[Infowarrior] - Dave Zweifel: New book reveals censorship's perils

[Richard Forno]

 Dave Zweifel: New book reveals censorship's perils
By Dave Zweifel, Dec. 27, 2006
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/index.php?ntid=112653&ntpid=1

An edition of the Chicago Sun-Times last week had a story tucked away inside
the paper that underscored just how damaging secrecy in a democratic society
can be.

The story was about the late George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
reporter for the old Chicago Daily News, who sneaked into Nagasaki, Japan,
about a month after we dropped the second atomic bomb on that country in
August 1945.

Weller posed as an Army colonel to get into the ruined city, where he
interviewed U.S. and other Allied soldiers who had been liberated from POW
camps. He then wrote a series of articles about the strange and devastating
disease known as "Disease X," which was actually radiation sickness
afflicting those who had survived the bomb.

But none of Weller's stories made print. In the name of national security,
Gen. Douglas MacArthur's staff censored every one of the articles he had
written.

Weller, however, saved copies of the series, and after he died in 2002 at
the age of 95, his son Anthony found them in an old mildewed wooden crate.
He is now publishing them in a book called "First Into Nagasaki," due out
this week.

A researcher at Cornell University told the paper that had the articles
gotten past MacArthur's censors, they would have helped alert the American
public early on to the horrors of the atomic bomb and perhaps slowed the
rush to build the nuclear arsenals that plague the world today.

Instead, people throughout the world lived under the delusion that they
could actually survive an atomic bomb. As a kid who grew up after the war, I
remember how we'd have periodic drills jumping under our school desks to
practice what we'd do if the Soviet Union was on its way with atomic bombs.
During the '50s, Americans everywhere built extensive bomb shelters in their
back yards as if they could emerge and resume a normal life.

Weller's accounts 61 years too late showed that not only does an atomic bomb
create unfathomable destruction, the radiation it spills in the atmosphere
causes horrific sickness and a slow death to those exposed to it long after
it has exploded. We know that now, but now atomic bombs are virtually
everywhere.

The world could have known this soon after the first bombs were dropped and
maybe just maybe it might have led to saner decisions in the development of
atomic, then nuclear, weaponry.

But government censorship, by the freest country in the world, stopped that
from happening.

Dave Zweifel is the editor of The Capital Times. E-mail:
dzweifel at madison.com
Published: December 27, 2006