{"id":154136,"date":"2017-07-03T11:34:25","date_gmt":"2017-07-03T11:34:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=154136"},"modified":"2017-07-07T05:49:05","modified_gmt":"2017-07-07T05:49:05","slug":"us-guilty-of-premeditated-murder-of-civilians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=154136","title":{"rendered":"US Guilty of Premeditated Murder of Civilians"},"content":{"rendered":"

Darkmoon — July 3, 2017<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The US has been targeting civilians for a long time but pretending that all such deaths are accidental, aka \u201ccollateral damage\u201d.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

By PETER VAN BUREN — for The American Conservative<\/em><\/strong><\/h2>\n
With pictures, captions, and short notes by Lasha Darkmoon<\/h6>\n

\"napalm<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018NAPALM \u00a0GIRL\u2019
\nWHAT AMERICA DID TO VIETNAMESE CHILDREN<\/h3>\n
U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis\u00a0said<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0\u201ccivilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation,\u201d referring to America\u2019s war against the Islamic State. And yet the fighting now in Mosul and Raqqa is destroying civilians and their homes on a medieval scale.\u00a0How can America in clear conscience continue to kill civilians across the Middle East? It\u2019s easy. Ask Grandpa what he did in the Good War. Civilian deaths in WWII weren\u2019t dressed up as \u201ccollateral damage\u201d, they were deliberate policy.<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Following the institution of what some claim are looser rules of engagement under the Trump administration, U.S.-led coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria killed\u00a01,484<\/a><\/span>\u00a0civilians in March 2017 alone. Altogether some\u00a03,100<\/span><\/a>\u00a0civilians have been killed from the air since the U.S. launched its coalition war against Islamic State, according to the NGO\u00a0Airwars<\/span><\/a>. Drone strikes outside of the ISIS fight killed\u00a03,674 other civilians<\/a><\/span>. In 2015 the U.S.\u00a0destroyed<\/a><\/span>\u00a0an entire hospital in Afghanistan, along with doctors and patients inside. Whole neighborhoods in\u00a0Raqqa<\/span><\/a>\u00a0are being systematically leveled.<\/h5>\n
That all adds up to a lot of accidents \u2013 accidents created in part by the use of Hellfire missiles designed to destroy tanks employed against individual people, and 500 pound bombs that can clear a football-field sized area dropped inside densely inhabited areas. The policy of swatting flies with\u00a0sledgehammers<\/span><\/a>, surgical strikes with blunt instruments, does indeed seem to lead to civilian deaths, deaths that mock the definition of \u201caccident.\u201d<\/h5>\n
Yet despite the numbers killed, the watchword in modern war is that civilians are never targeted on purpose, at least by our side. Americans would never intentionally kill innocents.<\/h5>\n
Except we have.<\/h5>\n
The good guys in World War II oversaw the rapid development of new weapons to meet the changing needs of killing entire cities\u2019 worth of innocents. For example, in Europe, brick and stone construction lent itself to the use of conventional explosives to destroy cities. In Japan, however, given the prominence of wood construction, standard explosives tended to simply scatter structures over a limited area. The answer was incendiary devices.<\/h5>\n
To fine-tune their use, the U.S. Army Air Force built a full-size Japanese\u00a0village<\/span><\/a>\u00a0in Utah. They questioned American architects who had worked in Japan, consulted a furniture importer, and installed\u00a0<\/strong>tatami\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>straw floor mats taken from Japanese-Americans sent off to internment camps. Among the insights gained was the need for\u00a0incendiary devices to be made much heavier than originally thought. Japanese homes typically had tile roofs. The early devices tended to bounce right off. A heavier device would break through the tile and ignite inside the structure, creating a much more effective fire.<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Far from accidental, firebombing Japan had been planned in\u00a0War Plan Orange<\/span><\/a>, written long before Pearl Harbor. As far back as the 1920s, U.S. General Billy Mitchell had said Japan\u2019s paper and wood cities would be \u201cthe greatest aerial targets the world had ever seen.\u201d Following the outline in War Plan Orange, the efforts were lead by Curtis \u201cBombs Away\u201d LeMay, who expressed his goal as \u201cJapan will eventually be a nation without cities, a nomadic people.<\/strong><\/h5>\n
LD notes: A correspondent writes to me:<\/h5>\n
\u201cIf the Japanese people were aware of all the evils inflicted upon them by the US, they would stop sucking up to America and aping its sexual degeneracy and Cultural Marxist mores. After South Korea, Japan happens to have the second highest per capita consumption of pornography in the world. Makes you wonder: why South Korea ad Japan? I\u2019ll tell you why. Both South Korea and Japan are US-occupied territories, like Germany. American bases scattered around everywhere, local women constantly being raped by US troops, brothels galore catering to American tastes. The Japanese would do well, IMHO, to align themselves with China and Russia against the common Judeo-Amercan enemy.\u201d<\/h5>\n
Sobering words. But will the Japanese read them and take remedial action? [LD]<\/h5>\n
LeMay also helped run the U.S. bombing campaign against North Korea during that war, claiming that American efforts killed some\u00a020 percent<\/a><\/span>\u00a0of the civilian population. The man many call the architect of the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara, worked for LeMay during the WWII firebombing campaign. McNamara as Secretary of Defense went on to order the use of napalm in Vietnam, often against undefended civilian targets. The accidents of civilian deaths in war turn inside tight circles.<\/h5>\n
The skill with which America tuned its WWII firebombing into an exquisite way to destroy civilians reached its peak on March 10, 1945, when three hundred American B-29 bombers flew virtually unopposed over Tokyo\u2019s most densely populated residential area. They dropped enough incendiary bombs to create a firestorm, a conflagration that burned the oxygen out of the air itself.<\/h5>\n
What was\u00a0accomplished?<\/span><\/a>\u00a0One hundred thousand dead, a million people made homeless. The raid remains the single most destructive act of war ever committed, even after Hiroshima.<\/h5>\n

\"Tokyo<\/a><\/p>\n

TOKYO FIRESTORM, 9 MARCH 1945<\/strong>
\nTe charred body of a woman who was carrying a child on her back<\/strong><\/h4>\n
LD: \u00a0Here is an instructive quote which paints a graphic picture of what firebombing an entire city entails:<\/h5>\n
\u201cThe fire spread so swiftly that windstorms twirled around swirling vortexes that sucked people, homes, debris into the flames. Flames spread so fast that even when there was a way to run where there was no fire, it was often too late. Clothes burst into flames and so did any packages people held. People who jumped into waterways often boiled alive. People on the bridges jumped into the water as the steel grew hot. \u00a0It\u2019s important to remember that death estimates range from 80,000 to 200,000 dead Japanese citizens, and most of them were innocent bystanders<\/span>.\u201d<\/a><\/h5>\n
The general public, lulled into apathy by government propaganda using euphemisms like \u201ccollateral damage\u201d, would be horrified if they knew the chilling truth about the mass murders committed in their name. [LD]<\/h5>\n
(Article continues)<\/em><\/h5>\n
The problem, however, for the U.S. with such raids was their inefficiency in killing civilians. The logistics of sending off 300 planes were daunting, especially when an hour or two of unexpected wind or rain could negate much of effort. There was no question firestorms were the very thing to systematically commit genocide in Japan. But what was needed was a tool to create those firestorms efficiently, and to make them weather-proof.<\/h5>\n
It would only take science a few more months after the Tokyo firebombing to provide that\u00a0tool<\/span><\/a>. <\/strong><\/h5>\n
A single atomic bomb meant one plane could do the work of 300. And the bomb would create a fire so powerful and large and hot that weather would have no effect; it was foolproof. There could be no better weapon for destroying whole cities and all of the people in them, and it has only been used by one nation \u2014 the United States.<\/strong><\/h5>\n
They used the atom bomb <\/strong>twice<\/strong><\/em>, because the 85,000 killed in Hiroshima were not enough.<\/strong><\/h5>\n
These were tactics of vengeance matched with weapons designed to carry them out as horribly as possible.\u00a0They worked well: the firebombing campaign over Japan, including the atomic bombings, purposely killed more than\u00a0one million<\/span><\/a>\u00a0civilians in just five months in 1945.<\/strong><\/h5>\n

BURNED ALIVE AT HIROSHIMA<\/h3>\n

\"hiroshima\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It was only after WWII ended, when accurate\u00a0descriptions\u00a0from Hiroshima began finding their way back to America, that the idea of firebombing as a way to shorten the war, to spare lives in the long game, came into full flower. The myth, that the atomic bomb was in fact a reluctant instrument of mercy, not terror, was first published\u00a0in\u00a0Harper\u2019s Magazine\u00a0in February 1947 under the name of Secretary of War\u00a0Henry Stimson. The actual writing was done by McGeorge Bundy, who later as National Security Adviser helped promote the American war in Vietnam that took several\u00a0million civilian lives.<\/h5>\n
The majority of Americans, recovering their consciences post-war, were thus nudged into seeing what was actually a continuation of long-standing policy of civilian genocide in Japan as an unfortunate but necessary step toward Japan\u2019s surrender, and thus saved innumerable lives that would have been lost had the war dragged on. This thinking lives on today on politically correct ground under the banner of great powers having to reluctantly put aside what is moral in peace for what is expedient in war. A \u201cfact of life,\u201d according to the U.S. Secretary of Defense.<\/h5>\n
So look deeper into history if you want to understand the morality-free rise in civilian deaths across America\u2019s battlefields in the Middle East. We don\u2019t like to think of ourselves as the kind of people who willfully kill innocents, but we were pleased by it only a skip back in history; your grandfather flew missions over Japan to burn children to death. Accidents of course happen in war, but there is a dark history of policy that demands skepticism each time such claims are made.<\/h5>\n

HIROSHIMA \u00a0AND \u00a0NAGASAKI<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"hiroshima<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cYour grandfather flew missions over Japan
\nto burn children to death.\u201d<\/h4>\n
From The<\/em> American Conservative<\/a><\/span><\/h6>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Van Buren argues that the U.S. has been deliberately targeting civilians for years but pretending that all such deaths are accidental, “collateral damage” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Hidden_and_Revisionist_History"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=154136"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":154143,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154136\/revisions\/154143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=154136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=154136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=154136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}