U.S. drone killings of civilians in Pakistan have WWII precedent

Long before American drones were murdering civilians in Pakistan, American pilots were committing similar war crimes in Germany

In a 1985 autobiography by the American who was the first pilot to break the sound barrier, the author described how, while serving in the US armed forces during World War II in the autumn of 1944, his fighter group was attacking Germany and "...assigned an area fifty miles by fifty miles and ordered to strafe anything that moved...We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it ... We were ordered to commit an atrocity, pure and simple, but the brass who approved this action probably felt justified because wartime Germany wasn't easily divided between 'innocent civilians' and its military machine. The farmer tilling his potato field might have been feeding German troops.”

Chuck Yeager, Yeager: An Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1985) pp. 79-80.

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New York Times honors American war criminal

Editor's Note: The insouciance with which the New York Times celebrates the life of the late atomic physicist Norman Ramsey, who died Nov. 4, is breathtaking. Accompanying their obituary (below), The Times published a photo of Ramsey signing the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki and killed tens of thousands of civilians, as if he were signing a birthday card. If Dr. Ramsey had been photographed signing the door of the alleged gas chamber at Auschwitz, the New York Times would have condemned him as a monster, but their laudatory obituary is oblivious to the horrors perpetrated at Nagasaki by war criminals like Ramsey, including Japanese children with acute radiation burns. This depraved indifference emanates from blind faith in the Allied dogma of The Good War, and the Talmudic mentality of Judaic-victim exceptionalism. 
                             

Norman Ramsey Dies at 96; Work Led to the Atomic Clock

By Jascha Hoffman

New York Times, November 7, 2011, page A19

Norman F. Ramsey in 1989

Ramsey signing the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan in 1945.

Norman F. Ramsey, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who developed a precise method to probe the structure of atoms and molecules and used it to devise a remarkably exact way to keep time, died on Friday in Wayland, Mass. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his wife, Ellie. In 1949, Dr. Ramsey invented an experimental technique to measure the frequencies of electromagnetic radiation most readily absorbed by atoms and molecules. The technique allowed scientists to investigate their structure with greater accuracy and enabled the development of a new kind of timekeeping device known as the atomic clock. Dr. Ramsey received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 for both achievements.

“If you made a list of the most outstanding physicists of the 20th century, he’d be among the leaders,” said Leon M. Lederman, emeritus director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., which Dr. Ramsey helped found.

Early in the 20th century, physicists began to decipher the structure of atoms from measurements of the wavelengths of light they released and absorbed, a method called atomic spectroscopy. In 1937, the physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi of Columbia University developed a means of studying atoms and molecules by sending a stream of them through rapidly alternating magnetic fields. As Dr. Rabi’s student at Columbia in the late 1930s, Dr. Ramsey worked to refine it.

In 1949, when he was at Harvard, Dr. Ramsey discovered a way to improve the technique’s accuracy: exposing the atoms and molecules to the magnetic fields only briefly as they entered and left the apparatus. His new approach — which Dr. Ramsey called the separated oscillatory fields method, but which is often simply referred to as the Ramsey method — is widely used today. Dr. Ramsey’s research helped lay the groundwork for nuclear magnetic resonance, whose applications include the M.R.I. technique now widely used for medical diagnosis. (Do his MRIs help diagnose elderly Japanese with radiation sickness from Nagasaki? -Michael Hoffman)

But the most immediate application of the Ramsey method has been in the development of highly accurate atomic clocks. Since 1967 it has been used to define the exact span of a second, not as a fraction of the time it takes Earth to revolve around the Sun, but as 9,192,631,770 radiation cycles of a cesium atom. In 1960, working with his student Daniel Kleppner, now an emeritus professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Ramsey invented a different type of atomic clock, known as the hydrogen maser, whose remarkable stability has since been used to confirm the minute effects of gravity on time as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Atomic clocks like the hydrogen maser are also used in the ground-based timing systems that track global positioning satellites. Dr. Ramsey did not anticipate that his laboratory technique would have such applications. “I didn’t even know there was a problem about clocks initially,” he said in a 1995 oral history interview. “My wristwatch was pretty good.”

Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. was born on Aug. 27, 1915, in Washington, the son of Minna Bauer Ramsey, a mathematics teacher, and Norman Foster Ramsey, an Army officer. After receiving his Ph.D. under Dr. Rabi at Columbia, he worked at the M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory and served as a radar consultant to the secretary of war.

In 1943 he went to Los Alamos, N.M., to work on the Manhattan Project, leading a team that helped assemble the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan (the Times has no other comment on his role in the atomic holocaust - Michael Hoffman).

After the war, he taught for nearly four decades at Harvard, mentoring scores of graduate students, many of whom went on to start their own research groups. Although he officially retired in 1986, he continued his work through his early 90s. In recent years, he collaborated with a team of British physicists to study the symmetry of the neutron, searching for evidence that it was not perfectly spherical. Dr. Ramsey presided over the founding of Fermilab and another major particle accelerator laboratory, the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where he was the first head of the physics department in the 1940s. As the first science adviser to NATO, he initiated summer school programs to train European scientists. He led a National Research Council committee that concluded in 1982 that contrary to the findings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, acoustical evidence did not support the existence of a second gunman in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Dr. Ramsey had an athletic flair. He learned to ski in Norway in the 1930s. Later, he took up long-board surfing and ice sailing, and he traveled with his second wife, Ellie Welch Ramsey, from the Himalayas to Antarctica. After having a knee replaced in the 1980s, he continued to ski. Dr. Ramsey’s first wife, Elinor, died in 1983. In addition to his wife, he is survived by four daughters, Margaret Kasschau, Patricia Ramsey, Winifred Swarr and Janet Farrell; two stepchildren, Marguerite and Gerard Welch; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Colleagues said Dr. Ramsey was a tall man with bright white hair who gestured energetically and walked briskly. “He had a messianic quality when talking about his work,” said Gerald Gabrielse, a physics professor at Harvard. William Phillips, a physicist at the University of Maryland, said Dr. Ramsey’s forceful presence and as his contributions “set the tone for a generation of physicists.”

(Emphasis supplied)

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9/11 hijacked by fake heroes

Stuck pigs (and presstitutes) squeal

By Paul Craig Roberts

September 22, 2011

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman

As an economist I have never had much patience with Paul Krugman’s economics, stuck as he is in 1940s-era Keynesian demand-side economics. I have sometimes concluded that Krugman had rather denounce Ronald Reagan that to acknowledge that supply-side economists have established that fiscal policy has supply-side, not just demand-side, effects.

However, Krugman does display at times a moral conscience. He did so on September 11 in his New York Times column, “The Years of Shame.” Krugman wrote that 9/11 was hijacked by “fake heroes” who used the event “to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight” and that “our professional pundits” lent their support to the misuse of the event.

The stuck pigs, of course, squealed loudly. The war criminal, Donald Rumsfeld, publicly cancelled his New York Times subscription, and the complicit presstitutes in Washington’s wars of aggression jumped on Krugman with spikes and hatchets.

Perhaps Krugman meant to use the plural and say “unrelated wars.” The US government has made war on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, resulting in massive destruction of homes, infrastructure, and lives of civilians, all in the name of one lie or the other. In addition, the US government is conducting military operations against the populations of three more Muslim countries—Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, with extensive loss of civilian life in Pakistan, a US ally. Drones are sent in week after week that blow up schools, medical centers, and farm communities, and each time Washington announces that they have killed “militants,” “al Qaeda,” “Taliban leaders.”

Thanks to what Krugman calls “our professional pundits” and Gerald Celente calls “presstitutes,” the American people know little if anything about the murder of countless civilians and displacement of millions of others in these six Muslim countries, which the Bush/Obama governments regard as “security threats,” or habitats of small elements that are “security threats,” to the single super-power.
Before I continue, think for a minute about the level of threat posed by these Muslim countries that lack internal unity, an air force, a navy, a modern army, and nuclear ICBMs. Compare this “threat” to the Soviet threat, which, at least, was potentially real. The Soviets had the Red Army, which had defeated Hitler and his high-class war machine. The Soviet Union had an amazing array of extremely powerful ICBMs with single and multiple nuclear warheads, and nuclear submarines outfitted with nuclear-armed missiles.

Somehow we survived 46 years of this threat without going to war. But Iraq, which all but the most stupid people on earth now know had no “weapons of mass destruction,” was such a threat that the US government felt not only compelled to invade but also justified to lie to the United Nations in order to attack and destroy a country that had done nothing whatsoever to us and posed no threat whatsoever.

The same for Afghanistan. The Taliban posed no threat whatsoever to the United States or its European allies.

Pakistan is a US ally; yet, Washington has murdered thousands of Pakistani civilians. The liars in Washington and the presstitute media always claim that murdered civilians are “al Qaeda terrorists.” Every time Washington blows up a hospital, a farmer’s home, a school, Washington issues a report that it has just killed some al Qaeda leader. Some of these leaders have been reported killed multiple times.

I’m not surprised that this does not sit well with Paul Krugman. The best thing in the Keynesians’ resume is not their economics—although it was better, perhaps, than the economics that could not explain the Great Depression—but their moral conscience. Keynesian economists, for the most part, cared about people and what happened to them. I knew many of the Keynesians and debated before university and professional audiences a handful of Keynesian Nobel prize-winners. I never thought that they were callous people. I never expected to miss them.

To return to Krugman: His message comes across most powerfully in the presstitute pundits’ response to him. Michelle Malkin misinterpreted Krugman’s courage as cowardice and called him a “smug coward.”

“Coward” was an epithet that the presstitutes seized upon. A Washington Post writer, Erik Wimple, declared Krugman “cowardly.”

After establishing Krugman to be a “coward,” the presstitutes, who delight in murdering “towel-heads” in six countries, escalated their attack on Krugman. Peter Bella declared Krugman to be “vile” and to have “no conscience.”

Bella’s interpretation of a moral conscience as its antithesis is a typical presstitute response. It led to attacks on the New York Times for having a “cowardly,” “bewildering,” “arrogant,” “vile,” contributor who “has no conscience” as a columnist.

Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post declared the New York Times for publishing Krugman’s column to be “a spiritual wasteland,” this from a “newspaper” that many regard as a CIA asset.

In other words, shut Krugman up. Cancel his column. We don’t want to hear anything from anyone that casts doubt on Washington’s murder, maiming, and dislocation of millions of people because of a “threat” that is a total lie. We are the exceptional nation. We are the light unto the world. Ordinary laws do not apply to us because we are exceptional. Laws are for underlings. We have “freedom and democracy.” Anyone who doubts us is evil and a terrorist and a pinko-liberal-commie.

It will be interesting to see if Krugman’s column survives his statement of truth. It will tell us whether America has succumbed totally to being the land of the liars, or whether a person of moral conscience still has a voice.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury under Ronald Reagan. His latest book, How the Economy was Lost, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at PaulCraigRoberts[at]yahoo.com

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Hoffman's Afterward: It is almost certain that some self-righteous skeptics who doubt the official miracle story of how the buildings were destroyed in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 (a doubt I share - see this writer's review of David Ray Griffin's excellent new book, 9/11: Ten Years Later), will call Krugman to task for accepting the official account of 9/11, even as he criticizes how it was exploited by war criminals. They may even question Dr. Krugman's integrity. I strongly disagree with this refusal to acknowledge the good will and sincerity of some of the people who accept the official story of anything, whether it be the mystical statistic of "Six Million Jews"  killed by the Nazis, or the "science" of "global warming." If we despise everyone who does not doubt everything that we doubt, we will end up supporting an inquisition in reverse -- of true believers.  Exhibiting a Pharisaic pride in the fact that we don't believe what those "compromised Publicans" believe (Luke 18:9-14), doesn't help advance the cause of truth; more humility might.

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