Surveillance okay because “I’ve done nothing wrong” ─ think again

Standards must stand as agents manufacture “wrongs” as they manufactured WMDs

Excerpt, editing, brief commentary by Carolyn Bennett 

On grounds of “a self-certification” they believe serves the “national interest,” the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and the intelligence community in general focuses on getting intelligence” by any means possible.” Though originally tailored narrowly for foreign intelligence gathering overseas, the NSA increasingly focuses within the United States ─ specifically targeting communications of everyone.  [Edward Joseph Snowden]

Pretext
Manufactured evidence
Breach of civil liberties, human rights, law, ethics

BREAKDOWN USA

Insidious Creep

“The greatest fear I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change,” says American whistleblower Edward Joseph Snowden.

“People will see in the media all of these disclosures.  They’ll know the length that the government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally, to create greater control over American society and global society,” he said ─  “but they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.

“In the months ahead, in the years ahead it’s only going to get worse ─ until eventually there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy.”

(Remember that nineteenth-century slavery was protected under policy and state laws upheld by federal lawmakers until new laws were written, old laws were changed, guarantees in the U.S. Constitution upheld and progressive laws enforced.)

“Even our agreements with other sovereign governments we consider to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law,” Snowden said; “and because of that, a new leader will be elected and they will flip the switch; pronounce that ─

Edward Joseph Snowden

…because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat ─ we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. It will be turnkey tyranny. 

American technical contractor, whistleblower, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), Edward Joseph Snowden has released to The Guardian (UK) and The Washington Post (USA) classified material on top-secret NSA programs including the PRISM surveillance program.

Wikipedia note: Edward Joseph Snowden: Born: June 21, 1983; Elizabeth City, North Carolina, United States; Residence: Hawaii. Currently in Hong Kong; Nationality: United States; Occupation: System administrator; Employer: Booz Allen Hamilton; Known for PRISM whistleblower.

Robin Cook
a mysterious death

The Democracy Now program today aired an interview  Glenn Greenwald had over the weekend with Edward Snowden and the most poignant question/answer for me was addressed to the often-heard mantra: “I don’t care if the government watches or listens in on my private actions and conversations” because “I have nothing to hide” or “I’ve done nothing wrong.” This kind of response has always irritated and baffled me on several levels: whose whimsy defines “wrong”; societies exist as “societies” (diversities within a whole) by the protection of and adherence to law, human rights principles and conventions, and ordinary ethics. These standards exist and must exist so that all may live free, not as license for any agent or agency or individual or head of state to do whatever pleases them. The preservation of domestic and global society (a reasonable knitting or coexistence of varieties of us) depends on adherence to rules of relations enshrined in law, human rights principles and convention, ethical standards.

 As USA agents’ Iraqi “WMDs”

Surveillance manufactures “wrong”

U.S. against Iraq

In his response, Snowden addressed the consequence of what heads of state and rogue agents can and will do with a license to do whatever they want to do. Greenwald asked, “Why should people care about surveillance?” Snowden answered ─ 

…Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded. 

“Storage capability of these systems increases every year, consistently by orders of magnitude; and it is getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong.

Iraq U.S.
shocked and awed

“You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody ─ even by a wrong call (consider tribes, factions, groups, gangs, neighbors bent on revenge, my insert) ─

U.S. terrorizing Iraqis
into the future based onmanufactured evidence: 
Nonexistent WMDs

…and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive (develop, create, conjecture,  manufacture, my insert) suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

 Speaking about the release of information by Edward Joseph Snowden in the public interest, another American whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, is reported saying  ─ 

Daniel Ellsberg

…‘there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that includes the Pentagon Papers, for which I was responsible 40 years ago.’

Snowden has done an ‘incalculable’ service to his country. His leaks might prevent America from becoming a surveillance state.

A Der Spiegel magazine article reviewing Snowden’s action was titled ‘The New World-Improvers’ (‘Die Neuen Weltverbesserer’)

Edward Joseph Snowden

At the same time, the United States National Security Agency has asked the U. S. Department of Justice to conduct a criminal probe into Snowden’s actions. The U.S. Select Committee on Intelligence chair Mike Rogers said the whistleblower ‘should be prosecuted.’ Booz Allen Hamilton called Snowden’s actions ‘shocking’ and ‘a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm.’

Dragnet: reckless waste and abuse

“The NSA,” Snowden said in that interview with Greenwald, “specifically targets the communications of everyone.

It ingests them by default.

It collects them in its system, and it filters them, and it analyzes them, and it measures them, and it stores them for periods of time ─ simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends.  

(Valuable to whom, efficient for whom – to say they are doing something to combat crises they have also manufactured? My question)

While they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone that they suspect of ‘terrorism,’ they are collecting your communications to do so. 

Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere.

“Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities with which that analyst is empowered,” Snowden said. “Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But, sitting at my desk, I certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone ─ from you or your accountant to a federal judge, even to the president if I had a personal email.”

Sources and notes

“‘You’re Being Watched’: Edward Snowden Emerges as Source Behind Explosive Revelations of NSA Spying,” June 10, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/10/youre_being_watched_edward_snowden_emerges

Snowden has fled to Hong Kong, a special administrative region that falls within the sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China. Snowden has expressed hope of being granted asylum in Iceland. The U.S. Department of Justice has classified Snowden’s involvement in the PRISM surveillance program as a ‘criminal matter.’ Snowden fate remains unclear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden

See also at Democracy Now

“Glenn Greenwald on How NSA Leaker Edward Snowden Helped Expose a ‘Massive Surveillance Apparatus,’” June 10, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/10/glenn_greenwald_on_how_nsa_leaker

“‘On a Slippery Slope to a Totalitarian State’: NSA Whistleblower Rejects Gov’t Defense of Spying,” June 10, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/10/on_a_slippery_slope_to_a

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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Defend Constitution or license chains without Charter ─ NDAA problem

Executive Branch (Nixon-era) impeachable offenses: 

Repression at home Repression abroad

Re-reporting, editing by 

Carolyn Bennett 

I believe the balance between finality and justice has been properly strung. 

Personal liberty is too vital a thing to be subject to deprivation except in accordance with the highest possible standards of fairness and decency. 

The record of the federal judiciary in the area of criminal law enforcement both federal and state may be viewed as the most striking example of its greatest function: the protection of individual liberties against encroachments of government power.”  ─ Thurgood Marshall, rights lawyer and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice

U.S. democracy, a people mindlessly in agony

“There is a growing recognition,” activist Sara Flounders said, “that the U.S. government at every level is [doing] less and less for the people.” The government is involved in more and more cuts to domestic programs (every social program; privatizing schools, libraries, hospitals for private profit. “The combination of cutbacks and endless wars grows repression.”

The Congress of the United States is overwhelmingly, Flounders says, “an extension of the lobbying industry. It salutes the lobbying industry. [Lawmakers] know who pays the ticket, who has gotten them into office and to whom they are answerable ─ not to the average working person in the United States, but to big corporate power at every level: the major pharmaceutical industries and others.”

The there is no greater or more serious indication of growing repression in the United States than in the National Defense Authorization Act (the NDAA): the Executive and Legislative branches’ grave violations of  “civil rights and liberties.”  

Regress: assault on U.S. Constitution

As a law, Daniel Ellsberg said, the Defense Authorization Act “is unprecedented.” But in practice, he said, “It is a systematic assault on the Constitution of the United States in every aspect—in the aspects of illegal surveillance and in warrantless surveillance,” practices that 40 years ago, he recounted, factored into the impeachment of former U.S. President Richard Nixon.

 “As a former civilian official” in the 1970s, Ellsberg said, “I released 7,000 pages of top-secret documents demonstrating lies, crimes, treaty violations by the U.S. government that had lied us into a wrongful and hopeless war; [and in the course of that war, the government] was killing Americans and others in large numbers.” For releasing those documents, Ellsberg “was facing 115 years in prison” (just as Bradley Manning now faces life charges) based on “illegal surveillance, warrantless surveillance, the use of the CIA against me ─ now legalized under the USA PATRIOT Act; and a hit squad now allegedly legalized by the current president but which had  figured into impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.”

  

Writing at al Jazeera last August one of the plaintiffs in the case against the Obama administration said “The U.S. government seems determined to have the power to do away with due process and Americans’ right to a trial.”

 Executive and Judicial imbalance, conflict

“I am one of the lead plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit against the National Defense Authorization Act, which gives the president the power to hold any U.S. citizen anywhere for as long as he wants, without charge or trial,” Jennifer (Tangerine) Bolen reported. “In May, following a March hearing in which U.S. lawyers had said the president has the power to lock up journalists, war correspondents, peaceful activists and other plaintiffs indefinitely under the NDAA,  Judge Katherine Forrest [U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York] issued an injunction against the practice.”

At the time Bolen was writing, there was a final hearing in New York City in which “U.S. government lawyers essentially asserted even more extreme powers: the power to entirely disregard the judge and the law. Indeed,” Bolen wrote, “[President] Obama’s lawyers filed an appeal to the injunction, a profoundly important development” that was scarcely reported in the press.

Excessive Executive powers, unlawful, capricious action

The government also refused to define what it means to be an ‘associated force,’ and it claimed the right to refrain from offering any clear definition of this term, or clear boundaries of power under this law.

The hearing in August, Bolen said, “was even more terrifying” in that President Obama’s attorneys refused under questioning to assure the court that ─ after Judge Forrest’s injunction ─ the NDAA’s provision, one permitting detention without trial of reporters and others who have not committed crimes, had not been applied by the U.S. government anywhere in the world.

“In other words,” Bolen explained, the Executive Branch “was saying to a U.S. judge that they could not or would not state whether the Obama government had complied” with the court’s ruling. In response Judge Forrest said if the enjoined provision had been applied, “the United States government itself will be in contempt of court.”

Repression: at home, abroad

Domestic policy is foreign relations practice

Repression at home goes hand in hand with an ever-expanding military machine, Sara Flounders said. The very policies that are implemented around the world─

Secret prisons,

U.S. asserting 'rights' to invade, occupy other countries

To establish military bases around the world

To fire drone attacks on any country

To assassinate anyone [the U.S. government considers or declares] a threat even if they know nothing about the person or the town or the village that is being attacked.

All of that comes home, she said. “What happens internationally gets reflected domestically. The prison system domestically is what is carried abroad in attacks on people around the world.”

B

y early February, according to news sources, more than “60,000 emails” had been sent to the U.S. Congress calling for the reversal of section 1021 of the NDAA ─ notably its vague language that leaves many people including journalists, war correspondents, out-spoken activists in danger of harm, losing fundamental rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. 

Defend U.S. Constitution or 

license chains sans Charter

“We are trying to get people across the country to stand with us,” Tangerine Bolen said, “because this is the thin line between the last of our most fundamental civil liberties.” The National Defense Authorization Act “rolls back our rights” to the days before the Magna Carta.  “We have had due process for 800 years. It is fundamental,” she said.

M

agna Carta: Charter of English liberties granted under King John in 1215 and reissued with changes in 1216, 1217, 1225): Early in its history, Magna Carta became a symbol and a battle cry against oppression, each successive generation reading into it a protection of its own threatened liberties.

In England the Petition of Right (1628) and the Habeas Corpus Act (1679) looked directly back to clause 39 of the charter of 1215, which stated that ‘no free man shall be…imprisoned or disseised [dispossessed]…except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.’

 

In the United States, both the national and the state constitutions show ideas and phrases directly traceable to Magna Carta. But 

“

O

ur Constitution has been under assault, mostly covertly, for 10 years,” Daniel Ellsberg said this week on the Democracy Now program.

At first, they simply lied [about what] they were doing, said they weren’t torturing anybody, weren’t sending anybody to rendition; now they are openly proclaiming it.

They have laid down the … challenge to the American public as a whole

[And] the time has come to defend the Constitution and try to restore its guarantees to the American people.

Sources and notes

“U.S. turns ‘war on terror’ on Americans: Sara Flounders,” February 2, 2013,

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/02/02/286864/war-on-terror-now-hits-americans/

“Lawsuit filed against Obama over controversial NDAA program,” February 7, 2013,

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/02/07/287702/lawsuit-filed-against-obama-over-controversial-ndaa-program/

On December 31, 2011, President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA) a bill passed each year. Section 1021 of the bill provides sweeping powers of detention through vague and undefined terms Critics say it grants the government to arrest any American citizen (or anyone, anywhere) without warrant and to indefinitely detain them without any charge.

On October 2, 2012, a stay against the permanent injunction was granted by a three judge motions panel of the Second District U.S. Court of Appeals, pending appeal on the merits.

At the time of this article, according to reports, more than “60,000 emails” had been sent to the U.S. Congress calling for the reversal of section 1021 of the NDAA ─ notably its vague language that leaves many people including journalists, war correspondents, out-spoken activists in danger of harm, losing fundamental rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. 

“NY rally protests unconstitutionality of U.S. Defense Authorization Act,” February 7, 2013, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/02/07/287738/us-rally-slams-ndaa-as-unconstitutional/

“Daniel Ellsberg: NDAA Indefinite Detention Provision is Part of ‘Systematic Assault on Constitution’” Democracy Now reporting (interview), Tuesday, February 5, 2013,

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/5/daniel_ellsberg_ndaa_indefinite_detention_provision#transcript

“Justice Dept. Argues Appeal of NDAA Ruling” Democracy Now headlines February 7, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/7/headlines#272

“The ability of the U.S. government to jail people without charge or trial is back in court.

“A group of reporters, scholars and activists … are suing the Obama administration over the controversial provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, saying it could allow for the indefinite detention of journalists and others who interact with certain groups.

“On Wednesday, the Justice Department asked an appeals court to reverse a judge’s earlier decision blocking indefinite detention, saying the ruling would hamper its ability to fight terrorism.

“The Obama administration has already won an emergency freeze of the ruling while the case is appealed. Plaintiffs Tangerine Bolen and Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon whistleblower, spoke outside the courthouse on Wednesday.”

“Due process under duress: Detaining citizens under NDAA ─ Activists retaliate against the U.S. government by suing them for signing a bill they say goes against the Constitution,  Jennifer (Tangerine) Bolen at, Al Jazeera August 23, 2012, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/profile/tangerine-bolen.html

Tangerine Bolen

Jennifer (Tangerine) Bolen is the founder and Executive Director of RevolutionTruth, an organization dedicated to restoring legitimate democracies in part through increasing access to accurate information. Bolen has background in integrative medicine and holds a Master’s degree in Public Health and Policy. She has also completed core coursework for a doctorate in public affairs and governance.

Sara Flounders

Co-Director of the International Action Center, an organization opposing U.S. militarism, corporate globalization, racism and war, Sara Flounders currently works with the Troops Out Now Coalition.

The IAC helped to form the broad-based U.S. anti-war coalitions that coordinated the major anti-war demonstrations that drew hundreds of thousands of people into the streets in 2003 before the U.S. invasion of Iraq and in the years of occupation.

Flounders has represented the IAC while speaking on numerous campus and community forums in the United States, Canada, England, Japan, Greece, Cuba, Egypt, Jordan and other countries; and has been interviewed by many national and international print and broadcast media outlets.

She has traveled to Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sudan and Colombia when these countries were under U.S. attack and to Palestine twice during the current Intifada. In 1992, Flounders coordinated the International War Crimes Tribunal on U.S. War Crimes in Iraq, which held mass hearings in 30 U.S. cities and 20 countries. She coordinated research and helped to edit Ramsey Clark’s groundbreaking 1992 book, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf.

To expose the use of sanctions as a weapon of mass destruction, Sara Flounders edited and co-authored two books: The Children Are Dying - The Impact of Sanctions on Iraq (1996, Second Edition, 1998) and Challenge to Genocide: Let Iraq Live (1998). She helped produce the videos: “Blockade - The Silent War against Iraq” (1994), “Genocide by Sanctions” (1998, award winner) and “Let Iraq Live” (1998). As a coordinator of the Iraq Sanctions Challenge, she organized large delegations of activists to visit Iraq each year in a challenge to the U.S. sanctions laws and has brought tons of medicine to the Iraqi people on each of these trips.

The International Action Center (IAC), initiated by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, combines grassroots activism with mass mobilizations and protest activities. Its educational work includes producing fact sheets and press releases, publishing books, producing documentary videos and maintaining a website. http://www.iacenter.org/flounders.htm

Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg (b. April 7, 1931) is a former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released to The New York Times and other newspapers the “Pentagon Papers,” a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making related to the Vietnam War.

RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development) is a nonprofit global policy think tank originally formed by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. It is currently financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations, including the healthcare industry, universities and private individuals.

This organization’s work reaches farther in working with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations on a variety of non-defense issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation

Since the end of the Vietnam War, “Ellsberg has been a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing.”

Ellsberg’s latest books are Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002) and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). In 2006 recognized “for putting peace and truth first at considerable personal risk and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example,” he was awarded a Right Livelihood Award.

See Ellsberg’s bio continued at Today’s Insight News, Tuesday, August 7, 2012

“Americans’ Hiroshima: wrong is right, a ‘dangerous state of mind’”

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg

http://www.ellsberg.net/bio

http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/hiroshima-day-america-has-been-asleep-at-the-wheel-for-64-years

Magna Carta

Charter of English liberties granted under King John in 1215 and reissued with changes in 1216, 1217, 1225): Early in its history, Magna Carta became a symbol and a battle cry against oppression, each successive generation reading into it a protection of its own threatened liberties.

In England the Petition of Right (1628) and the Habeas Corpus Act (1679) looked directly back to clause 39 of the charter of 1215, which stated that ‘no free man shall be…imprisoned or disseised [dispossessed]…except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.’

In the United States, both the national and the state constitutions show ideas and phrases directly traceable to Magna Carta. [Britannica note]

Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993), Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court (October 1967 - October 1991. The High Court’s 96th justice, its first African-American justice. (Wikipedia note, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurgood_Marshall)

Quote and image, http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2008/jul/08/naacp-historical-audio-files/

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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Americans’ Hiroshima: wrong is right, a “dangerous state of mind”

The Trinity test
Image at Wikipedia

Only the people of the United States believe this country won a war by bombing ─ with weapons of mass destruction ─ cities, children, the defenseless, the nonthreatening. Only Americans believe, Daniel Ellsberg writes, that the bombing of Hiroshima and other places in Japan “was fully rightful.”
Editing by Carolyn Bennett

Death Toll Hiroshima, Nagasaki

The real mortality of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan will never be known. The destruction and overwhelming chaos made orderly counting impossible. Estimates of killed and wounded in Hiroshima (150,000) and Nagasaki (75,000) are likely overly conservative.

Members of a survey team divided the morbidity and mortality into these phases:

Very large numbers of people were crushed in their homes and in the buildings in which they were working. Their skeletons could be seen in the debris and ashes for almost 1,500 meters from the center of the blast, particularly in the downwind directions. 

Large numbers of the population walked for considerable distances after the detonation before they collapsed and died. 

Large numbers developed vomiting and bloody and watery diarrhea (vomitus and bloody feces were found on the floor in many of the aid stations) associated with extreme weakness. They died in the first and second weeks after the bombs were dropped. 

During this same period deaths from internal injuries and from burns were common. Either the heat from the fires or infrared radiation from the detonations caused many burns, particularly on bare skin or under dark clothing. 

After a lull, without peak mortality from any special causes, deaths began to occur from purpura (Any of several hemorrhagic states characterized by patches of purplish discoloration resulting from forcing out or escape of blood into the skin and mucous membranes), which was often associated with epilation (hair loss), anemia, and a yellowish coloration of the skin. The so-called bone marrow syndrome, manifested by a low white blood cell count and almost complete absence of the platelets necessary to prevent bleeding, was probably at its maximum between the fourth and sixth weeks after the bombs were dropped. [From Children of the Atomic Bomb]

Ellsberg’s comments 

In his 2009 article “Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years,” former RAND and Defense Department staffer and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg wrote: “Before that day (August 6, 1945) perhaps no one in the public outside our class—no one else outside the Manhattan Project (and very few inside it)—had spent a week, as we had, or even a day thinking about the impact of such a weapon on the long-run prospects for humanity.”  

The Manhattan Project was a research and development program by the United States with the United Kingdom and Canada that produced the first atomic bomb. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites, some secret, across the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.  

Two types of atomic bomb were developed during the war. A relatively simple gun-type fission weapon was made using uranium-235, an isotope that makes up only 0.7 percent of natural uranium. Parallel with the work on uranium was an effort to produce plutonium. Reactors were constructed at Hanford, Washington, in which uranium was irradiated and transmuted into plutonium.  

The first nuclear device ever detonated was an implosion-type bomb at the Trinity test conducted at New Mexico’s Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on July 16, 1945. Little Boy, a gun-type weapon, and the implosion-type Fat Man, respectively, were used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

The Manhattan Project is said to have begun modestly in 1939 and grew to employ more than 130,000 people, at a cost of nearly $2 billion (in 2012, roughly equivalent to $25.8 billion). More than 90 percent of the cost went to building factories and producing fissionable materials, less than 10 percent for development and production of the weapons.

Atomic Attack Death Toll
Children of the Atomic Bomb

Insider’s clear-sightedness 

Ellsberg continued. “We were set apart from our fellow Americans in another important way.  

“Perhaps no others outside the project or our class ever had occasion to think about the Bomb without the strongly biasing positive associations that accompanied their first awareness in August 1945 of its very possibility: that it was ‘our’ weapon, an instrument of American democracy developed to deter a Nazi Bomb, pursued by two presidents, a war-winning weapon and a necessary one—so it was claimed, and almost universally believed—to end the war without a costly invasion of Japan.  

“Unlike nearly all the others who started thinking about the new nuclear era after August 6, 1945, our attitudes of the previous fall had not been shaped or warped by the claim and appearance that such a weapon had just won a war for the forces of justice, a feat that supposedly would otherwise have cost a million American lives (and as many or more Japanese).”  

Outsiders’ delusion then and now 

“For nearly all other Americans, whatever dread they may have felt about the long-run future of the Bomb (and there was more expression of this in elite media than most people remembered later) was offset at the time and ever afterward by a powerful aura of its legitimacy and its almost miraculous potential for good which had already been realized.  

“For a great many Americans, still, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are regarded, above all, with gratitude, for having saved their own lives or the lives of their husbands, brothers, fathers or grandfathers, which would otherwise have been at risk in the invasion of Japan.  

“For these Americans and many others, the Bomb was not so much an instrument of massacre as a kind of savior, a protector of precious lives.” 

Delusion makes wrong right 

“Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective—as constituting a just means; in effect, just terrorism under the supposed circumstances─ thus legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day massacres in history.  

The largest (also by the U.S. Army Air Corps) was the firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, 1945, which burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians.  

Most of the very few Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate in wartime. 

Ellsberg concludes: “To regard those acts as other than criminal and immoral, as most Americans do, is to believe that anything—anything—can be legitimate … if done by Americans on the order of a president, during wartime.  

“We are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction—and believes that it was fully rightful in doing so.”  

This, Ellsberg says, “is a dangerous state of mind.”

Sources and notes

DANIEL ELLSBERG

Daniel Ellsberg (b. April 7, 1931) is a former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released to The New York Times and other newspapers the “Pentagon Papers,” a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making related to the Vietnam War.  

RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development) is a nonprofit global policy think tank originally formed by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. It is currently financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations, including the healthcare industry, universities and private individuals. 

This organization’s work reaches farther in working with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations on a variety of non-defense issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation 

Since the end of the Vietnam War, “Ellsberg has been a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing.” 

Ellsberg’s latest books are Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002) and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). In 2006 recognized “for putting peace and truth first at considerable personal risk and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example,” he was awarded a Right Livelihood Award. 

In 1959, Ellsberg was a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation and consultant to the U.S. Defense Department and White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making.  

In 1961 he drafted the guidance from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the operational plans for general nuclear war. He was a member of two of the three working groups reporting to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOM) during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. 

Ellsberg moved to the U.S. Defense Department in 1964 as Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) John McNaughton, working on the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evaluating pacification in the field. 

In 1967, he returned to the RAND Corporation and worked on the top secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam (1945-68), which later came to be known as the “Pentagon Papers.” 

In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and in 1971, he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. His trial on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him.” 

 “Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years” (Ellsberg.Net) August 6, 2009, http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/hiroshima-day-america-has-been-asleep-at-the-wheel-for-64-years

Ellsberg bio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
http://www.ellsberg.net/bio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

Wikipedia image The Manhattan Project created the first nuclear bombs. The Trinity test is shown.

Image Atomic Attack Death Toll, http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/cab/200708230009.html

From Children of the Atomic Bomb, a research website project developed by Dr. James N. Yamazaki, UCLA professor emeritus of pediatrics, together with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center

Death Toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The mortality was greater in Hiroshima because the city was located in a flat delta, in contrast to Nagasaki’s Urakami Valley (northern part of the city). The Nagasaki-Urakami is enclosed by mountain ridges that shielded the city.

The real mortality of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan will never be known. The destruction and overwhelming chaos made orderly counting impossible. The estimates of killed and wounded in Hiroshima (150,000) and Nagasaki (75,000) are likely overly conservative.

At no time during the period between 1943 and 1946 were facilities allotted or time provided for the Medical Section of the Manhattan Engineer District to prepare a comprehensive history of its activities. Regulations forbade taking notes. Official records were scanty. There were few charts and photographs. 

Members of the survey team (from their own observations and from testimony of Japanese) divided the morbidity and mortality of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan into the following phases:  

Very large numbers of people were crushed in their homes and in the buildings in which they were working. Their skeletons could be seen in the debris and ashes for almost 1,500 meters from the center of the blast, particularly in the downwind directions. 

Large numbers of the population walked for considerable distances after the detonation before they collapsed and died. 

Large numbers developed vomiting and bloody and watery diarrhea (vomitus and bloody feces were found on the floor in many of the aid stations) associated with extreme weakness. They died in the first and second weeks after the bombs were dropped. 

During this same period deaths from internal injuries and from burns were common. Either the heat from the fires or infrared radiation from the detonations caused many burns, particularly on bare skin or under dark clothing. 

After a lull, without peak mortality from any special causes, deaths began to occur from purpura (Any of several hemorrhagic states characterized by patches of purplish discoloration resulting from forcing out or escape of blood into the skin and mucous membranes), which was often associated with epilation (hair loss), anemia, and a yellowish coloration of the skin. The so-called bone marrow syndrome, manifested by a low white blood cell count and almost complete absence of the platelets necessary to prevent bleeding, was probably at its maximum between the fourth and sixth weeks after the bombs were dropped, http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/cab/200706100001.html

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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When entrenched press, government fail democracies —

Insiders must whistle
Excerpting, re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

We need more whistleblowers from within.

Their truth telling

to outside authorities and audiences

is essential

— 1969 Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg —

“Secret U.S. Embassy Cables” released

“Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into U.S. Government foreign activities.

“The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year (2010), contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the U.S State Department in Washington DC. Fifteen thousand six hundred and fifty-two (15,652) of the cables are classified Secret.

“The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice. The cables show the extent of U.S. —

Spying on its allies and the UN;
Turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in "client states";
Backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries;
Lobbying for U.S. corporations; and
Measures U.S. diplomats take to advance those who have access to them

“This document release reveals the contradictions between the United States’ public persona and what it says behind closed doors — and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.

“Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington — the country’s first President – could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the U.S. Government has been warning governments — even the most corrupt — around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.

“The full set consists of 251,287 documents, comprising 261,276,536 words (seven times the size of ‘The Iraq War Logs,’ the world’s previously largest classified information release).

“The cables cover from 28th December 1966 to 28th February 2010 and originate from 274 embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions.

“When the Leaders Are the Problem,” Daniel Ellsberg writes  —

“Above all, we need more whistleblowers from within. Their truth telling to outside authorities and audiences is essential. And the only way to get it—since dangers to their own careers in their organizations cannot be eliminated—is to somehow encourage them to accept those risks, for the benefit of others.

“Is that asking the impossible?
 “Difficult, unusual, unlikely, yes. Yet it is humanly possible and essential.

“Humans have the capability for great concern, altruism, and even self-sacrifice in the interest of others outside their immediate families and teams, and they very often show it; only not often enough, indeed quite rarely, in their official roles within organizations.

“Unfortunately, as human beings, we also all have the capability of being selective in our concern, and of being manipulated in our selectivity of concern by our leaders and colleagues in our groups.

“A major reason for the occurrence of disasters is that, as humans, we often choose keeping our job, protecting our reputation, getting promoted, maintaining our access to inside information, getting reelected, assuring college education for our children, preserving our marriage, and holding on to our house in a nice neighborhood—all considerations that are neither trivial nor discreditable for any of us— over actions, including truth telling to the public, that would risk some of these but which could potentially save vast numbers of other people’s lives.”

“… When I released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, former senator Wayne Morse told me that if I had given him those documents at the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964 (when I had many of them in my office safe in the Pentagon), “The Resolution would never have gotten out of committee. And if it had been brought to a vote, it would never have passed.” That’s a heavy burden to bear. But scores of other officials, perhaps a hundred, could have given those documents to the Senate as well as I.

“…More recently, any one of a hundred people within the government could have averted the Iraq War by telling the public—with documents—what they knew about the lies the president was feeding the public. Yet no one did.

“When confronted with potential looming catastrophes, people within large organizations often think, ‘Somebody else will take care of this. Surely, the top people know more than I do. It is their job to take care of it, and surely they will.’ The truth is, there is no likelihood at all that the leaders will take care of it.

“In the years since the Iraq War first approached (and more recently, equally disastrous prospects of attack on Iran), I have been urging patriotic and conscientious insiders, who may be in the situation I once was in — holding secret, official knowledge of lies, crimes, and dangers of impending, wrongful, catastrophic wars or escalations — to do what I wish I had done in 1964 or early 1965, years earlier than I did: ‘Go to Congress and the press and reveal the truth, with documents.’ The personal risks are real, but a war’s-worth of lives might be saved.”

“… From my own experience in government, and in my study of national security policy catastrophes in the decades since, I have come to believe that the most dangerous practices in the national security realm reflect priorities, in general, that are set by top officials: getting reelected, avoiding condemnation for past actions, or other political or bureaucratic objectives. Those priorities generally take great precedence over safety or preventing public harm.

“… The behavior of the people down below in the hierarchy is generally responsive to those priorities, because the way for them to keep their jobs and get ahead is self-evidently to conform to the priorities of their superiors, and especially the top boss. … What those superiors often want is help in avoiding or concealing documentation of warnings or recommendations that might convict them, on later examination, of self-interest or recklessness in choosing or continuing policies that failed.…

“… We need more whistleblowers from within. Their truth telling to outside authorities and audiences is essential. And the only way to get it—since dangers to their own careers in their organizations cannot be eliminated—is to somehow encourage them to accept those risks, for the benefit of others.

Sources and notes

Cable gate, http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/

“When the Leaders Are the Problem,” (Michael Ellsberg) July 14, 2009, Daniel Ellsberg’s Afterword to Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents Are Rarely Accidental (Marc Gerstein with Michael Ellsberg), http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/when-the-leaders-are-the-problem

Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg was a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation in 1959 and consultant to the U.S. Defense Department and White House specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making. In 1961, he drafted the guidance from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on operational plans for general nuclear war. He was a member of two of the three working groups reporting to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOM) during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Ellsberg joined the U.S. Defense Department in 1964 as Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) John McNaughton, working on the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evaluating pacification in the field.

Returning to RAND in 1967, Ellsberg worked on the top-secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; in 1971, he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers.

His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, which led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against 327th U.S. President Richard M. Nixon.

Daniel Ellsberg is the author of Papers on the War (1971); Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002); and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). In December 2006, he was awarded a Right Livelihood Award in Stockholm, Sweden, the citation “… for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example.”

Daniel Ellsberg was born in Chicago in 1931, graduated from Harvard (1952) with a B.A. in Economics and later studied at King’s College, Cambridge University. In the years 1954 -1957, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps. http://www.ellsberg.net/bio

See also

“U.S. Facing Global Diplomatic Crisis Following Massive WikiLeaks Release of Secret Diplomatic Cables,” November 29, 2010, Guests: Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower; Carne Ross, a British diplomat for 15 years who resigned before the Iraq war, founder and head of a non-profit diplomatic advisory group, Independent Diplomat; Greg Mitchell, writer of the Media Fix blog for The Nation, longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine, author of 10 books including The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics; As’ad Abu Khalil, professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley, author of The Battle for Saudi Arabia, and writer at the Angry Arab News Service blog, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/29/us_facing_global_diplomatic_crisis_following

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Bennett's books available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY]; LONGS’ Cards and Books: http://longscardsandbooks.com/ [Penn Yan, NY]