coalkirk wrote:More bullshift liberal revisionist history. Victory was far from inevitable. I'd bet you can rattle off the exact number of US servicemen killled in Iraq to the minute ( I picture you with a little chalk board tally next to your computer) but I'd also bet you have no idea of the number of US servicemen killed in just the pacific battles. We lost 12,500 on Okinawa alone, 6,000 at Guadalcanal, 5,000 in the Bataan death march. Causuality estimates were widely debated for the planned invasion of the Japan islands but the number agreed on by most accounts was 500,000 to 750,000 US killed alone.
Two early critics of the bombings were Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, who had together spurred the first bomb research in 1939 with a jointly written letter to President Roosevelt. Szilard, who had gone on to play a major role in the Manhattan Project, argued:
"Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?"
A number of scientists who worked on the bomb were against its use. Led by Dr. James Franck, seven scientists submitted a report to the Interim Committee (which advised the President) in May 1945, saying:
"If the United States were to be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race for armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons."
The above is from a Wiki article on this precise debate, complete with actual facts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
"Means of indiscriminate destruction?" No double standard? As we all know, history is written by the victors. But that doesn't mean we're as virtuous as we like to think.
And the last prediction? Pretty accurate for a crystal ball now 63 years old, huh?
) and he opposes torture of all kinds under all circumstances (at least until he started kissing up to the radical right a couple months ago 
).