsdam.html

RALPH BARD:
AN ALTERNATIVE TO A-BOMBING JAPAN
http://www.doug-long.com/bard.htm

Jack, we called on them to surrender, they said no. Now what part of this don't you understand? All your dissembling and all your assigning of motives to the American side cannot wash these historical facts away. The timeline clearly shows what happened, and when. So go create another fairy tale.

Truman and others insisted on "unconditional surrender" being the specific wording. This was the only impediment Japan had towards surrender, which the US had communication in their hands stating as much.

The site of Hiroshima was selected not for military reasons, but because it represented a "pristine" area with which to evaluate the effectiveness of the bomb's destructive capacity. Simply put, it was one of the larger cities unsoiled by Allied bombing.

US defense admitted they knew Japan would have surrendered once Russia committed to attacking, as well. This was politicking on the highest scale, as both Potsdam attest to, hence the schism between US/UK & Soviet Union.

None of this defends Japan's atrocities in WWII. They were horrendous. But as the Atoll testing showed, we could have easily dropped the bomb (one or both) on the Japanese destroyers or carriers and delivered the same message: this is our weapon which we will use should you fail to surrender. Dropping it on heavily populated non-military targets, however, sends an entirely different message.

The Japanese and their apologists can quibble all they want - the allies had made it clear to the axis powers all along that they would accept nothing but unconditional surrender. They said so to the Italians, to the Germans, and to the Japanese.
Truman discussed the bomb with Stalin, and Stalin responded that he hoped we would use it against the Japanese as soon as possible.
The dropping of the bombs ended the war.

some perspectives from the white world.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
anticrisis

Comments from 'the White World'? Where the hell is that? Scandinavia?

Here's your boys:

William Blum left the State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer, because of his opposition to what the United States was doing in Vietnam.
He then became one of the founders and editors of the Washington Free Press, the first "alternative" newspaper in the capital.
• In 1969, he wrote and published an exposé of the CIA in which was revealed the names and addresses of more than 200 employees of the Agency.
• Mr. Blum has been a freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. His stay in Chile in 1972-3, writing about the Allende government's "socialist experiment" and its tragic overthrow in a CIA-designed coup, instilled in him a personal involvement and an even more heightened interest in what his government was doing in various parts of the world.
• In the mid-1970's, he worked in London with former CIA officer Philip Agee and his associates on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds.


Dr. Howard Zinn is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Boston University. An insightful social critic and acclaimed historian, he studies forces that have broken down community as well as obstacles confronting any genuine attempt to build or rebuild community.
He is the author of fourteen books, the most recent being You Can't Remain Neutral on a Moving Train (1994), a powerful memoir in which he relates his life and political activism from his moments as a civil rights chronicler and ally to his antiwar protests and teaching career. Throughout this book, Zinn shows that civil disobedience is necessary to combat society's wrongs.
Professor Zinn argues that it is the social responsibility of the historian to do work that will help solve the conflicts humans face. His well-known A People's History of the United States 1492- Present (Second Edition, 1995), which has sold more than 350,000 copies, tells American history from the point of view of the powerless and disenfranchised, those whose circumstances are usually omitted from history books.

What you meant to say was perspectives from the Left World.