From Korea To Abu Ghraib -
War, Bio-Weapons, Torture And Back
By
Moon Of Alabama
April
27, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-
In
Why North Korea Needs Nukes - And How To End
That we pointed
to the utter destruction the U.S. and its allies
waged in the war on Korea on all parts of the
country. That North Korea seeks "weapons of mass
destruction" is quite understandable when one
takes into account the
hundreds of thousands tons of napalm
used against it. But even Napalm and the
criminal destruction of North Korean dams were
not the worst depravation the U.S. applied.
Biological warfare agents, primarily anthrax,
were dropped over North Korea and China and
killed civilians. The U.S./UN command denied
such use and covered it up. One consequence of
that cover up was the development of torture
methods in the U.S. SERE pilot training programs
and their later proliferation into criminal
abuses in Guantanamo, Abu Graibh and elsewhere.
An important piece of evidence of this trail was
recently and for the first time re-published on
the web
During the 1950s war on Korea heavy air to air
fights were waged near the Chinese border which
led to significant losses of airplane on both
sides especially along the
MiG Alley:
USAF
pilots nicknamed April 12, 1951 "Black
Thursday", after 30 MiG-15s attacked three
squadrons of B-29 bombers (36 planes)
escorted by approximately 100 F-80s and
F-84s. The MiGs were fast enough to engage
the B-29s and extend away from their
escorts. Three B-29s were shot down and
seven more were damaged, with no casualties
on the communist side.
During "Black Thursday" and on other occasions
U.S. bomber pilots were captured. Some of them
admitted to have dropped biological weapons
over China and northern Korea. Their confessions
were published in writing and publicized on
Korean, Chinese and Russian radio.
The
U.S. (UN) command under U.S. General MacArthur
denied any use of biological warfare agents. It
claimed that the downed pilots were tortured to
give false confessions.
Since
World War II the U.S. Airforce and Navy had
established training courses in Survival,
Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) for pilots
that might be captured by enemies. During these
courses "controlled" torture was used to provide
realistic training. Decades later, during the
war of terror and on Iraq, the CIA hired two
psychologists as "behavioral science
consultants" from the SERE training staff to
teach its agents how to use torture on
prisoners. The absolutely inhuman and dangerous
methods those SERE "experts" devised
proliferated to the U.S. military which,
together with the CIA, used them on alleged
enemy combatants in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and
other places.
According to the Senate Armed Services Committee
Report (pdf) on
U.S. torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo and CIA black sites,
SERE techniques originated in
Chinese Communist methods in the Korean War
employed to extract false confessions from
captured U.S. personal.
(During the 1960s the CIA itself developed
additional "scientific" torture methods and
published them
in the KUBARK Counterintelligence
Interrogation and Human Resource Exploitation
Training Manual. U.S. personal as well as
several south American militia were trained in
and used these abusive and illegal methods.)
The
torture training at the SERE schools and the
abuse was all based on a big lie.
The U.S. had used biological weapons in the
Korea war. It also
used chemical weapons and suppressed
investigations into it.
Its pilots dropped bombs with biological warfare
agents over China and Korea. Theirs were not
false confessions extracted by Chinese Communist
methods. The captured U.S. pilots were telling
the truth.
The SERE
torture resistance training and its abuse are
based on the bigger lie about the non-use
biological agents in the war on Korea.
(The
Geneva Protocol of 1925 generally prohibited the
use of biological agents but the specific
Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention was only
developed and signed in 1972.)
The U.S. and UK developed extensive biological
warfare programs during World War II but those
weapons were not put to use in the European
theater. The Japanese used biological weapons,
with mixed success, in China and elsewhere. At
the end of World War II the Japanese biological
warfare
Unit 731 was
taken over by the U.S. military:
[General] MacArthur struck a deal with
Japanese informants—he secretly granted
immunity to the physicians of Unit 731,
including their leader, in exchange for
providing America, but not the other wartime
allies, with their research on biological
warfare and data from human experimentation.
American occupation authorities monitored
the activities of former unit members,
including reading and censoring their mail.
The U.S. believed that the research data was
valuable.
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During and after the war on Korea the Chinese
government alleged the use of biological weapons
on Korean and Chinese civilians by the U.S. The
U.S. denied. A commission was
called upon to
investigate:
To
convince the world of the truth of their
claims, the North Koreans and Chinese,
sponsored a purported independent
commission, using the auspices of the World
Peace Council, gathering together a number
of leftist scientists from around the world.
Most surprisingly, this commission, which
came to be known as the International
Scientific Commission, or ISC, was headed by
one of the foremost British scientists of
his time, Sir Joseph Needham. The ISC
travelled to China and North Korea in the
summer of 1952 and by the end of the year
produced a report that corroborated the
Chinese and North Korean claims that the
U.S. had used biological weapons in an
experimental fashion on civilian
populations.
For a long time the commission's report and its
appendices with the witness statements were
suppressed and not available online. Jefferey
Kay, a psychologist and
author living
in northern California, dug them up and recently
published them
(recommended) on the web for the first time. You
can read them here:
Sir
Joseph Needham was blacklisted by the U.S.
during the McCarthy anti-communist campaign.
General MacArthur, one of the foremost war
criminals ever,
covered up the war crimes of the Japanese
and especially of Unit 731. He took care to
integrate the Japanese biological weapon
experience into the U.S. military resources.
Under his command biological agents were then
used against Korean and and Chinese civilians
and military units. When his pilots confessed,
he denied all such reports and alleged
"brainwashing" through torture by the Chinese.
This again led to torture "simulations" in U.S.
SERE training from which recent U.S. torture in
Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere derived.
U.S. media and the public have a general amnesia
whenever it comes to U.S. war crimes - no matter
how recent. The Senate report on CIA torture in
Iraq and elsewhere is still suppressed. But U.S.
war crimes do not end. Whenever "threatened"
with compromise, the U.S. tends to seeks the
belligerent ways. As Noam Chomsky reiterates in
relation to the current campaign for
another war on Korea:
[V]ery
strikingly [..] there’s one lesson that you
discover when you carefully look at the
historical record. What I just described
about North Korea is pretty typical. Over
and over again, there are possibilities of
diplomacy and negotiation, which might not
succeed—you can’t be sure if you don’t try
them—but which look pretty promising, which
are abandoned, dismissed, literally without
comment, in favor of increased force and
violence.
For an example see this influential sitting U.S.
Senator who
argues for
"preemptive" strikes against North Korea's
missile program without any regard for the
people who's life would be destroyed by them:
“It
would be bad for the Korean Peninsula. It
would be bad for China. It would be bad for
Japan, be bad for South Korea. It would be
the end of North Korea. But what it would
not do is hit America and the only way it
could ever come to America is with a
missile.”
Considering the historical record of the United
States of committing and covering up warcrimes
as well as its general belligerence, North Korea
and other nations are probably well advised to
stick to their nuclear and missile programs.
This article was first published by
Moon Of Alabama-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
