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No the FBI is not accountable to the president.

Let me help: https://www.trumanlibrary.org/...

immediately after 9/11, we were the biggest recipient of world charity

Citation please? Where did the money go? Victim's families were compensated by federal government, buildings were rebuilt by insurance money, not quite understanding where all that "world charity" went? I understand there were many in-kind gifts and offers of assistance from many foreign nations, but wouldn't "the biggest (giving) of world charity" include money?

And, of course, the donations that streamed in made the https://www.trumanlibrary.org/...">Berlin Airlifts seem trivial by comparison, right? ("At the height of the campaign, one plane landed every 45 seconds at Tempelhof Airport." and delivered over 2 million tons of goods in 270,000 flights - the operation lasted almost a year.)

Thanks for the quote. I wasn't aware Truman had a diary.

Truman did say "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen", but the sign on his desk was "The buck stops here" which might or might not be appropriate for these cases. It would be interesting to know what Truman would have said about this - he didn't mince his words, for example: "I fired him [General MacArthur] because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail."

a lot of military reform (openly gay is a-ok

Using the military as lab rats for social-engineering experiments is bad defense policy.

Gee, looks like someone forgot to tell Harry Truman 'bout that...

I seriously doubt that.

The building was gutted and rebuilt from the basement to the roof 60 years ago.

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/abierowe/whitehse.htm

But you might want to check for pretzel crumbs under the sofa in the residence.

I was saying that no president can ultimately be held accountable for the actions of all the people below him, no more than any corporate CEO can be, or any parent can be.

Truman apparently felt differently:

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/buckstop.htm

not like we did not warn them

and the bomb was no worse then Japans actions

Ah, the "our actions were no worse than their actions" argument. So what does that make us, and how does it justify it? I would say that it wasn't any better either. I don't see how one country's atrocity justifies another country's atrocity. Moral relativism, at its finest.

We all agree that the Japanese did probably some of the most horrific shit any country could during WWII, but your argument implies that it was perfectly fine to nuke their civilians as well, most of whom had nothing to do with the atrocities in Nanking.

By the way, if you read the wikipedia article you linked to, it says that the Japanese asked the Chinese to surrender before the massacre, which they refused to do. That sounds similar to your "not like we did not warn them" argument.

And it's wrong. It was wrong for the soldiers in Nanking to commit rape and murder on civilians (or anyone, for that matter), even though they warned them in advance. The prior warning shouldn't give a green light to do whatever you want to do.

not like we did not warn them

and the bomb was no worse then Japans actions

Probably not very reliable, but: "The food situation in occupied Germany was initially very dire (see Eisenhower and German POWs). By the spring of 1946 the official ration in the U.S. zone was no more than 1275 calories per day, with some areas probably receiving as little as 700.

See also bit more reilable study, page nine.

Sounds like bullshit to me. See Contacting the Presidential Libraries. It lists the addresses of all the presidential libraries. eg:

• Herbert Hoover http://hoover.archives.gov/
• Franklin D. Roosevelt http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/
• Harry S. Truman http://www.trumanlibrary.org/
• Dwight D. Eisenhower http://eisenhower.archives.gov/
• George H Bush http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/

Most are .edu or .gov, which squatters can't use at all. I guess it's because everyone thinks the have to have a .com. Thus all the presidential candidates have an entirely inappropriate .com site instead of .org for their campaign, for instance. So they can't get "GWBushLibrary.com". Too fucking bad. Get GWBush.archives.gov or a subdomain of whatever institution manages it (probably a .edu).

Really now? That's news to me. If they don't do that then what is their job? I guess they aren't the ones who came up with the DMCA or any other bill that has been signed into law by the President? Congress (legislative) makes the laws. They pass the bills so the President (executive) signs them into law. The Supreme Court (judicial) then enforces those laws.

From this site:

I suspect "plausible deniability" wasn't in the lexicon when this once sat on a President's desk.

Surprisingly, the parent didn't post any links to the famous picture of the debacle. Well, I guess it turns out there are a few of them.

Here are three, including a wide shot I hadn't seen before..

W

The war minister and the two chiefs of staff opposed unconditional surrender. The impact of the Hiroshima attack was to bring further urgency and lubrication to the machinery of achieving peace, primarily by contributing to a situation which permitted the prime minister to bring the Emperor overtly and directly into a position where his decision for immediate acceptance of the Potsdam declaration could be used to override the remaining objectors. Thus, although the atomic bombs changed no votes of the Supreme War Direction Council oncerning the Potsdam terms, they did foreshorten the war and expedite the peace.

Indubitably the Hiroshima bomb and the rumor derived from interrogation of an American prisoner (B-29 pilot) who stated that an atom bomb attack on Tokyo was scheduled for 12 August introduced urgency in the minds of the government and magnified the pressure behind its moves to end the war.

There is little point in attempting more precisely to impute Japan's unconditional surrender to any one of the numerous causes which jointly and cumulatively were responsible for Japan's disaster.