The new ‘tanker war’ and US military escalation in the Persian Gulf
The last time Washington put armed personnel on private vessels was during World War II. Does Biden know what he’s getting into?

(...) The deployments involve stepping into a zone of regional rivalries and is not a simple matter of protecting good guys against bad guys. Despite the perennial fixation on Iran, Tehran’s regional rivals — including ones that are the origin or destination of much of that commercial shipping that the administration wants to protect — are just as distant from American values and interests. Saudi Arabia, traditionally the principal rival, is at least as much of an authoritarian state as Iran and an oppressive violator of human rights whose actions and ideology have had lethal consequences for Americans both individually and on a larger scale.

The stated reason for considering the placement of U.S. troops on commercial ships, and part of the background to the other U.S. military deployments to the region, involves Iran’s interception, seizure, or other harassment of some oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz. With different U.S. policies, this situation could have been avoided. Iran has not intercepted shipping because Iranians have some genetic malice that compels them to do such things. As with many other Iranian policies and actions, this practice is reactive.

It was the United States, not Iran, that began the latest round of going after another nation’s tankers and seizing its oil. The U.S. actions reflect a unilateral U.S. policy of trying to prevent Iranian oil exports. This policy is not grounded in international law, and Iran unsurprisingly has labeled the U.S. seizure and selling of Iranian oil as “piracy.” The U.S. government has not found a buyer for a tanker full of Iranian oil that it seized at sea in April and brought to Houston, because shippers and potential buyers fear repercussions. (...)

Would you buy a used car from this man? 

Decades Later, the US Government Called Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘Nuclear Tests’

In 1980, when I asked the press office at the U.S. Department of Energy to send me a listing of nuclear bomb test explosions, the agency mailed me an official booklet with the title “Announced United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 Through December 1979.” As you’d expect, the Trinity test in New Mexico was at the top of the list. Second on the list was Hiroshima. Third was Nagasaki.

So, 35 years after the atomic bombings of those Japanese cities in August 1945, the Energy Department – the agency in charge of nuclear weaponry – was categorizing them as “tests.”

Later on, the classification changed, apparently in an effort to avert a potential P.R. problem. By 1994, a new edition of the same document explained that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “were not ‘tests’ in the sense that they were conducted to prove that the weapon would work as designed . . . or to advance weapon design, to determine weapons effects, or to verify weapon safety.”

But the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually were tests, in more ways than one.

Take it from the Manhattan Project’s director, Gen. Leslie Groves, who recalled: “To enable us to assess accurately the effects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air raids. It was also desirable that the first target be of such size that the damage would be confined within it, so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb.”

A physicist with the Manhattan Project, David H. Frisch, remembered that U.S. military strategists were eager “to use the bomb first where its effects would not only be politically effective but also technically measurable.”

For good measure, after the Trinity bomb test in the New Mexico desert used plutonium as its fission source on July 16, 1945, in early August the military was able to test both a uranium-fueled bomb on Hiroshima and a second plutonium bomb on Nagasaki to gauge their effects on big cities.

Public discussion of the nuclear era began when President Harry Truman issued a statement that announced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima – which he described only as “an important Japanese Army base.” It was a flagrant lie. A leading researcher of the atomic bombings of Japan, journalist Greg Mitchell, has pointed out: “Hiroshima was not an ‘army base’ but a city of 350,000. It did contain one important military headquarters, but the bomb had been aimed at the very center of a city – and far from its industrial area.”

Mitchell added: “Perhaps 10,000 military personnel lost their lives in the bomb but the vast majority of the 125,000 dead in Hiroshima would be women and children.” Three days later, when an atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, “it was officially described as a ‘naval base’ yet less than 200 of the 90,000 dead were military personnel.”

Since then, presidents have routinely offered rhetorical camouflage for reckless nuclear policies, rolling the dice for global catastrophe. In recent years, the most insidious lies from leaders in Washington have come with silence – refusing to acknowledge, let alone address with genuine diplomacy, the worsening dangers of nuclear war.

 Coaxial wrote:

Your worst trait is that you nap so much it makes us all jealous.

 miamizsun wrote: 
Dang, bro, why you call me out like this?

in my humble opinion the level of negativity, contempt and hate that consumes you is not healthy
i hope i'm wrong and you live a long and prosperous life

Culture of coercion
America’s Love of Sanctions Will Be Its Downfall
Measures intended to punish autocrats are eroding the very Western order they were meant to preserve.

“Lethality matters most!” he told the crowd. “When you can kill your enemy, every part of your life is better! Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger.”

Minihan followed up by releasing a 20-page “Mobility Manifesto” that was both urgent and irreverent. “If you are easily offended by intentional crass, please stop reading now,” he wrote in the opening. The document goes on to criticize “excuse-laden admiration for the status quo” and declare that air mobility forces were in “crisis.”

While U.S. airmen are the best in the world, he wrote, there is “significant risk” in inaction that requires “revolutionary” moves to ensure that the Air Force can continue to do its part.“If this comes across as harsh, good,” Minihan wrote. “We are not looking for blue skies or smooth air. We are looking to deliver.”

Weeks later, Minihan’s memo predicting war within China drew international attention. He ordered airmen to get their personal affairs in order and to “fire a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most.”

“Aim for the head” when doing so, he directed. The Pentagon distanced itself from the remarks, while China’s state-run Global Times cited analysts decrying what they called the U.S. military’s prevalence of “super-hawkish war maniacs.”

One influential retired general, Barry McCaffrey, tweeted that Minihan needed “to be placed on terminal leave,” effectively fired, after showing bad judgment and “cowboy aggression.”

Protect those precious bodily fluids!

Washington Post Still Covers Up U.S. War Crimes And Use Of Biological Weapons

---

Remember the Atrocities of the Korean War, Not the Propaganda

Because the evils of communism were self-evident, few questions arose about how the United States was thwarting Red aggression. When a U.S. Senate subcommittee appointed in 1953 by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) investigated Korean War atrocities, the committee explicitly declared that “war crimes were defined as those acts committed by enemy nations.” This same standard prevailed in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and practically any other place where the U.S. has militarily intervened.

Gerontocracy and the Decline of the US Empire - W. Astore

I still remember when Americans made fun of “old guard” Soviet leaders and used words like “sclerotic” to describe them. They were a visible symbol of Soviet tiredness and decline, the refuse of the past when compared to a younger, more vigorous, United States with its dominant and thrusting world economy.

 Beaker wrote:

When Oppenheimer visited Japan ...

Continuity
Ten Years After Coup, the U.S. Still Supports Tyranny in Egypt
Biden promised to end the “blank checks” given to Egypt’s dictator under the Trump administration. That has not happened.

The $850 billion chicken comes home to roost
The military industrial complex is not designed to actually fight wars. If so, you wouldn’t see Ukraine struggling right now to win one.

As originally designed, the Bradley tanks promptly burst into flame when hit with anything much more powerful than a BB pellet, incinerating anyone riding inside. The armor bureaucrats were well aware of this defect, but pausing development for a redesign might have hurt their budget, so they delayed and cheated on tests to keep the program on track. Prior to one test, they covertly substituted water-tanks for the ammunition that would otherwise explode.

Only when Jim Burton, a courageous air force lieutenant colonel from the Pentagon’s testing office, enlisted Congress to mandate a proper live fire test were the army’s malign subterfuges exposed and corrected. His principled stand cost him his career, but the Bradley was redesigned, rendering it less potentially lethal for passengers. Hence, forty years on, the survival of those lucky Ukrainians.

This largely forgotten episode serves as a vivid example of an essential truth about our military machine: it is not interested in war.

How else to understand the lack of concern for the lives of troops, or producing a functioning weapon system? As Burton observed in his instructive 1993 memoir Pentagon Wars, the U.S. defense system is “a corrupt business — ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom.”

Nothing has happened in the intervening years to contradict this assessment, with potentially grim consequences for men and women on the front line. Today, for example, the U.S. Air Force is abandoning its traditional role of protecting and coordinating with troops on the ground, otherwise known as Close Air Support, or CAS. Given its time-honored record of bombing campaigns that had little or no effect on the course of wars, CAS has probably been the only useful function (grudgingly) performed by the service. (...)

Echoes.

 thisbody wrote:

This post resembles that of a certain smooth-brained troll who posted here years ago.
/observation

While "His Lordship" Christopher Nolan always has been intent on igniting the nerve of violence in his movies (see: the Batman cinema massacre) like a typical Umrican he left out Hiroshima and Nagasaki in his movie on the Atom bomb.

I just seems like the latest Umrican (Hollyweird) hypocrisy.

 R_P wrote: 
Yep.

Hollywood
What ‘Oppenheimer’ leaves out
The three-hour-long movie has gripping drama and important history, but it ignores the first victims of the nuclear era.

But one impact of the test is clear. In the months after the explosion, the entire state of New Mexico saw an unprecedented spike in infant mortality, with 56 percent more New Mexican babies dying during live births in 1945 than in 1944. That number went back down in 1946 and has never reached such high levels since, a statistical anomaly with a 0.0001 percent chance of being caused by natural conditions, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

 R_P wrote:
I don't know what you mean by boilerplate here.

 haresfur wrote:
Boilerplate. It may be "a non-issue" to you.

Trinity test “downwinders” — a term describing people who have lived near nuclear test sites and may have been exposed to deadly radioactive fallout — have never been eligible for compensation under the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). It has provided over $2.5 billion in payments to nuclear workers in much of the Western U.S. and to downwinders who were located near the Nevada test site and may have developed cancer or other diseases as a result of radiation exposure.“

Despite the Trinity test taking place in New Mexico, many New Mexicans were left out of the original RECA legislation and nobody has ever been able to explain why,” said Senator Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat. He has helped lead efforts in Congress to expand and extend the legislation, currently due to sunset in 2024.

Census data from 1940 shows that as many as 500,000 people were living within a 150-mile radius of the test site. Some families lived as close as 12 miles away, according to the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. Yet no civilians were warned about the test ahead of time, and they weren't evacuated before or after the test.

“This new information about the Trinity bomb is monumental and a long time coming,” Tina Cordova, a co-founder of the consortium, said. “We’ve been waiting for an affirmation of the histories told by generations of people from Tularosa who witnessed the Trinity bomb and talked about how the ash fell from the sky for days afterward.”

The study also documents significant deposition in Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and Idaho, as well as dozens of federally-recognized tribal lands, potentially strengthening the case for people seeking expanded compensation in those areas.