NEW: Reuters: U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' testimony that he opposed a proposal for President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign team to meet with Russians has been contradicted by three people https://t.co/xD3CCBtCuh
— Evan Rosenfeld (@Evan_Rosenfeld) March 18, 2018
… Or maybe his memory is just failing, selectively:
… Sessions testified before Congress in November 2017 that he “pushed back” against the proposal made by former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos at a March 31, 2016 campaign meeting. Then a senator from Alabama, Sessions chaired the meeting as head of the Trump campaign’s foreign policy team…
Sessions, through Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores, declined to comment beyond his prior testimony. The special counsel’s office also declined to comment. Spokeswomen for the Democrats and Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee did not comment.
Reuters was unable to determine whether Mueller is probing discrepancies in accounts of the March 2016 meeting.
The three accounts, which have not been reported, raise new questions about Sessions’ testimony regarding contacts with Russia during the campaign.
Sessions previously failed to disclose to Congress meetings he had with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and testified in October that he was not aware of any campaign representatives communicating with Russians…
Legal experts expressed mixed views about the significance of the contradictions cited by the three sources.
Sessions could argue he misremembered events or perceived his response in a different way, making any contradictions unintentional, some experts said….
NYMag adds:
… Sessions has been slippery — to put it generously — about Russia before. During his confirmation hearings last year, he said that he was not aware of any meetings between Trump campaign officials and representatives of the Russian government, neglecting to mention two meetings he had Sergei Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sessions claimed that he had met with Kislyak in his capacity as a U.S. Senator, not as a Trump surrogate. He later claimed that the meetings in question did not involve campaign-related issues — a version of events contradicted by Kislyak himself.
Sessions’s duplicitousness led to his fateful recusal from the Russia investigation, paving the way for Mueller’s appointment.
But remember, when it comes to firing political enemies of President Trump, the attorney general is deeply concerned about honesty.
Sidebar from Vox: “Jeff Sessions may have violated his recusal pledge when he fired Andrew McCabe”
Corner Stone
This is my shocked face.
Patricia Kayden
So Sessions is a liar, you say? Shocking!! The only question is who can take these creeps down. They’ve given ample evidence that they are unfit to hold any political offices.
Corner Stone
“Suh, I said, suh! I will *not* sit heah and allow yooo to ehmpune mah honor and IN-tegri-TEAH!
West of the Rockies (been a while)
How dare you impugn the honor and integrity of Miss Jefferson!
Lapassionara
Baud suggested a candle in a dark room and Yarrow’s incantation, but it hasn’t stopped the head spinning or the jaw-dropping. Shocked, shocked to see lying going on here.
Baud
OT, but what’s Snowden’s play here? “Sincerity” is not one of the choices.
Think Progress
PsiFighter37
A true peisoner’s dilemma: Sessions clearly deserves to be fired from his job. If gets canned, though, Mueller is almost certainly going to be canned by Pruitt.
Baud
I wonder if Sessions threatened to turn state’s evidence in exchange for immunity if he got fired.
Baud
@Lapassionara: Did you remember the “motherfucker”?
Suzanne
I just found out that I have to go camping on Friday night and I am not allowed to bring any alcohol.
OH FFS.
Major Major Major Major
This can’t end soon enough.
@Baud: He’s allowed to go off the reservation sometimes to maintain his brand.
@PsiFighter37: Seems simple to me, you just prioritize. Keeping Mueller is more important than getting rid of Sessions. It’s not like his replacement is going to be any better.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Traitor is saying what his boss wants him to say, so that he can pretend being a hero to the crowd that worships GG.
Cermet
Nothing any thug does can lead to removal if they are aiding and abetting the criminal activities of the orange fart cloud.
Central Planning
@Suzanne: All those teenagers weren’t “allowed” to bring alcohol when they went camping too.
zhena gogolia
@Major Major Major Major:
Seems a likely interpretation.
Suzanne
@Central Planning: Oh, don’t worry, I already asked Mr, Suzanne to lend me his flask.
I do not camp.
Chyron HR
@Baud:
Did he specify on which candidate’s behalf the ballot stuffing was being done?
Davis X. Machina
@Baud: Some suicide attempts are cries for help. Then again, who can say some cries for help aren’t suicide attempts?
schrodingers_cat
If T does anything to jeopardize Mueller’s investigation it would be admitting guilt and signing a confession in big neon letters.
Central Planning
Since this is an OT, my daughter was telling me that we dropped the nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima because we were really trying to show Russia how bad-ass our bombs were. The story about we were doing it to save American lives by making the Japanese surrender was just a story, and the Japanese had already planned to surrender before we dropped the bombs on them.
Is that true? I was taught/told we did it to save American lives. Russia was never in the picture. What’s the straight dope?
John Revolta
@Suzanne: Pretty sure that’s Unconstitutional.
Mnemosyne
@Baud:
When he claims that the midterm elections were totally rigged for a Democratic victory, the broflakes will all nod along and denounce the Democrats as the real villains.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Suzanne:
Flask, Suzanne, or a nice bhota (sp?) bottle.
Baud
@Davis X. Machina: The brand preservation theory seems the most plausible to me.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Is it really Snowden, though? Has anyone actually seen him. How do we know that he is still alive.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: he’s far more valuable to Putin as an American ratfucker than as a Russian cheerleader.
Steve in the ATL
@Suzanne: weed
Baud
@Central Planning: First I’ve heard that Russia was a consideration.
Raven
@Central Planning: ask the people who were at Okinawa how ready they were to quit.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: No.
@Major Major Major Major: Are his tweets blocked in Russia? (Not that I’m disagreeing…)
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Central Planning:
I’ve certainly heard that explanation, too. BJ historians?
Corner Stone
@Suzanne: Two words for you:
“I’ll be fucked if I will.”
Mnemosyne
@Central Planning:
There is a LOT of historical dispute over whether or not the Japanese planned to surrender after Hiroshima. I think it’s come out fairly recently that elements of the army were planning a coup to continue the war even after that, and it was Nagasaki that negated their plans. There’s also the cable from the Emperor to the Allies that used an ambiguous word that the Americans may have mistranslated.
So the answer is — it’s complicated, and she should read a few books about it. I have a really good one called Downfall about the fall of Japan, but I can’t remember the author’s name. ?
Suzanne
@Steve in the ATL: I’m sure that the smell of weed at Girl Scout camp is a bit of a giveaway.
dnfree
@Central Planning: I don’t know the straight dope, but I do know that my father, having survived the near-sinking of one ship in the Pacific, was on a ship heading back toward Japan when the bombs were dropped. It was his fervent belief that his life and the lives of countless others were spared because the Japanese would never have surrendered otherwise. And yet it has been asked whether we couldn’t have just done a demonstration on some abandoned atoll rather than killing so many people.
I believe it is also true that the two bombs were of different designs so there may have been some element of testing them for comparison as to effectiveness.
RemindsMeOfThatMovie
You know what “may have means”? Absolutely nothing will come of it, that’s what it means. It’s like another way of saying “some R’s have reportedly furrowed their brows”. Like that is supposed to mean they might actually do something but never do.
Yarrow
This information coming out today isn’t accidental. Mueller owns Sessions.
@Baud:
Sessions is doing what he does to save himself. Won’t really work all that well.
Tick tock, motherfuckers.
efgoldman
@Suzanne:
mrs efg’s family (originally five kids) camped to have affordable vacations.
My feeling? If gawds wanted us to go camping s/he wouldn’t have made Holiday Inns.
[I told that to a catholic priest, who had just come back from a camping trip. Broke him up.]
Yarrow
@Lapassionara: Try schrodingers_cat’s refusal to be afraid and then say, “Tick tock, motherfuckers.” The traitors will not win.
Raven
@dnfree: What craft was he on that was sunk?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Suzanne: I thought AZ was one of the states that had legalized. Edibles?
Yutsano
@RemindsMeOfThatMovie: Your concerns have been duly noted.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Central Planning: Yes and No, there was a legitimate fear that there would be mass casualties, if we invaded and that there was still significant number of Japanese military who would not surrender(they even went so far to try and overthrow the Emperor, a great offence to Japan). Plus the Red Army was ready to invade Japan after capturing Manchuria and the Sakhalin Islands. So the Atom Bomb served those purposes to end the war and to show Stalin we had the bomb, of course the Soviet union was in process of developing their bomb too.
Major Major Major Major
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I had the same thought!
@schrodingers_cat: he does video stuff. He spoke at a hacker thing in SF somewhat recently I think. And his cryptographic signatures at least verify that somebody has his key and password.
Yarrow
@Suzanne: Pot brownies or pot trail mix. Just make sure the kids can’t get at it.
efgoldman
@Mnemosyne:
Fuckem
Suzanne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Legalized for medical use only, and certainly not allowed when supervising one’s child at Girl Scout camp.
I am working on getting SuzMom a MMJ card. Then she can relax and be more fun.
Matt
Trump tweet quoted in NYT.
“Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans?”
Is it true, 13 “hardened” Democrats and 0 Republicans? If not, why didn’t the NYT say that, and right away? (I know, stupid question.)
Raven
@Suzanne: so it’s important for you to drink in that situation?
Yarrow
@Suzanne: Maybe just bring a lot of chocolate.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt: Nazi Times is in T’s pocket.
Baud
@Yarrow: She could tell the girl scouts how life is like that.
dnfree
@Raven: It was a near-sinking. The Japanese bombed it, and another American ship shot down the Japanese plane, which then crashed into my dad’s ship. Probably about a third of the crew died. The ship underwent temporary repairs in the Philippines and then limped back to California, where it was more fully repaired and sent back into action. During the layover, my dad and mom got married and I was conceived, hence I am one of the earliest of the baby boomers. The ship was the Orestes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Orestes_(AGP-10)
Jager
@dnfree: My glider pilot father who survived the invasion of Germany (Operation Varsity) was in California training for the invasion of Japan when the bombs were dropped. To say my mother was relieved he didn’t have to head for the Pacific theater would be a huge understatement. My old man had genuine mixed emotions about atomic weapons.
Corner Stone
@Matt: Sessions, Wray (where is he, btw?), Rosenstein, Mueller, Comey, Rachel Brand (who left)…all registered R’s. Could go on.
efgoldman
@Yarrow:
But if the raccoons do, it might be the funniest thing you ever saw.
Mnemosyne
@Raven:
I think she’s mostly joking. Though you know that if they banned it, it’s because some idiot parent had to ruin it for everyone else.
Or, in Suzanne’s location, probably because the campground is owned by Mormons. She’d better make sure she doesn’t show up with a can of the Demon Diet Coke and horrify them all. ?
zhena gogolia
@Matt:
WaPo had a headline calling that false hours ago.
LAO
@Matt: Not for nothing, but the NYT article you link to comprehensively demolishes Trump’s tweet.
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
@Suzanne: Good god. It’s March. I hope you live someplace warm. But even so, camping? AKA sleeping in the dirt?
Mike in NC
@Central Planning: I read somewhere that so many American casualties were expected in the invasion of the Japanese home islands that the US government ordered so many Purple Heart medals that they are still being given out up to the present day.
On a related note, everybody ought to have read Paul Fussell’s essay entitled “Thank God for the atomic bomb”.
Raven
@dnfree: Ah, a converted LST. My old man was on a converted Destroyer, DD164-APD 17.
schrodingers_cat
Charming friends of our President.
Stable genius wants to slap tariffs on China and restrict the number of international students from China.
Link:https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/16/reports-trump-administration-considering-limits-visas-chinese-citizens-cause-concern
Suzanne
@Raven: I can’t fall asleep on the ground sober!
Raven
@Suzanne: swell
Cckids
@Suzanne:
In my days camping where alcohol was not allowed, I found that vodka in a Smart Water bottle or pre-mixed margaritas in a Gatorade bottle worked wonders. Just remember to hold onto your bottle & don’t share ?
Good luck!!
Suzanne
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): Phoenix. I’m already wearing sleeveless dresses.
Raven
@Mike in NC: 1 million Americans, who knows how many Japanese.
Central Planning
@Mnemosyne:
Daughter’s assertion is that Japan was getting ready to surrender before we dropped any bombs.
@Mr Stagger Lee: Right, we wanted to show Stalin we had the bomb. Clearly we couldn’t bomb Russia, so it sounds like we bombed Japan to stop Russia from invading them.
@dnfree: I would probably believe what your dad believed too.
So, was the primary effect of bombing Japan to intimidate the Russians, or was it really to stop Japan? Sounds like maybe the goal was to stop Japan with the side effect of flexing our muscle at Russia.
Suzanne
@Cckids: Now THAT is a plan.
I actually don’t drink often, but I REALLY hate camping.
Steve in the ATL
@Yarrow:
Unless they get annoying. Then share the hell out of it.
SoupCatcher
@Mnemosyne:
It’s a Girl Scout rule.
Raven
@Central Planning: the primary effect was dead people
Suzanne
This is yet another reason that, when Mr. Suzanne’s grandfather tried to talk her into joining the military, Suzanne replied with, “HAHAHAAHAHAHAAAAAAAA!” before realizing that he was serious.
Jeffro
@Yarrow:
Por que no los dos? :)
dnfree
@Raven: Lots of conversions of ships in the war, it seems. My dad was a radar technician but the position was always referred to as “radio technician” because they didn’t want to make it clear that they were using radar.
It seems my dad’s ship was attached to support a somewhat secret project called Beach Jumpers, but I don’t think he was aware of that at the time.
Zinsky
I hope people on this forum are thinking about the appropriate response when Trump fires Robert Mueller. I say “when”, not “if”, because I think it is coming. Soon. Typing tweets or blog posts is not enough. Mass demonstrations outside GOP congressional offices at a minimum is needed. I would even support vandalism of GOP assets in some cases (e.g. cement powder poured in their car gas tanks). We need to abstain from physical violence until it becomes absolutely necessary. I sure hope the Antifa guerillas are training the way that I have heard they are – they need to be the first one taking wacks at the shit-for-brains conservatives who will use this outrage to begin shooting innocent people. You know they will – the sick deviants get sexually aroused just thinking about it.
jl
Heard some GOPeer on the news this morning babbling that McCabe had revealed classified information. Just caught the end of the report, so not sure whether it was WH or some Senator that said this.
Huh? Classified information? First time I heard that, and certainly different from initial stories. What was ‘classified’ about FBI investigation into HRC or Trump campaigns. And one of McCabe’s jobs was to oversee communications with public and press, so it was part of his job to decide what should be released.
WH/GOP story on McCabe firing gets weirder and fishier. I can’t imagine the WH or GOP toadies covering up for the WH would engage in a false smear campaign against someone they didn’t like /snark.
Cckids
@Suzanne: I like camping, but also can’t sleep on the ground, with pads or a cot or whatever, with no assistance from alcohol or Tylenol PM or something. My back is screaming within an hour.
And Girl Scout camps- the drinking is to help survive the other parents, frequently.
charon
@Central Planning:
Extensive discussion here of various bomb issues …
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/03/sekigawas-hiroshima
mike in dc
If we ever get to the point where JeffBo Sesh is a “cooperating witness”, Trump is not only headed for impeachment, he’s headed to prison, for the rest of his life. Along with his son-in-law and his three oldest children.
Humdog
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): Maybe I do camping differently than you, DAW, but I always slept UPON the dirt and not IN it.
Raven
@dnfree: yep, the head of my Dad’s destroyer organization was a beach jumper. His name was Curtis Clark and served in beach jumpers after the war.
http://www.beachjumpers.com/History/1950sCC.htm
The 32 APD’s were converted WW1 four stackers.
SiubhanDuinne
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
S’mores and whiskey and wild, wild wimmen.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Suzanne: We went on a camping trip with the Young Marines once out to Hatteras Island, I literally smuggled beer out there and drank it after all the kids had gone to bed. There is no way that I could have slept without that beer considering the sand fleas that bit us all night, camping sans alcohol does not work, period.
dmsilev
@Central Planning:
There’s very little real evidence for that. The military, especially the Army, was running the show and most of the people in charge were pretty fanatical about fighting until (at least) an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. It took 2 A-bombs, the Russian invasion of Japanese Manchuria, AND the intervention of the Emperor to get them to surrender, and even then there was a real danger of a coup by the hard-liners.
danielx
@Jager:
My dad saw Hiroshima in late 1945 and, almost equally horrifying, Tokyo after the fire raids. He never looked at war the same way again, and he’d spent three years in the Pacific at that point.
Raven
@Litlebritdifrnt: did you go to the Brit Cemetery on Okracoke?
Walker
@Central Planning:
This is a classic US History AP exam question. There is a lot of documentation from the time that Russian wanted to get into the Japanese theater now that the war in Europe was over. Truman was very worried about this and there is a lot of evidence that he saw the bomb as a way to end the war quickly without Russian involvement.
The exam question is not a yes/no question. This is a very common argue for-or-against question because it is controversial.
Another Scott
@Central Planning: There was a comment here in a thread a few days ago (or less) that Truman would have been strung up by a mob composed of every grieving mother who had a son die in the invasion if he didn’t use the bombs. I think that’s right, but that’s only one of the considerations.
Once “the gadget” was shown to work at Alamogordo, it was practically inevitable that it would be used to end the war, for lots and lots of reasons. It was “total war” and the imperative was to get (mostly) unconditional surrender as quickly as possible.
Cheers,
Scott.
Yarrow
@Suzanne: I can also suggest liquor filled chocolates. Check with a local liquor store or you can find them online. I bought some vodka ones at Christmas for someone who likes vodka. There are also brand name ones like Jose Cuervo, Jack Daniels, etc. They do melt, which could be a problem. I think there’s also liquor hard candy.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Cckids: REI has some self-inflating sleeping cushions to put under your sleeping bag that are fantastic. They compress down to a very small size when packed. Much less cumbersome than an air mattress and I’d say almost the same level of comfort. Anyways, just wanted to throw that out there for anyone here who struggles with that aspect of camping.
Suzanne
@Cckids: Yeah, I get sore if I don’t sleep in a bed with lots of pillows.
@Litlebritdifrnt:
PREACH.
Gelfling 545
@efgoldman: my family camped for similar reasons. I hated it. Some pf the extended family return every summer to the state park where we used to camp. I do not join them. Surely we’ve moved beyond huddling in crude, temporary shelters by now.
Raven
Try camping in Korea in January some time.
Yarrow
@Suzanne: What sort of camping are you doing? Like backpacking where you’re hiking out to some campsite and pitching tents? Or is it more like car camping where you drive everything to the campsite? If it’s the latter you can bring all sorts of things that could help make it more comfortable.
Jim Parish
@Raven: My father did that, sometime around 1952. Kinda mandatory, seeing as he was in the Army. That was the one part of his long service that he wouldn’t talk about. He did mention that it was damned cold.
Corner Stone
@Humdog:
Sean Spicey, is that you?
Barbara
@Suzanne: A friend told me that when he went on scout camping trips as a teenager he could never figure out how his scoutmaster slept so well, through soggy tents, yammering scouts, cold, etc., until another kid told him years later that the leader’s water bottle was actually filled with vodka. I would not do that if it is a school related event, however!
Raven
@Jim Parish: it was indeed
Zinsky
@Another Scott: Gore Vidal, the novelist who was also a top notch historian, has always asserted that the Hiroshima bombing was not needed, a naval blockade of Japan would have led to their surrender within weeks with little or no loss of American life. It was a macho, dick-swinging exercise by Truman to intimidate the Russians. And America also lost any moral high ground it had earned by entering WWII and saving Western Europe from Nazi rule by becoming the only country to ever use a WMD on a civilian population (don’t cite poison gas, since most scientists don’t consider gas to be a WMD). Thanks.
Matt
@LAO: Does it though? It admits right away the Mueller is Republican, but doesn’t say anything about the affiliations of his team except that at least one is a Democrat.
@zhena gogoliaThe Post article doesn’t disprove it either. Here’s what a less misleading tweet might ask:
“Why does the Mueller team (of 17 excluding Mueller) have 13 registered Democrats, 7 of whom donated to Clinton and 0 registered Republicans?”
Barbara
@Central Planning: Well, we weren’t actually enemies with Russia by that point, though of course it was in the cards. The other thing is that, if you believe him, Truman was not well-informed about the details of the Manhattan Project. Russia, of course, was already receiving information about the scope of the project from Ted Hall and others who were worried about the prospect of only one power having the bomb. My guess is that there might have been more than one motivating factor. Also, if she heard this from a podcast, it seems to be the MO of these things to be revisionist (but actually, the truth was . . .) without necessarily being well-grounded in scholarship.
Raven
@Zinsky: oh well, if Gore Vidal said it. . .
patrick II
@Central Planning:
@dnfree:
Here is link to a paper on the projections of casualties by the Army and Hoover commission near the end of WWII. The Army estimate was for about 500,000 American casualties and five million Japanese. The Hoover estimate was for one million U.S. casualties and ten million Japanese.
The paper goes on to say that the Japanese had anticipated the invasion locations so the casualties would have been at the higher end. Those numbers may be right or wrong, but they were the ones Truman based his decision on when he dropped the bombs and killed as many as 200,000 Japanese.
zhena gogolia
@Raven:
lol
Jay Noble
One of the things about dropping the 2nd bomb which applied to both Japan and Russia was to prove the 1st was not the only one we had. Ironically, the 2nd left the cupboard bare.
Barbara
@schrodingers_cat:
It’s like he only wants votes from white people.
Raven
@Jay Noble: Yea but if no one knew that?
Captain C
@Raven: Or for that matter, ask the generals who were ready and willing to kill the emperor after Nagasaki in order to keep the war going.
Major Major Major Major
@Raven: yeah all his opinions are 100% accurate everybody knows that ?
Raven
@Captain C: well it’s a great thing to babble about while I watch Tiger and the last pick in the tourney (da Cuze) try to beat Sparty!
debbie
@Major Major Major Major:
If he’s still living in Russia, then he’s risking his safety. Unless Putin ordered him to post that.
coin operated
@Uncle Ebeneezer: @Suzanne:
I do a lot of camping, and hands down the best of the lot is a brand called Thermarest. Guaranteed for life. Comfortable as you can get without lugging your SleepNumber out to the woods.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Baud:
Is he trying to get himself killed?
debbie
@Central Planning:
Stalin was still an ally. This theory makes no sense, and it reminds me more of an idiotic half-baked RWNJ meme than of anything else. But I’m no historian.
Another Scott
@Zinsky: Lots of people have lots of views. That’s part of what makes history so interesting – and important.
More people died in the Operation Meetinghouse firebombing of Tokyo than in Hiroshima or Nagasaki (or Dresden)…
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@debbie: he is still living in Russia, and again, he’s much more valuable to putin as an American ratfucker (which requires occasional posts like that) than a Russian cheerleader.
ETA letting him post that without consequence also makes putin look good
Raven
MSU has missed their last 13 shots in a row!
Mnemosyne
@Zinsky:
Additional information has been released from Japanese archives that shows that Vidal was not correct in his interpretation. You can’t fault him for not knowing facts that weren’t released until after his death, but his take was based on incomplete information and is no longer backed up by the facts.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Mr Stagger Lee:
I watched “The Right Stuff” several months ago, and a portion of the movie took place in 1947. Two guys are at a military base during a demonstration of some aircraft I think. One of them, after the other mentions the Russians as a potential threat, exclaims that the Russians are our allies.
Was there a popular view immediately post ww2 that the Soviets were our friends?
Mnemosyne
@patrick II:
One of the things that made the Pacific campaign so ugly is that the Japanese troops would fight to the death rather than surrender because they were told that the Allies would torture them just like the Japanese army tortured Allied POWs. So battles that normally would have ended with the outnumbered side surrendering turned into meatgrinders.
feathers
@Central Planning: It was done to end the war. That ending the war would save American lives and that using the atom bomb when it became available meant that Japan would remain outside the Soviet sphere of influence were merely bonuses.
World War II killed 60 million people. When people start getting fussy and nit-picky about how it was ended, I want to punch them. I don’t, and just lose some respect. It’s the ultimate whataboutism. It’s as silly as saying the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if the Jews had guns. Part of being an adult in the world is accepting that your life is constrained (and enlarged) in so many ways by the choices of people who came before you. Giving yourself a cookie for pretending that you would have made a different choice than the one that was the consensus choice of the time is a habit you should discourage your daughter from indulging in.
That said, it was a fascinating moment in history and examining it from the perspective of “how did we get to the point where this was the only realistic outcome?” is a discussion well worth having. The other thing to remember about an event this large is that there were many moving parts. There were people very worried about the Soviets in Japan, there were people who worried tremendously about unleashing the atom bomb as a weapon. My understanding was that this concern was mainly over it becoming something which might become a usual and expected part of war, rather than it being inappropriate to use at that time and place. As I recall, when the “we only did it to stop the Russians” theory came out, people got very angry. There was a fascinating article from a English or American historian working in Japan, who pointed out that the scholarly literature in Japan, in Japanese and working from the Imperials archives, pretty much unanimously came to the conclusion that it was only the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb that gave the Emperor the leverage and face-saving room to surrender.
;tldr, I just really hate counterfactuals. Invariably, they are being pushed by people who always have to be right, but they aren’t happy when other people are also right. It always seems to be more about wrongfooting others than convincing them of the truth. It’s the refuge of the worst professors. Niall Ferguson uses copious amounts of counterfactuals in his works.
Lapassionara
@Baud: of course. Out loud and proud.
Fair Economist
@Central Planning:
I don’t know of any reports on the real intents on the American side. Presumably both forcing the Japanese to surrender and impressing the Russians were motives.
We do have the discussions from the Japanese Cabinet and they show that a) a minority wanted peace before the bomb but a majority wanted continued war, b) the actual bombs did not change anybody’s opinion and for that matter were not even considered particularly important. Remember the firebombing of Tokyo killed well over 10 times as many people as nuking Nagasaki, so it was really nothing new in terms of damage.
The actual cause of suing for peace was that the Americans threatened to drop the *next* bomb on the Imperial Palace, and the “Emperor’s Party” of Cabinet ministers immediately changed their votes from war to peace, giving the peace faction a majority. The mechanism was the peculiar unconditional surrender with conditions, where the Americans agreed to allow the Emperor to keep his throne but claimed that wasn’t actually a condition. It’s unclear if that particular bit of sophistry would have allowed peace without the threat to blow up Hirohito’s house. I think a surrender with the explicit condition of the Emperor retaining power had been offered some time before, but the Americans had refused.
Note that at the time the Americans did not know what was going on in the Japanese Cabinet. This is hindsight.
sukabi
@Corner Stone: yeah, that’s pretty much what he said to Kamala Harris during his confirmation hearing.
Lapassionara
@feathers: after I read William Manchester’s memoir (part history) about his time as a marine in the Pacific war, I understood why dropping the bomb made sense at the time. Women on Okinawa were throwing their children off cliffs and jumping after them, they were so convinced that they would suffer a horrible fate if captured by American troops. Still, it was horrible, and anyone who thinks we should use tactical nukes is a lunatic.
Jim
In “Burn after Reading” by Laidas Farago he says the secret services almost made a deal to preserve the emperor and have Japan surrender. Then as the left hand didn’t know what right hand was doing the bombs were dropped.
–jim
Mnemosyne
@Central Planning:
Her assertion is not supported by the facts. Send her out to do more research and report back. ?
It’s a common urban legend among pacifists that the Japanese were going to surrender before Nagasaki, but it’s not supported by the facts. I hadn’t realized that they’ve now back-dated the legend to before Hiroshima.
sukabi
@Baud: be very crass to have a betting pool on how long it will be and by what method Mr. Snowden will be rendered mute.
J R in WV
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:
The Red Army crushed the German attack on the eastern front, eventually, and then rolled across eastern Europe and into Berlin. Partly this was possible because of American, British and Free French attacks in Northern Africa, Italy and, finally, in Normandy, France.
Those attacks kept the Germans from moving all their armored divisions into the Eastern front because they had to be prepared to fight the Western Allies invasion of Europe. So without the Russian Red Army, which took millions of casualties, WW II would very possibly had a different and terrible ending. It didn’t take long for people to forget that as the Cold War broke out soon after. But in 1947, yes, people probably still remembered the Russian sacrifices to defeat the Nazis.
And here we are, 73 years later, Russia is a fascist nation and we’re nearly taken over by fascists of our own, aided by the Russian fascists. So we may still lose WW II yet.
sukabi
@Suzanne: brownies…not that I would know.
Mnemosyne
@Lapassionara:
The Japanese actions in WWII are not quite as infamous today as the Nazis’ actions, but their treatment of Allied POWs was absolutely horrific. The Japanese people were told that the Allies would treat them the same way the Japanese had treated the countries they conquered, so their fear of being tortured and massacred by the Allies was very real.
RobNYNY
@Suzanne:
You’ll have to cadge some from the teenagers present.
afanasia
@Cckids: Sleeping outside when it isn’t raining or snowing is fantastic – in a real bed with duvets and lots of pillows. I’m not married to someone who will help me carry the bed outside anymore, though.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Mnemosyne:
Well there was that whole “Rape of Nanjing” thing prewar…
PJ
@feathers: the two options on the table before the Bomb proved to be viable were blockade and invasion. Blockade would have cost few US lives (in Japan) but would take much longer and would result in many million Japanese deaths. Invasion would costs hundreds of thousands of US lives and millions of Japanese. Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more then 200,000 Japanese, I believe, but this was fewer than had died in the bombing of Tokyo (or in the fighting on Okinawa, for that matter). The notion that the Japanese were just going to surrender because of the Russian invasion of Manchuria is absurd, given how fierce the fighting was on Okinawa, and that there was no surrender after Hiroshima, but only after it was understood we had more than one atomic bomb.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@PJ:
Would a demonstration have made an impression on the Japanese, negating the need for using the bombs on cities?
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: @? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: A very good novel, which (partly) deals with this at a visceral level, is Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, btw. Highly recommend.
PJ
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: demonstrating that we could be bomb the f*ck out of Tokyo didn’t seem to make a difference, so I would say no. I mean, they knew they had lost the war, but for all we knew, they were going to fight to the death (as in Okinawa). The other thing is is that despite the NM tests, no one was sure if the bomb would actually work.
Mnemosyne
My Sunday afternoon: laying down with a cat in my lap listening to someone practice their tap dancing in the alleyway behind our apartment. They have music and everything.
dnfree
@Raven: This thread is probably dead, but thanks for sharing your info! Small world, as we sometimes say.
Bill Arnold
Open thread, so
Russia is already warmed up for a massive attack on US energy grid
The author is this guy: Morgan Wright. Don’t know how partisan he is, but
Bold mine. I was worried a bit (call it paranoia if you prefer :-) in 2017 about a false-flag operation against one or more of the mainland US electric grids (East, West, Texas), to definitively spike the Trump-Russia investigation including breaking informal communications/organizing infrastructure (internet etc). I know. Paranoia. And the Trump team was too incompetent/frightened(/residual-patriotic) enough to pull it off.
Anyway, the new twist is that Russia, which is competent, could do it on Trump’s behalf. Voila! National emergency, President for Life, no pesky investigation/meddlesome Meuller, actual FEMA camps (infrastructure broken, have to feed/house/water the 10s of millions), the full authoritarian works.
Anyway, something to track. I no longer trust the Trump Family (and his backers) enough to rule this out definitively. (i.e. 100%)
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
South Korea would disagree with you.
Raven
@dnfree: Same to you, I have a soft spot for old salts.
Fair Economist
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:
Not in itself. The War Party (6 out of 13 in the cabinet) were willing to fight to the death of the last Japanese. The Emperor’s party (3 of 13) only cared about what would happened to the Emperor. The Peace Party (4 of 13) already wanted to surrender, but they were outvoted. (“Peace” is kind of a misnomer as they hadn’t opposed going to war, they just thought it was useless to continue.)
We had already largely destroyed Tokyo, their largest city, killing hundreds of thousands in the process. What “demonstration” could surpass that? We know from the archives of Cabinet discussions that the nuclear bombings we did were of little significance to them.
Cheryl Rofer
I see this thread has quite a discussion of the atom bombing of Japan in World War II. I don’t see anything that I seriously disagree with, except that the Manhattan Project scientists were sure enough that the Hiroshima bomb (Little Boy) would work that they never tested it. After Alamogordo, they knew that Fat Man would work too. I guess you can always argue that a bomb might not work, but the assurance for these two was as high as for any other bomb.
I’ll add a couple of things.
Japan was running out of food. That is part of the argument that they were ready to surrender anyway. Russia was about to invade. There were various factions in the government, and we don’t know how the discussions would have come out. There are various arguments revolving around particular documents and transcripts of meetings.
At the time, the president did not need to okay the use of nuclear weapons. They were looked upon as being part of the military’s repetoire. After the Nagasaki bombing, Truman learned that civilians had been present in both cities. He seems to have believed that they were military targets only until after the bombings. He said no to a third bombing for that reason. There was a plutonium core ready for a third weapon, but it wasn’t used. That core went on to kill two physicists in experiments.
My own feeling is that it was a different time. It’s useful to think things through in different ways and to try to learn what people were thinking on all sides, but I go easy on attributing blame. It was a horrible war, and people did horrible things. That’s why we set up the international order to, hopefully, head off doing something like that again.
Cheryl Rofer
Oh yes, the demonstration idea.
It just ran into too many logistical problems.
What if the Japanese put a bunch of prisoners on the test island? How to get the Japanese leadership to watch, how to get them there? And then would they believe it anyway? What if it was a dud?
The number of bombs was very limited. The military wasn’t willing to go to all that trouble.
Matt
Freeman Dyson, no hippie, changed his mind a while back about whether the bombs ended the war in Japan:
https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/freeman-dysons-interview
Another Scott
@Cheryl Rofer: Good points. Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
dnfree
@Raven: My dad didn’t talk about his service for a long time, until there started to be PT boat reunions in the 1980s. It turned out to be one of the most significant memories of his life. He wanted the “Navy Hymn” at his memorial service.
Bill Arnold
Another open thread item.
What kind of person signs an agreement like this? I knew about the campaign NDA, but this is just … Un-American
Trump had senior staff sign nondisclosure agreements. They’re supposed to last beyond his presidency.
Kinda like signing away one’s immortal soul, it is forever:
Mnemosyne
@Bill Arnold:
IANAL, but I’m pretty sure those are illegal under federal law since there are various disclosure requirements for government employees that cannot be overridden by an NDA.
mike in dc
@Mnemosyne:
Like others have said, their treatment of their “fellow” East Asians and Pacific Islanders was so barbarous that they were hated for generations. Some still harbor ill feelings to this day.
Matt McIrvin
@Bill Arnold: For sixty trillion years of reincarnations, like signing your thetan over to the Scientologists!
JR
@Central Planning: McNamara, who was below Lemay basically said that the firebombings were already atrocities in a scale larger than even the atomic bombs. Lemay (correctly) asserted that if we lost they all would have been hanged as war criminals. Doesn’t clarify your question but gives a context for what the strategic air command was thinking at the time.
Another Scott
@Matt: Interesting.
He certainly is opinionated, isn’t he, especially about politics? ;-)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
@mike in dc:
Yeah, I probably should have been more specific that I mean in the US, not in Asia. I actually have run into (mostly white) Americans who are puzzled about why most of the other countries in Asia still hate and fear Japan. A lot of that knowledge got shoved under the carpet in the US when we made Japan into an ally and major trading partner after the occupation ended.
(Though people on Okinawa will tell you that the US occupation still hasn’t ended …)
Vhh
@Mnemosyne: There was an attempted coup Aug 14-15 which sought to prevent the emperor’s surrender broadcast. It was put down.
Mnemosyne
@Matt:
Yes, but he seems to question the entire utility of mass bombing, regardless of whether they’re conventional or nuclear bombs.
And then there’s this:
Even a guy who doubts the overall utility of mass bombing thinks that Truman made the right decision based on the information he had at the time.
Lapassionara
@Cheryl Rofer: Thank you.
mike in dc
The American military still struggles with the problem of striking “legitimate” military/strategic targets while minimizing and avoiding civilian casualties. Seems particularly problematic with regard to decisions on whether to target terrorists with military/drone strikes. We’ve accidentally hit wedding parties(several times!), dropped a bomb in the first Gulf War that destroyed a bomb shelter and killed hundreds of civilians, and in the course of massive bombing campaigns have killed thousands of adjacent civilians as a matter of “collateral damage”. That being said, we appear to be on the moral high ground compared to what the Russians and Assad have been doing in Syria–using chemical agents, dropping barrel bombs and deliberately targeting civilian targets such as hospitals.
MoxieM
@Raven: WWII dads are great. Mine was in the USAAF in the Pacific Theatre. He was on Tinian while they readied the bombs, and as an NCO with no relationship to that effort, he said he knew absolutely nothing about them. So very tight secrecy was maintained, since it’s not a big place.
SFBayAreaGal
@Brachiator: So would the Phillipines. My dad saw some of the aftermath of what the Japanese did to the Filipinos. He only mentioned a couple of things he saw. Wouldn’t talk anything more about it.
frosty
@Suzanne: Never stopped me. After I was in the tent with the kid and he was asleep, I could pull out a flask while I read with a flashlight.
Amir Khalid
@Matt:
Didn’t Mueller fire one or two people from his team for having sent pro-Hillary tweets?
Bill Arnold
Yet another open thread item. Here:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/975346628113596417
Did President D.J. Trump, or whoever wrote this tweet, not think through what not taking notes during a meeting might mean? Like, perhaps McCabe’s phone, or a pen (or something surreptitious and tiny, if he was having people frisked), was recording? And that the recordings were (1) retained and (2) used to write accurate notes after the meeting?
Tom
@Another Scott: Scott – I agree with your comment but want to add one clarification. Alamagordo is midway up the east side of the Tularosa Basin, an elongate basin about 100 mile north to south by 60 miles east to west in south-central New Mexico, created by extensile faulting as part of the Rio Grande rift. (White Sands National Monument is almost dead center in the basin, and the Army’s White Sands Missile Range occupies most of the western half). The Trinity site where the prototype implosion atomic bomb was detonated is north of the northern end of the basin, and closer to Socorro than Alamagordo. This is important because there’s a fairly active movement in the Alamagordo area claiming that the residents were badly irradiated by fallout from the test. As best as can be determined from contemporary records, the wind direction the day of the test implies that the fallout traveled northeast over Chupadera Mesa (which is still a FUSRAP site) and other sparsely inhabited areas, rather than southeast towards Alamagordo.
Amir Khalid
@Mnemosyne:
I’ve mentioned before that Malaysians of my parents’ generation had horrific tales to tell their children about growing up during the Japanese Occupation of Malaya and Singapore, which in our case began with an invasion on the same day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Bill Arnold
@Matt McIrvin:
One particularly pathetic aspect is that even if such an agreement were enforceable, there are now genuinely secure ways to leak information, resistant to even a motivated nation state if one is very careful following cookbook OPSEC procedures.
e.g. https://securedrop.org/directory. (Signal might be OK too; not sure. Might need one or two smart burners and maybe a vpn etc.)
Karen Potter
@Central Planning: children’s grandfather “helped” build, his job was mostly purchasing materials, but he said they were told they would be used to prove how powerful they were to rest of world even if they weren’t really needed. We can’t really be sure just what was going on in Japan, but the mind set of US was “we have them, let’s use them” FIL said that the scientists couldn’t be sure just how much damage they would do until they had been dropped.
Brachiator
@SFBayAreaGal:
Yes. A co-worker’s father was imprisoned and brutalized by the Japanese. He lost an eye. He held on to his resentment until his youngest daughter married a young man of Japanese ancestry (the family came to the US some years after WW II).
Another Scott
@Tom: Thanks for the clarification. I shouldn’t rely on my (often faulty) memory on things like this.
Relatedly, it’s been widely reported that hundreds of thousands (or more) may eventually die as the result of above-ground nuclear testing:
(Emphasis added.)
A former colleague’s father worked on the Manhattan Project. He died early and was was part of the insurance program that was eventually created for irradiated nuclear workers.
The Manhattan Project may have been necessary, but the cost was and continues to be very, very high.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt
@Another Scott: He is opinionated, but he’s also very comfortable with opposing opinions. I always enjoy how his clear prose makes my head feel, usually in his reviews at nybooks.com.
Karen Potter
When you read about WWII little is mentioned about the invasion and occupation of Japan in China, it is also hard to find information about the use of Chinese as test subjects for bio weapons; there is a great deal of information about the Germans using prisoners as test subjects but little about the horrors the Japanese inflicted upon the people’s they conquered.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@sukabi: My personal guess is “self strangled suicide” by a Cat-5 cable.
Uncle Cosmo
@Central Planning: For some weeks prior to the atom bombings, the Japanese ambassador to the USSR was making strenuous efforts to enlist the Soviets (who were still neutral in the Pacific) in brokering a surrender short of the “unconditional” variety that had been the Allied position since FDR & Churchill met at Casablanca.
From the Allied POV “unconditional surrender” made perfect sense: There was good reason to believe that the armistice (not surrender) of November 1918 had fostered the Dolchstosslegende (“stab in the back myth”) that the Reichsheer had no’t in fact been defeated (no Allied solder had set foot on German soil as of 11/11/1918) but had been “stabbed in the back” by the civilians who took over after the Kaiser abdicated. This in turn led to Great War 2.0 after a 20-year truce. No one wanted a repeat of that.
Unfortunately it hamstrung the Allies with respect to the Japanese government, whose primary concern was to retain the Emperor (& incidentally not have him as the prime defendant in war crimes trial). Hence the negotiations in Moscow. However, Stalin at Potsdam had already committed to entering the Pacific war 3 months after Den’ Pobedy (Victory Day in Europe), which by Soviet accounting was May 9. So Molotov was stalling until the Red Army could go ripping through Manchuria & Korea – starting on August 9, when war was in fact declared. When “The Hammer” presented the declaration that day, the ambassador [Matsuoka?] said something like, What did we do to deserve this? But the main meaning for the Japanese was that the last feasible hope of negotiating terms had just ended.
August 9 also happens to be the day Nagasaki was A-bombed. And meantime there had been some rumblings in diplomatic circles that Truman was OK keeping the Emperor as a figurehead in a constitutional monarchy.
.
Bottom line, although Hirohito cited the A-bombs in his message to his people announcing surrender, the real reason was probably the Soviet declaration of war – greased a bit by the sense that the US would probably not insist on terms the Japanese couldn’t accept.
Mnemosyne
@Karen Potter:
This is kind of what I was trying to say — when you read stuff written in English about war crimes in WWII, at least 80 percent of it is about the Nazis.
Knowledge of the war crimes of Imperial Japan is still omnipresent in Asia, but many Americans are barely aware of them because our schools and historians usually focus on the war in Europe.