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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 11/14/20

U.S. Biological Warfare Korean War Redux

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Who can disagree with that? Baker's book is one long argument against war crimes and the military mindset that produces such atrocities, and then acts to cover them up.

"Really secrecy is about mind control," Baker writes. "It's about deliberately imposed historical amnesia. If you can suppress all knowledge of something" for decades, you allow the myth of American decency and goodness to endure. By the time the truth comes out, the shock is muffled. The outrage response is inhibited." (pp. 332-333)

I understand Baker's concerns. I have shared many of his interests, as well as his frustrations. I also have tussled with FOIA over the years, with a few notable successes - obtaining a new, less redacted version of a CIA torture manual, as well as documents pertaining to a number of Guantanamo detainee deaths - and way too many rejections or forever-delayed FOIA defeats.

I have shared Baker's interest in the true facts behind the Korean War, as that war has been, as researcher Tom Powell reminds us in a new essay, "deliberately erased from cultural memory in order to hide [U.S.] misdeeds."

Powell is the son of John W. Powell, who was the first in the United States to use FOIA to reveal the extent of the U.S. cover-up of its collaboration with Japan's World War II biological warfare scientists in Unit 731. John Powell and his wife, and their associate at the 1950s English-language journal China Monthly Review, were prosecuted for sedition for daring to report on the germ warfare charges during the Korean War. (After years, the charges were finally dropped.)

Tom Powell, who has written critically about attempts to document the Korean War BW charges as a hoax, wrote to this author and noted the importance of Baker's research, but he reached much the same conclusion I did about the underlying weaknesses of Baker's approach:

"Baseless illustrates clearly the shortcomings of purely archival work - the academic prejudice for written documents over the eye-witness testimony". [In] Baker's love of the discovery process, rabbiting around archives playing cat and mouse with redactors, he fails to understand that documents can be forged, or placed to deliberately falsify the record"."

Powell's complaint about forged documents relates to Baker's seeming acceptance of the findings of scholar Milton Leitenberg, who claims he has definitively debunked the germ warfare charges by the publication of purported documents from China and the Soviet Union that claim the bacteriological warfare charges were a conspiracy by the Russian, Chinese and North Korean governments, who supposedly planted BW evidence deliberately to deceive.

There is not time and space in this essay to review the charges and analysis of Leitenberg's evidence. Those interested can pursue both Leitenberg and Powell's work, as well as other writings on the subject. (I will soon be publishing my research on this point.)

There is other evidence overlooked or minimized in Baker's book. He refers to the Korean War-era pamphlet, "I Accuse," written in 1952 by Stephen Endicott's father, the Rev. James Endicott. Baker notes that James "took the side of China and North Korea and said the germ-warfare accusations were true," and was threatened with treason charges in Canada as a result (p. 327). But James Endicott was also an eyewitness to the germ warfare, not just a backer of the Chinese and North Korean charges. This is what James Endicott wrote literally at the beginning of his pamphlet:

If you had seen what I have seen, what would you say?

What would you say if you had seen with your own eyes sections of the brains of children who had died from acute encephalitis following germ-war bombardments by U.S. aircraft?

". Would you be silent? That would make you an accomplice.

Or would you speak out?

I did all these things. I was there. I saw and heard the truth.

Somehow, Baker never refers to the eyewitness testimony of James Endicott.

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Jeffrey Kaye is the author of Cover-up at Guantanamo, and his articles can be found on Medium and Invectus.  He is a  retired psychologist.  He has written extensively on torture issues, psychological and (more...)
 

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