The forgotten anniversary: Nagasaki

Mark McDonald:

On Thursday, several thousand people attended a ceremony marking the 67th anniversary of the atomic destruction of Nagasaki during World War II. A single plutonium device, nicknamed Fat Man, almost instantly killed some 70,000 people. Countless others would later succumb to radiation illness and collateral diseases.

Three days earlier, Little Boy, a uranium bomb, had killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima. That city’s annual memorial was held on Monday.
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The survivors — known in Japan as hibakusha — sometimes told their stories with tears streaming down their faces, even six decades later. Robert Jay Lifton also wrote about the post-traumatic stress of the hibakusha in “Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima.”

When recounting their stories, he said, the survivors were “unable to remain open to experience of this intensity for any length of time.”

“Very quickly — sometimes within minutes or even seconds — hibakusha began to undergo a process of ‘psychic closing-off’; that is, they simply ceased to feel.”

Mr. Lifton tells of a Hiroshima grocer watching stunned survivors trudging down a road right after the blast, their skin blackened, their hair burned off, “like walking ghosts” who “didn’t look like people of this world.” A history professor told of seeing “blue phosphorescent flames rising from the dead bodies — and there were plenty of them.”

Even in today’s articles about the bombing of Nagasaki, there’s a focus on Hiroshima. Nagasaki feels that its suffering has been forgotten.

Obama Admin. asserts right to impunity

Tangerine Bolen, The Guardian (reprinted from The Daily Cloudt):

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 US citizen anywhere for as long as he wants, without charge or trial.

In a May hearing, Judge Katherine Forrest issued an injunction against it; this week, in a final hearing in New York City, US government lawyers asserted even more extreme powers – the right to disregard entirely the judge and the law.
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In the earlier March hearing, US government lawyers had confirmed that, yes, the NDAA does give the president the power to lock up people like journalist Chris Hedges and peaceful activists like myself and other plaintiffs. Government attorneys stated on record that even war correspondents could be locked up indefinitely under the NDAA.
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twice the government has 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.
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Obama’s attorneys refused to assure the court, when questioned, that the NDAA’s section 1021 – the provision that permits reporters and others who have not committed crimes to be detained without trial – has not been applied by the US government anywhere in the world after Judge Forrest’s injunction. In other words, they were telling a US federal judge that they could not, or would not, state whether Obama’s government had complied with the legal injunction that she had laid down before them.

I’m with Hedges et al. on this one. The powers claimed in the NDAA are so vague and sweeping that they cannot be considered law. If, as claimed by Bolen, the Administration is refusing to admit that it has to comply with a court order, then it is acting lawlessly.

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