HUMAN WRONGS WATCH

Human Wrongs Watch

By Amy Goodman and David Goodman – Common Dreams*

3 August 2015 

“Governments lie.”
— I. F. Stone, Journalist

August 10, 2004 – At the dawn of the nuclear age, an independent Australian journalist named Wilfred Burchett traveled to Japan to cover the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The only problem was that General Douglas MacArthur had declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press.

An allied correspondent stands in a sea of rubble before the shell of a building in Hiroshima September 8, 1945, a month after the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare was dropped by the US. (AP Photo/Stanley Troutman) | Source: CommonDreams

Over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story.

The world’s media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese.

“I turned around and saw the outside world. Although it was morning, it looked like twilight because of the dust and smoke in the air. People at a distance saw the mushroom cloud and heard a thunderous roar. But I did not see the cloud because I was in it. I did not hear the roar, just the deadly silence broken only by the groans of the injured.

Streams of stunned people were slowly shuffling from the city centre toward nearby hills. They were naked or tattered, burned, blackened and swollen.

Eyes were swollen shut and some had eyeballs hanging out of their sockets.

They were bleeding, ghostly figures like a slow-motion image from an old silent movie. Many held their hands above the level of their hearts to lessen the throbbing pain of their burns.

Strips of skin and flesh hung like ribbons from their bones.

Often these ghostly figures would collapse in heaps never to rise again.

With a few surviving classmates I joined the procession carefully stepping over the dead and dying.”

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Human Wrongs Watch

By Gary G. Kohls, MD*

4 August 2015

70 years ago (August 9, 1945) an all-Christian bomber crew dropped a plutonium bomb over Nagasaki City,

“An irradiated crucifix lies in the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral Following the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki” | Source of photo: Dr Gary G. Kohls

Japan, instantly vaporizing, incinerating or otherwise annihilating tens of thousands of innocent civilians, a disproportionately large number of them Japanese Christians.