Hiroshima Bombing Pilot - Dead at 92

http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2007/11/02/1193619145412.html

The Japs wanted an apology from Tibbets.
He did the right thing; he was a great hero.
He did nothing for which to apologize.

I wonder whether the Japs apologized for Pearl Harbor.

David

http://www.oilempire.us/warcrime.html

"We have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride, and our arrogance as a nation."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr., March 1968

"The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them. "
-- Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter

aniel and the rest of the world would not find out until months later why the dead had vanished. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them alive and firing their weapons from World War I-style trenches, were buried by plows mounted on Abrams main battle tanks. The Abrams flanked the trench lines so that tons of sand from the plow spoil funneled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, actually straddling the trench line, came M2 Bradleys pumping 7.62mm machine gun bullets into the Iraqi troops. ...

One reason there was no trace of what happened in the Neutral Zone on those two days were the ACEs. It stands for Armored Combat Earth movers and they came behind the armored burial brigade leveling the ground and smoothing away projecting Iraqi arms, legs and equipment.

PFC Joe Queen of the 1st Engineers was impervious to small arms fire inside the cockpit of the massive earth mover. He remained cool and professional as he smoothed away all signs of the carnage. Queen won the Bronze Star for his efforts. "A lot of guys were scared," Queen said, "but I enjoyed it." Col. Moreno estimated more than 70 miles of trenches and earthen bunkers were attacked, filled in and smoothed over on Feb. 24-25.

...

So when the air war began in January 1991, the media was fed carefully selected footage by Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia and Powell in Washington, DC. Most of it was downright misleading.

Briefings by Schwarzkopf and other military officers mostly featured laser guided or television guided missiles and bombs. But of all the tons of high explosives dropped during more than a month of night and day air attacks, only 6 percent were smart bombs. The vast majority were controlled by gravity, usually dropped from above 15,000 feet - 35,000 feet for U.S. heavy bombers - where winds can dramatically affect accuracy. And there never was any footage of B-52 bomber strikes that carpeted Iraqi troop positions.

Just as distorted were Schwarzkopf's claims of destruction of Iraqi Scud missiles. After the war, studies by Army and Pentagon think tanks could not identify a single successful interception of a Scud warhead by the U.S. Army's Patriot antimissile system.

http://www.oilempire.us/warcrime.html

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

" Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies.

Certainly, there are other local, regional, national and international factors in many of these operations, but if the CIA were tried fairly in a U.S. court, under U.S. law, the principle of complicity, incitement, riot, and mayhem would clearly apply. In the United States, if you hire someone to commit a murder your sentence may be approximately the same as that of the murderer himself.

Who are these six million people we have killed in the interest of American national security? Conservatives tell us, "It's a dangerous world. Our enemies have to die so we can be safe and secure." Some of them say, "I'm sorry, but that's the way the world is. We have to accept this reality and defend ourselves, to make our nation safe and insure our way of life."

Since 1954, however, we have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union - our number one enemy - to destabilize that country... Neither do we run these violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World countries where governments do not have the power to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns.

One might call this the "Third World War." It is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. Others call it the Cold War and focus on the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rationales, but the dead are not Soviets; they are people of the Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. Altogether, perhaps twenty million people died in the Cold War. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II.

The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.
Communists? Hardly, since the dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of the United States? That description doesn't fit either, because the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed to murder people and wreck the country."
John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Truth_Commissions/Truth_Commission_page.html

"I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side."
-- US General Curtis LeMay, commander of the 1945 Tokyo fire bombing operation.

Just one more war criminal who escaped justice. May he rest in Hell for eternity.

And on and on it goes.

Quote:

http://www.oilempire.us/warcrime.html

"We have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride, and our arrogance as a nation."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr., March 1968

"The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them. "
-- Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter

aniel and the rest of the world would not find out until months later why the dead had vanished. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them alive and firing their weapons from World War I-style trenches, were buried by plows mounted on Abrams main battle tanks. The Abrams flanked the trench lines so that tons of sand from the plow spoil funneled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, actually straddling the trench line, came M2 Bradleys pumping 7.62mm machine gun bullets into the Iraqi troops. ...

One reason there was no trace of what happened in the Neutral Zone on those two days were the ACEs. It stands for Armored Combat Earth movers and they came behind the armored burial brigade leveling the ground and smoothing away projecting Iraqi arms, legs and equipment.

PFC Joe Queen of the 1st Engineers was impervious to small arms fire inside the cockpit of the massive earth mover. He remained cool and professional as he smoothed away all signs of the carnage. Queen won the Bronze Star for his efforts. "A lot of guys were scared," Queen said, "but I enjoyed it." Col. Moreno estimated more than 70 miles of trenches and earthen bunkers were attacked, filled in and smoothed over on Feb. 24-25.

...

So when the air war began in January 1991, the media was fed carefully selected footage by Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia and Powell in Washington, DC. Most of it was downright misleading.

Briefings by Schwarzkopf and other military officers mostly featured laser guided or television guided missiles and bombs. But of all the tons of high explosives dropped during more than a month of night and day air attacks, only 6 percent were smart bombs. The vast majority were controlled by gravity, usually dropped from above 15,000 feet - 35,000 feet for U.S. heavy bombers - where winds can dramatically affect accuracy. And there never was any footage of B-52 bomber strikes that carpeted Iraqi troop positions.

Just as distorted were Schwarzkopf's claims of destruction of Iraqi Scud missiles. After the war, studies by Army and Pentagon think tanks could not identify a single successful interception of a Scud warhead by the U.S. Army's Patriot antimissile system.

http://www.oilempire.us/warcrime.html

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

" Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies.

Certainly, there are other local, regional, national and international factors in many of these operations, but if the CIA were tried fairly in a U.S. court, under U.S. law, the principle of complicity, incitement, riot, and mayhem would clearly apply. In the United States, if you hire someone to commit a murder your sentence may be approximately the same as that of the murderer himself.

Who are these six million people we have killed in the interest of American national security? Conservatives tell us, "It's a dangerous world. Our enemies have to die so we can be safe and secure." Some of them say, "I'm sorry, but that's the way the world is. We have to accept this reality and defend ourselves, to make our nation safe and insure our way of life."

Since 1954, however, we have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union - our number one enemy - to destabilize that country... Neither do we run these violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World countries where governments do not have the power to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns.

One might call this the "Third World War." It is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. Others call it the Cold War and focus on the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rationales, but the dead are not Soviets; they are people of the Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. Altogether, perhaps twenty million people died in the Cold War. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II.

The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.
Communists? Hardly, since the dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of the United States? That description doesn't fit either, because the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed to murder people and wreck the country."
John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Truth_Commissions/Truth_Commission_page.html

This is very unJapanese, in that SURELY the only reason that the Japs
did not nuke us first is that it was impossible; thay wud have if thay cud have.


We did the right thing, and the only logical thing.
In the same circumstances, we 'd be proud to do it again.
Any contrary decision wud be an act of treason.

David

OmSigDAVID wrote:

This is very unJapanese, in that SURELY the only reason that the Japs
did not nuke us first is that it was impossible; thay wud have if thay cud have.


We did the right thing, and the only logical thing.
In the same circumstances, we 'd be proud to do it again.
Any contrary decision wud be an act of treason.

David

Quote:

What war crimes someone else might POSSIBLY engage in

We did not nuke Japan out of fear that it possibly had a nuclear capability.
We nuked it to obviate a painfully expensive infantry invasion,
in terms of American casualties.
Truman owed loyalty to American troops, not to the Japs.

Quote:

doesn't, in any manner, absolve those from the USA of the war crimes
that they have perpetrated upon various peoples of this globe.

Let 's do one thing at a time,
one war at a time; forget about the " various peoples ".
We r discussing the Japs.
Our nuclear attacks were not " war crimes ";
if we had gone in and began raping the women ( like the Russians did )
THAT wud have been a " war crime ".
An example of a " war crime " is the rape of Nanking in 1937;
remember that one ?

Quote:

You sure have a strong aversion to facts, don't you?

Yes, I don 't ; what facts ??

OmSigDAVID wrote:

This is very unJapanese, in that SURELY the only reason that the Japs
did not nuke us first is that it was impossible; thay wud have if thay cud have.


We did the right thing, and the only logical thing.
In the same circumstances, we 'd be proud to do it again.
Any contrary decision wud be an act of treason.

David

What war crimes someone else might POSSIBLY engage in doesn't, in any manner, absolve those from the USA of the war crimes that they have perpetrated upon various peoples of this globe.

You sure have a strong aversion to facts, don't you?

"I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side."
-- US General Curtis LeMay, commander of the 1945 Tokyo fire bombing operation.

Just one more war criminal who escaped justice.

May he rest in Hell for eternity.

Quote:

"We have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride, and our arrogance as a nation."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr., March 1968

Quote:

aniel and the rest of the world would not find out until months later why the dead had vanished. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them alive and firing their weapons from World War I-style trenches, were buried by plows mounted on Abrams main battle tanks. The Abrams flanked the trench lines so that tons of sand from the plow spoil funneled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, actually straddling the trench line, came M2 Bradleys pumping 7.62mm machine gun bullets into the Iraqi troops. ...

One reason there was no trace of what happened in the Neutral Zone on those two days were the ACEs. It stands for Armored Combat Earth movers and they came behind the armored burial brigade leveling the ground and smoothing away projecting Iraqi arms, legs and equipment.

PFC Joe Queen of the 1st Engineers was impervious to small arms fire inside the cockpit of the massive earth mover. He remained cool and professional as he smoothed away all signs of the carnage. Queen won the Bronze Star for his efforts. "A lot of guys were scared," Queen said, "but I enjoyed it." Col. Moreno estimated more than 70 miles of trenches and earthen bunkers were attacked, filled in and smoothed over on Feb. 24-25.

Quote:

So when the air war began in January 1991, the media was fed carefully selected footage by Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia and Powell in Washington, DC. Most of it was downright misleading.

Briefings by Schwarzkopf and other military officers mostly featured laser guided or television guided missiles and bombs. But of all the tons of high explosives dropped during more than a month of night and day air attacks, only 6 percent were smart bombs. The vast majority were controlled by gravity, usually dropped from above 15,000 feet - 35,000 feet for U.S. heavy bombers - where winds can dramatically affect accuracy. And there never was any footage of B-52 bomber strikes that carpeted Iraqi troop positions.

Quote:

Just as distorted were Schwarzkopf's claims of destruction of Iraqi Scud missiles. After the war, studies by Army and Pentagon think tanks could not identify a single successful interception of a Scud warhead by the U.S. Army's Patriot antimissile system.

http://www.oilempire.us/warcrime.html

OmSigDAVID wrote:

This is very unJapanese, in that SURELY the only reason that the Japs
did not nuke us first is that it was impossible; thay wud have if thay cud have.


We did the right thing, and the only logical thing.
In the same circumstances, we 'd be proud to do it again.
Any contrary decision wud be an act of treason.

David

What war crimes someone else might POSSIBLY engage in doesn't, in any manner, absolve those from the USA of the war crimes that they have perpetrated upon various peoples of this globe.

You sure have a strong aversion to facts, don't you?

You are SURE that is the reason for the bombing?

By the way, if anyone wonders at my current avatar, it is the painting on the side of the bomber that took care of Nagasaki:

http://www.airventure.de/noseartpics/Noseart_Dayton_Bockscar.jpg

Intrepid wrote:

You are SURE that is the reason for the bombing?

The reason for the bombings was to make Japan surrender.

The reason there was a war was because Japan was a genocidal rampage.

So, yes.

You are SURE that is the reason for the bombing?