Cover-up of Original Atomic Bomb Effects in New York Times Rings True Today

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Dear friends,

 

The below article is an excellent example of how the New York Times, one of the

most respected newspapers in the world, has twisted the facts and manipulated

public opinion in order to support a deeper agenda. This revealing story covers

the bombing of Hiroshima almost 60 years ago, yet the same deceptive techniques

of distortion and manipulation continue to be used today to support the

profit-making war machine. Thanks to the Internet and excellent alternative news

websites (like commondreams.org where this article is reported), those who want

to know can now find viable alternative viewpoints and explore the veracity of

questionable news reports in the mainstream media. Please help to inform others

by sharing this revealing news with your friends and colleagues.

 

With best wishes,

Fred Burks for the WantToKnow.info team

 

 

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0810-01.htm

 

 

Hiroshima Cover-up: How the War Department's Timesman Won a Pulitzer

by Amy Goodman and David Goodman

 

Governments lie.

-- I. F. Stone, Journalist

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. 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.

Wilfred Burchett decided to strike out on his own. He was determined to see for

himself what this nuclear bomb had done, to understand what this vaunted new

weapon was all about. So he boarded a train and traveled for thirty hours to the

city of Hiroshima in defiance of General MacArthur's orders.

Burchett emerged from the train into a nightmare world. The devastation that

confronted him was unlike any he had ever seen during the war. The city of

Hiroshima, with a population of 350,000, had been razed. Multistory buildings

were reduced to charred posts. He saw people's shadows seared into walls and

sidewalks. He met people with their skin melting off. In the hospital, he saw

patients with purple skin hemorrhages, gangrene, fever, and rapid hair loss.

Burchett was among the first to witness and describe radiation sickness.

Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His

dispatch began: " In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed

the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and

horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something

which I can only describe as the atomic plague. "

He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: " Hiroshima

does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has

passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as

dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the

world. "

Burchett's article, headlined THE ATOMIC PLAGUE, was published on September 5,

1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation.

Burchett's candid reaction to the horror shocked readers. " In this first testing

ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening

desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an

Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show. " When you arrive in

Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and perhaps thirty square miles.

You can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to

see such man-made destruction. "

Burchett's searing independent reportage was a public relations fiasco for the

U.S. military. General MacArthur had gone to pains to restrict journalists'

access to the bombed cities, and his military censors were sanitizing and even

killing dispatches that described the horror. The official narrative of the

atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed

reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation. Reporters whose dispatches

convicted with this version of events found themselves silenced: George Weller

of the Chicago Daily News slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000-word story on

the nightmare that he found there. Then he made a crucial error: He submitted

the piece to military censors. His newspaper never even received his story. As

Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur's censors, " They won. "

U.S. authorities responded in time-honored fashion to Burchett's revelations:

They attacked the messenger. General MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan

(the order was later rescinded), and his camera with photos of Hiroshima

mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital. U.S. officials accused

Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda. They scoffed at the notion

of an atomic sickness. The U.S. military issued a press release right after the

Hiroshima bombing that downplayed human casualties, instead emphasizing that the

bombed area was the site of valuable industrial and military targets.

Four days after Burchett's story splashed across front pages around the world,

Major General Leslie R. Groves, director of the atomic bomb project, invited a

select group of thirty reporters to New Mexico. Foremost among this group was

William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The New

York Times. Groves took the reporters to the site of the first atomic test. His

intent was to demonstrate that no atomic radiation lingered at the site. Groves

trusted Laurence to convey the military's line; the general was not

disappointed.

Laurence's front-page story, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES TOKYO TALES: TESTS ON

NEW MEXICO RANGE CONFIRM THAT BLAST, AND NOT RADIATION, TOOK TOLL, ran on

September 12, 1945, following a three-day delay to clear military censors. " This

historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and

cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer today to

Japanese propaganda that radiations [sic] were responsible for deaths even after

the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons entering Hiroshima had

contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent radioactivity, " the article

began. Laurence said unapologetically that the Army tour was intended " to give

the lie to these claims. "

Laurence quoted General Groves: " The Japanese claim that people died from

radiation. If this is true, the number was very small. " Laurence then went on to

offer his own remarkable editorial on what happened: " The Japanese are still

continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war

unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms

.. . . Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described 'symptoms' that did not

ring true. "

But Laurence knew better. He had observed the first atomic bomb test on July 16,

1945, and he withheld what he knew about radioactive fallout across the

southwestern desert that poisoned local residents and livestock. He kept mum

about the spiking Geiger counters all around the test site.

William L. Laurence went on to write a series of ten articles for the Times that

served as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical achievements of the

nuclear program. Throughout these and other reports, he downplayed and denied

the human impact of the bombing. Laurence won the Pulitzer Prize for his

reporting.

It turns out that William L. Laurence was not only receiving a salary from The

New York Times. He was also on the payroll of the War Department. In March 1945,

General Leslie Groves had held a secret meeting at The New York Times with

Laurence to offer him a job writing press releases for the Manhattan Project,

the U.S. program to develop atomic weapons. The intent, according to the Times,

was " to explain the intricacies of the atomic bomb's operating principles in

laymen's language. " Laurence also helped write statements on the bomb for

President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

Laurence eagerly accepted the offer, " his scientific curiosity and patriotic

zeal perhaps blinding him to the notion that he was at the same time

compromising his journalistic independence, " as essayist Harold Evans wrote in a

history of war reporting. Laurence boasted " Mine has been the honor, unique in

the history of journalism, of preparing the War Department's official press

release for worldwide distribution, " boasted Laurence in his memoirs, Dawn Over

Zero. " No greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for

that matter. "

" Atomic Bill " Laurence revered atomic weapons. He had been crusading for an

American nuclear program in articles as far back as 1929. His dual status as

government agent and reporter earned him an unprecedented level of access to

American military officials-he even flew in the squadron of planes that dropped

the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. His reports on the atomic bomb and its use were

laced with descriptions that conveyed almost religious awe.

In Laurence's article about the bombing of Nagasaki (it was withheld by military

censors until a month after the bombing), he described the detonation over

Nagasaki that incinerated 100,000 people. Laurence waxed: " Awe-struck, we

watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from

outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white

clouds. . . . It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before

our incredulous eyes. "

Laurence later recounted his impressions of the atomic bomb: " Being close to it

and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing, so exquisitely

shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one . . . felt

oneself in the presence of the supranatural. "

Laurence was good at keeping his master's secrets--from suppressing the reports

of deadly radioactivity in New Mexico to denying them in Japan. The Times was

also good at keeping secrets, only revealing Laurence's dual status as

government spokesman and reporter on August 7, the day after the Hiroshima

bombing--and four months after Laurence began working for the Pentagon. As

Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell wrote in their excellent book Hiroshima in

America: Fifty Years of Denial, " Here was the nation's leading science reporter,

severely compromised, not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew

about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his

time. "

Radiation: Now You See It, Now You Don't

A curious twist to this story concerns another New York Times journalist who

reported on Hiroshima; his name, believe it or not, was William Lawrence (his

byline was W.H. Lawrence). He has long been confused with William L. Laurence.

(Even Wilfred Burchett confuses the two men in his memoirs and his 1983 book,

Shadows of Hiroshima.) Unlike the War Department's Pulitzer Prize winner, W.H.

Lawrence visited and reported on Hiroshima on the same day as Burchett. (William

L. Laurence, after flying in the squadron of planes that bombed Nagasaki, was

subsequently called back to the United States by the Times and did not visit the

bombed cities.)

W.H. Lawrence's original dispatch from Hiroshima was published on September 5,

1945. He reported matter-of-factly about the deadly effects of radiation, and

wrote that Japanese doctors worried that " all who had been in Hiroshima that day

would die as a result of the bomb's lingering effects. " He described how

" persons who had been only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86

percent of their white blood corpuscles, developed temperatures of 104 degrees

Fahrenheit, their hair began to drop out, they lost their appetites, vomited

blood and finally died. "

Oddly enough, W.H. Lawrence contradicted himself one week later in an article

headlined NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN. For this article, the Pentagon's

spin machine had swung into high gear in response to Burchett's horrifying

account of " atomic plague. " W.H. Lawrence reported that Brigadier General T. F.

Farrell, chief of the War Department's atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima, " denied

categorically that [the bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity. "

Lawrence's dispatch quotes only Farrell; the reporter never mentions his

eyewitness account of people dying from radiation sickness that he wrote the

previous week.

The conflicting accounts of Wilfred Burchett and William L. Laurence might be

ancient history were it not for a modern twist. On October 23, 2003, The New

York Times published an article about a controversy over a Pulitzer Prize

awarded in 1932 to Times reporter Walter Duranty. A former correspondent in the

Soviet Union, Duranty had denied the existence of a famine that had killed

millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. The Pulitzer Board had launched two

inquiries to consider stripping Duranty of his prize. The Times " regretted the

lapses " of its reporter and had published a signed editorial saying that

Duranty's work was " some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper. "

Current Times executive editor Bill Keller decried Duranty's " credulous,

uncritical parroting of propaganda. "

On November 21, 2003, the Pulitzer Board decided against rescinding Duranty's

award, concluding that there was " no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate

deception " in the articles that won the prize. As an apologist for Joseph

Stalin, Duranty is easy pickings. What about the " deliberate deception " of

William L. Laurence in denying the lethal effects of radioactivity? And what of

the fact that the Pulitzer Board knowingly awarded the top journalism prize to

the Pentagon's paid publicist, who denied the suffering of millions of Japanese?

Do the Pulitzer Board and the Times approve of " uncritical parroting of

propaganda " --as long as it is from the United States?

It is long overdue that the prize for Hiroshima's apologist be stripped.

Amy Goodman is host of the national radio and TV show " Democracy Now!. " This is

an excerpt from her new national bestselling book The Exception to the Rulers:

Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them, written

with her brother journalist David, exposes the reporting of Times correspondent

William L. Laurence

Democracy Now! is a national radio and TV program, broadcast on more than 240

stations.

 

 

 

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