Organizing Notes

Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....

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The collapsing US military & economic empire is making Washington & NATO even more dangerous. US could not beat the Taliban but thinks it can take on China-Russia-Iran...a sign of psychopathology for sure. We must all do more to help stop this western corporate arrogance that puts the future generations lives in despair. @BruceKGagnon

Monday, April 17, 2017

Previous U.S. Attacks on North Korea

Inside Fort Detrick, Maryland in the early days

I first wrote this blog entry in 2006 after reading an amazing book called “A Plague Upon Humanity” by Daniel Barenblatt. It reveals the hidden history of Japan’s biological warfare program before and during WW II.  Since we are currently in deep concern that the Trump war team will bomb North Korea it seems like a good time to retell this important story.

Barenblatt begins by revealing how Japan created a phony pretext in order to start the Manchurian war. In September 1931 Japanese army engineers secretly blew up the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway near Shenyang. The Japanese government then immediately blamed the explosion upon Chinese soldiers garrisoned nearby. Japan then attacked the Chinese troops, sleeping in their barracks at the time. A war was underway.

Early on Japan set up a biological warfare (BW) unit led by Shiro Ishii. BW units were established throughout Manchuria and China in Japanese army occupied territory. At these locations Chinese freedom fighters and civilians were used as lab rats and were given lethal doses of bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, typhus and typhoid. Bodies of infected prisoners were cut open, often while people still lived, to study the effects of the biological contamination. Japan’s BW program used infected rats and fleas, dropped from airplanes, to spread the deadly diseases killing entire Chinese villages. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese civilians were killed by Japan.

As WW II widened throughout the Pacific, Japan took their BW campaign to Japanese occupied islands. Japan also sent disease laden animals into Russia in hopes of spreading disease into that country. American prisoners of war were experimented on in Japanese labs as well.

Following Japanese surrender at the end of WW II one would have thought that these crimes against humanity would have been exposed and punished, similar to Nazi war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. But this was not the case. General Douglas MacArthur made a deal with Japan’s chief BW expert, Shiro Ishii, protecting him from prosecution by literally covering up the entire BW story. Ishii and his BW team gave their expertise to the US. According to Barenblatt, “Not only did they escape war crimes proceedings and public scrutiny by virtue of their cooperation with the US occupation authorities, they also became prominent public health officials and respected academic figures in Japanese university and government circles. A few became quite wealthy as executives of pharmaceutical companies.”

The Soviet Union knew about Japan’s BW program and in late 1949 called for Ishii to be apprehended and tried by the US occupation forces in Japan as the ringleader of the secret Japanese program. In response, Gen. MacArthur’s office in Tokyo denounced the Soviet charges of Japanese biological warfare and a US cover-up as evidence of communist propaganda.

In fact on March 13, 1948 the US War Department cabled instructions to Gen. MacArthur in Japan to give “immunity” to Japanese BW operatives. “Information retained from Ishii and associates may be retained in intelligence channels,” the instructions concluded.

There were war crimes trials in Japan after WW II. B.V.A. Roling, the last surviving judge from the Tokyo trials, who represented the Netherlands on the international tribunal, learned of this American deception many years later. “As one of the judges in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, it is a bitter experience for me to be informed now that centrally ordered Japanese war criminality of the most disgusting kind was kept secret from the Court by the US government,” Roling wrote. The US should be “ashamed because of the fact they withheld information from the Court with respect to the biological experiments of the Japanese in Manchuria on Chinese and American prisoners of war,” he said.

In the 1950’s Ishii was secretly taken to the US to lecture at Fort Detrick, Maryland on how to best conduct germ warfare. And as the Korean War heated up, Ishii was used by the US to advise on how to spread deadly disease in that war against North Korean and Chinese forces. North Korea, China and the Soviet Union all claimed in 1951-52 that the US Pentagon was using germ warfare on a large scale in the Korean War.

The Chinese showed footage and photographs of metallic US shells that snapped open upon hitting the ground, releasing a swarming cargo of insects that unleashed bubonic plague, smallpox, and anthrax. This method of delivery had been a favorite of Japan’s BW program.

Barenblatt notes that an international scientific investigating team, headed by a highly noted British biochemist from Cambridge University, did research in Korea and issued a report saying that sudden appearances of insects and spiders, of species not normally known in the region, in winter, and in association with the dropping of strange containers and objects by US military planes were evidence of bio-warfare. Lab tests performed on fleas discovered in such unusual circumstances, positively showed the presence of bubonic plague bacteria.

In some cases, US military jets, usually F-86 fighters, had flown over Korea dropping masses of fowl feathers tainted with anthrax.

In 1956 American journalist John Powell was charged with 13 counts of sedition for trying to expose the US BW campaign in Korea. In 1953 former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover brought Powell before congressional committees charging him with “un-American activities.” Years later, in the 1980’s, Powell’s story was finally aired in an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

So as we today hear China warning about the re-arming of Japan, with full support and encouragement of the U.S., can we not see some historical precedent for their worry? Both Japan and the US have shown, since WW II, that they will use extreme measures to subdue Korea and China in the quest for control and domination of the Asia-Pacific.

As the US today doubles its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, can there be any doubt that China and North Korea have not forgotten the stories of the past? Stories that to most Americans are unknown and long covered up.

Bruce

2 Comments:

Blogger Ken Jones said...

Thanks for the very thorough history lesson, Bruce. So savage our country has been and is.

4/17/17, 7:23 PM  
Anonymous Brother Jonah said...

George Washington was one of the people who would absolutely know about Amherst and the smallpox blankets. That's only for perspective even though some historians, some self-proclaimed, have a bitter taste about it. One here in Colorado Springs wrote that Ward Churchill should only be allowed to teach history on death row.

Smallpox was wiped out "in the wild" by 1975. The Soviets were said to have smallpox live virus 'for research' and the U.S. definitely did. Funny thing about BioWar.... how do you keep your own soldiers from contracting it, because the reasons for war always involve resources. Somebody would have to go in and extract those coveted-unto-death resources.

and how would one use the contaminated resources? See, those are the basic questions to ask anybody who supports BioWar and chemical and nuclear, because it would cause those who have a deformed conscience to think, because they obviously don't care about the Morality.

Sometimes they think of the consequences about using old fashioned "lead poisoning" projected by chemical reactions like with cordite or something similar, because wiping out a portion of a population only causes the other members to hate the ones who killed their mothers and fathers and babies and all the in between. Kind of Oedipus Wrecks. "his father's sword he hath girded on, with his wild harp slung behind him".

There's an effect on fecundity. Goes to all species, too. When the adults of any population perceive the imminent extinction of their group, the sperm count of males and the fecundity of the females increase. Kill a lot of the local population of coyotes or raccoons and the females in the next breeding cycle will be more fertile and willing, same with the males. The litters will go from perhaps 2 offspring in 2 or 3 cycles per year to 4 offspring 4 times annually. In humans there's more fraternal twins. even if the threat is perceived rather than actual.

Which is a long and fancy way of saying the war itself breeds (literally) the next war.

People who can convince themselves that war is moral and even necessary, eh... they might be persuaded with science.

4/19/17, 5:50 PM  

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