[Vision2020] Bishop: Bombing Hiroshima, Nagasaki Same As Terrorism

[Tbertruss at aol.com]

All:

We often hear support for the use of nuclear weapons against Japan in WWII.  
The USA had been attacked by Japan, and the quickest way to end the war and 
save US soldiers lives was to use nuclear weapons to force a quick surrender. 

But the ethical reasoning in the War on Terror pleads that the USA is morally 
superior to the "terrorists" in Iraq because we do not indiscriminately 
target civilians.  Then was not our use of nuclear weapons against Japan an act of 
"terrorism?"  

How is the targeting of civilians in Iraq by "terrorists," to fight the US 
occupation of a country that we bombed and invaded with no solid evidence that 
Iraq had attacked the USA, morally different from the targeting of tens of 
thousands of innocent civilians the US killed in the nuclear bombings in Japan in 
WWII?


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Bishop: Bombing Hiroshima, Nagasaki Same As Terrorism

POSTED: 8:25 pm PDT August 3, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said, 
that like terrorism today, the atomic bombs that the United States dropped on 
Japan to end World War II were unjustifiable because they failed to 
"discriminate between noncombatants and combatants."  

Bishop William Skylstad wrote a letter to the head of Japan's Catholic 
Bishops Conference in advance of Saturday's 60th anniversary of the bombing of 
Hiroshima. That atomic bomb and a second one that was dropped on Nagasaki three 
days later killed more than 130,000 people.

http://www.kirotv.com/news/4807499/detail.html

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Terrorism and nuclear weapons “fail to discriminate between combatants and 
noncombatants,” wrote Bishop William S. Skylstad of Spokane, Wash., in a letter 
to Bishop Augustinus Jun-ichi Nomura of Nagoya, Japan, who is president of the 
Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan. 

http://www.baltcatholicreview.org/story2.asp

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Vision2020 Post by Ted Moffett
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