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In 1952, during the Korean War, the Chinese and North Koreans insinuated
that mysterious outbreaks of disease in North Korea and China[43] were due
to U.S. biological attacks.[44] Despite contrary assertions from the
International Red Cross and World Health Organization, whom the Chinese
denounced as Western-biased, the Chinese government pursued an investigation
by the World Peace Council.[45] A committee led by Joseph Needham gathered
evidence for a report that included testimony from eyewitnesses, doctors,
and four American Korean War prisoners who confirmed use of biological
weapons by the U.S.[45] The U.S. government denied the accusations and their
denial was generally supported by top scientists in the West.[45] In
eastern Europe, China, and North Korea it was widely believed that the
accusations were true.[43] A 1988 book on the Korean War, by Western
historians Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings also suggested the claims might be
true.[46][47]
In 1998, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagermann claimed that the accusations
were true in their book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets
from the Early Cold War and Korea[48] The book received mixed reviews, some
calling it "bad history"[49] and "appalling",[44] while others praised the
authors' case.[49] In the same year Endicott's book was published, Kathryn
Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg of the Cold War International History
Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington released a cache of
Soviet and Chinese documents that revealed the North Korean claim to have
been an elaborate disinformation campaign.[46][50] In addition, a Japanese
journalist claims to have seen similar evidence of a Soviet disinformation
campaign and that the evidence supporting its occurrence was faked.[45] In
2001, KGB historian Herbert Romerstein supported Weathersby and Leitenberg,
observing that Endicott's researches were purely based on accounts provided
by the Chinese government.[51]
In March 2010, the allegations were investigated by the Al Jazeera English
news program People & Power.[52] In this program, Professor Mori Masataka
investigated historical artifacts in the form of bomb casings from US
biological weapons, contemporary documentary evidence and eyewitness
testimonies.[52] He concluded that the United States did, in fact, test
biological weapons on North Korea during the Korean War.[52]
Dirty little secrets
Al Jazeera investigates claims that the US used germ warfare during the
Korean War.
04 Apr 2010 11:25 GMT | US & Canada, Latin America, Brazil, China, France
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This summer marks the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War, a
bloody three-year conflict that set Communist North Korea against a South
Korea supported by a UN coalition headed by the US.
It was the first armed confrontation of the Cold War and by the time a truce
was agreed in 1953, two million soldiers and two million civilians had been
killed or wounded.
Six decades on, the conflict is still not formally resolved.
Troops from both sides continue to face each other across the 38th parallel,
while the relationship between Washington and Pyongyang, the North Korean
capital, is dominated by acrimonious quarrels over the latter's nuclear
weapons programme.
But there is another bitter and intractable dispute that continues to haunt
both sides.
North Korea alleges that the US used biological weapons against Korean
civilians during the war– dropping "germ" bombs containing insects,
shellfish and feathers infected with anthrax, typhoid and bubonic plague on
villages across the country.
The US has always vehemently denied these claims, dismissing them as crude
and outlandish communist propaganda from a secretive and totalitarian state.
Nevertheless, the accusations have refused to go away. Pyongyang continues
to press for an apology for an "outrage" that the US insists never happened.
Professor Mori Masataka has been trying to unravel the truth about alleged
germ warfare
Twenty-year mystery
In a specially extended edition, People & Power set out to investigate this
extraordinary story.
Our journey began in North Korea where we were given unprecedented access to
follow a leading Japanese academic, Professor Mori Masataka, who has been
trying to unravel the mystery for the last twenty years.
On this, his fourth visit to the country, Mori's intention was to talk to
men who claim to have witnessed, first hand, biological attacks on villages
in 1952.
But neither he nor People & Power's location producer, Tim Tate, were under
any illusions.
North Korea is one of the world's most secretive states and is usually
impenetrable to journalists. Everywhere our cameras went, government
officials went too, strictly monitoring where and what we could film.
In a vast museum in the centre of Pyongyang, Mori explored a room given over
to what the North Koreans claim is direct evidence of US germ warfare –
including specimen jars filled with flies, mosquitoes and fleas all
allegedly injected with deadly pathogens.
A smartly uniformed army officer, Captain Ryu Uk Hui, drew his attention to
some salvaged bomb casings.
On impact, she said, they were adapted to split open and release the insects
to infect the local population. A film-show followed.
North Koreans said masses of insects crawled around bomb casings which fell
in the snow
The grainy black and white footage, purportedly North Korean news film from
1952, appeared to show masses of insects crawling on the snow covered ground
beside the bomb casings.
All this could have been phony, of course, and that is how the US has always
responded to such claims, especially to filmed "confessions" from 36
captured US airmen - also screened in Pyongyang's museum - in which they
give the North Koreans apparently detailed accounts of their participation
in the US "germ" raids.
Accounts that, it must be said, were all retracted on the air crews' return
home to the US after the war.
Hwanjin
But other testimony is more difficult to fake convincingly.
Later, we are driven deep into the North Korean countryside, to a village
called Hwanjin, where two elderly farmers are patiently waiting.
It is clear they have been tidied up for the occasion and both wore
patriotic badges pinned to their tunics, yet their weathered faces,
calloused hands and still grimy fingernails speak of long years spent in the
fields.
Although it is impossible to be sure, neither seems to be a Communist Party
apparatchik primed for the occasion. And one speaks with convincing passion
about the events that took the life of his father and many others, in the
days after the insects came.
"It was in March", says Yun Chang Bin. "The flies were big and their colour
was brown-ish.
"Not long after that, about April, terrible epidemics like typhoid fever
were spread. People in the village developed high temperatures. Loss of
appetite and then aches on the arms and legs, there was much pain."
There were some 50 households in the village, he went on, and more than
thirty people died.
"My father died. He suffered a high fever, and then he was not able to use
the lower half of his body, he wasn't able to eat and was not able to move."
As his fellow farmer nods encouragingly beside him, Yun Chang Bin looks
directly at Professor Mori.
"I want you to go and tell the peace-loving people in the world about the
atrocity the Americans committed to inflict pain to us, to make us unhappy,
to kill all us Korean people, by scattering germ bombs to exterminate us."
Tears and grimace
At another village, another eyewitness, Li San, Bum holds his arms out as he
describe the iron bomb that almost six decades ago had tumbled out of a low
flying plane onto a nearby frozen lake, spilling its cargo of insects out
onto the snow. And then the villagers began to get sick and die.
"When they moved their bowels their stools had blood in them. And then they
developed fever, and the fever made them vomit everything. My grandmother
died after contracting this fever. One of my uncles died as well. So we
should regard the Americans as arch enemies - how can we think well of them,
" Li San says.
Mori has interviewed dozens of North Koreans over the years and has heard
similar tales from all of them. "They told me their stories, shedding tears
and grimacing with anger. They told me this germ warfare actually happened."
Yun Chang Bin says his father died from high fever after the US bombed near
his village
But however convincing he has found these accounts, Mori knows that
testimony from North Korean citizens will not be enough to convince a
sceptical world that the US used germ warfare in Korea.
"A scientific investigation or medical or biological investigation should be
carried out. I think it is definitely necessary that a non-political purely
-scientific organisation should be sent to North Korea to investigate", Mori
says.
As it happens, within months of the original allegations being made back in
the 1950s, North Korea invited an international commission to visit the
country.
International commission
Composed of scientists from France, Italy, Sweden, the Soviet Union and
Brazil, and led by Joseph Needham, a distinguished - if left-leaning -
British embryologist, the commission toured the affected areas, interviewed
the sick and the dying and carried out a detailed analysis of their
infections.
The resulting 600-page report included results of post-mortem on the victims
It concluded that germ warfare had been deployed exactly as the North
Koreans claimed. Yet despite its apparent wealth of scientific evidence, it
was again dismissed by the US as communist disinformation.
Which is why, if a new international enquiry was ever undertaken, it would
have to spread its net far further than North Korea and to the US, in
particular, where the truth almost certainly lies, buried deep in the Cold
War secrets of a superpower.
It was there that People & Power discovered that during the 1940s and 1950s
American scientists at the US Army base in Fort Detrick, Maryland, had
developed ways of delivering bomb-loads of insects infected with bubonic
plague and other deadly pathogens.
Our investigations also uncovered two remarkable documents in the US
National Archives.
Unit 731
They revealed that the US had bought the expertise of Unit 731, a Japanese
army biological warfare team, which conducted human experiments in the 1930s
and 1940s to perfect the technology of bacteriological warfare: in World
War 2, the Japanese military had dropped thousands of "germ bombs" across
Northern China, killing millions of civilians.
A third crucial document - marked "Top Secret" - showed that in September
1951, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued orders to begin "large scale field
tests ... to determine the effectiveness of specific BW [bacteriological
warfare] agents under operational conditions."
If these "field tests" were indeed undertaken, then they may have drawn
again on the expertise of the Japanese biological warfare team.
In Japan, People & Power found home video footage from one of the former
members of that team, shot just before his death, in which he claimed that
its leaders had indeed assisted the US in mounting "an attack" in Korea.
But perhaps the most telling evidence came from a former US air force
officer who took part in bombing raids over North Korea.
Kenneth Enoch was shot down in January 1952 and held as a POW for 20 months.
"Confessions"
While in captivity, he was one of 36 US air force officers who made written
and filmed "confessions" that they had taken part in "germ bomb" missions.
When these POWs were repatriated in 1953, the US department of defence
threatened to charge them with treason for co-operating with their captors.
Each then retracted their confessions in front of military cameras: each
claimed they had been tortured or indoctrinated by North Korean and Chinese
guards.
But when we tracked down and interviewed Enoch, now a sprightly 85 and
living in a gated retirement community in Texas, he denied having been ill-
treated or indoctrinated – and appeared to make at least a partial
admission that the US did use biological weapons in the Korean War.
"The people who deal in that don't have to go and fight, and that's a pretty
sweet deal for them. You know, but they send it with you," he said.
Nevertheless, he continued to deny that he personally played any part in
biological weapons attacks.
At one point, Enoch said his statements had been coerced by the North
Koreans
Records of Enoch's bombing missions over North Korea were removed by US air
force investigators from the official records in March 1952 – two months
after he was captured and one week before he made his confession to "germ
warfare".
People & Power asked both the US state department and the department of
defence for an interview about the issue raised in our film.
They turned down the offer and also declined to answer ten specific
questions we put to them about North Korea's allegations.
"Baseless claims"
Instead, a spokesman for the US administration dismissed the claims as "
baseless" and said they were "the disinformation campaign that refuses to
die."
So who is to be believed? Professor Mori Masataka, thinks he knows the
answer. "Use of germ weapons in war is in breach of the Geneva Convention. I
think that's why the Americans are refusing to admit the allegations. But I
have no doubt. I'm absolutely sure that this happened."
The clear implication, of course, is that were North Korea's claims ever to
be proved, the US might be open to prosecution for war crimes – which would
be awkward, to say the least, at a time when the US is relying on its moral
authority to underpin international efforts to combat global terrorism and
nuclear proliferation.
Either way, one thing is clear. Until the allegations are laid to rest and
the US's innocence or culpability is established beyond doubt - perhaps by
an independent enquiry – one of the most enduring Cold War mysteries will
continue to haunt Washington's relationship with the world's most secretive
state.
This episode of People & Power aired from Wednesday, March 10, 2010. | s******n
发帖数: 518 | 2 美国是撒慌大国
一些总相信美国资料，认为美国的话更可信的人，是极为愚蠢的 |
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