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American State Terrorism
and Biological Warfare
Against the Korean People

Beyond a reasonable doubt

by Faiza Rady
Al-Ahram Weekly, Cairo
6-12 April 2000; Issue No. 476
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2000/476/in1.htm

In an unprecedented move last week, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) accused the United States of having committed “crimes against humanity” and called for the creation of a special UN war crimes tribunal to investigate the mass murder of North Korean civilians during the 1950-53 Korean War.

In a memorandum addressed to the UN, the DPRK blasted the US military for perpetrating torture, massacres, the indiscriminate bombing of civilians and biological warfare.

At a press conference in New York last Friday, Li Hyong Chol, the DPRK’s ambassador to the UN, accused the US military of killing “more than one million innocent civilians” when US troops occupied parts of North Korea during the war.

“In recent years, the United States is making much ado, as if it is concerned about genocide occurring in other parts of the word under the signboard of protection of human rights — posing itself as the defender of world peace,” said Li in an evident reference to the US-sponsored embargo against Iraq, which the Clinton administration justifies in terms of Iraq’s alleged capabilities to produce biological weapons of mass destruction.

“This is nothing more than an attempt for a criminal to cover up its true colour and camouflage it as an angel,” added Li.

As expected, US State Department officials vociferously denied the charges, which actually first surfaced in 1952. Dismissing the DPRK’s claims as a rehashed version of communist propaganda, Mary Ellen Glynn, the spokeswoman at the US mission, described the allegations as “groundless” and “without basis in fact,” then and now.

While the Clinton administration went on the warpath to undermine the DPRK’s credibility, the North Koreans presented the UN with a long list of hard facts. In this memorandum, the DPRK charged that the mass killings and the use of biological warfare had been confirmed in the wake of recently declassified US government acts and through the testimonies of soldiers and victims and eyewitness accounts.

Listing a series of war crimes, the memorandum painstakingly documents the ruthless and routine mass killings of civilians.

“In Sariwon City, on 5 December 1950,” reads the document, “the occupiers arrested and took at least 950 inhabitants to Mt. Mara and then machine-gunned them to death.”

In another case among many,

“On 18 October 1950, the US aggressors arrested more than 900 innocent civilians and herded them into the air-raid shelter of the Sinchon County Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea and set them on fire after pouring gasoline over them, killing every one.”

The narration of similar atrocities extends over the nine-page document, with a focus on the use of biological weapons. According to the memorandum, germ weapons were part and parcel of the US military command’s offensive strategy.

On 28 January 1952, the US reportedly intensified its air offensive by dropping large numbers of flies, flees, bedbugs and insects carrying contagious viruses over the Ichon area. The insects were ingeniously carried in “bomblets”, a kind of hollowed-out bomb that reportedly breaks apart when it hits the ground, dispersing its contents.

Further escalating their assault over the following months and conducting an “all-out germ war,” the US launched a wide-scale bombing campaign in various provinces between January and March 1952.

US planes dropped various germ-carrying bomblets during an estimated 804 sorties on 169 villages and towns. These bombings led to an epidemic of atypical diseases in the area, including cholera, the plague, encephalitis and anthrax (a disease killing sheep and cattle, but transmissible to humans).

In addition to spreading killer diseases, the US military also used POWs as human guinea pigs to test the effectiveness of germ warfare in a “controlled” environment. According to a United Press report published on 18 May 1951, a group of US scientists injected 1,400 North Korean POWs incarcerated on Koje Island with various germs. As a result, 80 per cent of these POWs were infected with an unknown disease.

Can the truth of such testimonies be verified? Partly declassified Chinese, Canadian and US state archives are now available and provide damning evidence against the US. Despite decades of self-righteous US posturing, replete with vehement denials of the North Korean government’s accusations, independent researchers have recently confirmed the DPRK’s version of history.

Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, two Canadian historians who spent five years investigating declassified archives in China, Canada and the US — in addition to conducting extensive interviews and field work — concluded that the US had been actively developing biological weapons since the end of World War II. According to the two historians, the US tested these weapons by bombing parts of North Korea and China with anthrax, encephalitis and other diseases in early 1952.

While the US media has generally ignored Endicott’s and Hagerman’s findings and the Clinton administration continues to stubbornly dismiss the evidence, their research has won critical recognition from reputable experts on war crimes.

“For reasonable people,” argues Endicott, “we think we’ve established documentation beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The documentation includes the testimony of Dr John Burton, the former head of the Australian Foreign Affairs Department, who went to China in 1952 to investigate the allegations of biological warfare. Burton wrote in a letter to Endicott in April 1977:

“When I returned, Alan Watt, my successor at the Foreign Affairs Department, informed me that he had demanded answers from Washington and was told that the United States had indeed used biological arms in Korea, but only on an experimental basis.”

In fact, the US approved the use of biological warfare early in the day. On 27 October 1950, only two weeks after China had dispatched a military contingent to assist the North Koreans against concerted US assaults, then US Secretary of Defence George Marshall gave the military the green light to launch a programme for biological warfare.

The declassified records show that research focused on spreading diseases like botulism (a kind of food poisoning caused by a toxin), cholera, dysentery and typhoid through the use of anti-personnel weapons.

At the time, the US strategy kept its research secret in order to camouflage germ warfare as “natural” epidemics, endemic to poor countries of the South.

Reviewing China’s files on US germ warfare, Endicott and Hagerman noted the similarities between the Chinese and North Korean experiences.

In China’s Liaoning province, eye-witness accounts tell of a comparable number of US plane sorties and refer to unusual concentrations of insects — particularly flies and fleas — following the bombings. Medical personnel records also note the presence of insects “alien” to the region and highly resistant to the cold.

Following the bombings, epidemics of the plague, cholera and anthrax hit the region with a vengeance.

While such diseases were not unknown in Liaoning province, they had always been contained. In neighbouring North Korea, the last plague epidemic dated back to 1912 and epidemics of cholera had been wiped out since 1946.

Analysis by Chinese physicians of an epidemic of acute toxic encephalitis in Liaoning province revealed that the strain was different from the endemic one. After evaluating the available data, a local team of physicians, assisted by visiting medical teams, concluded that the epidemics were “man-made” — the consequence of biological warfare.

Despite the evidence and the DPRK’s plea for a UN-sponsored international tribunal to sue the US for “crimes against humanity”, the case will almost certainly remain closed. Should the Security Council call for a resolution to establish a new Nuremberg trial, it would, in all probability, be vetoed by the US.

Related pages

Weapons of American Terrorism: Chemical & Biological Weapons

American Terrorism and Genocide of the Korean People

The No Gun Ri Massacre

Neighborhood Bully: American Militarism
interview with Ramsey Clark

Related sites

Korea Truth Commission
http://www.koreatruthcommission.org/english/english.html

“If you’ve found your way to this site, you’re probably someone who believes in justice. You may already be aware of the terrible massacres of unarmed and innocent Korean villagers at the hands of U.S. troops during the 1950/53 Korean War. But if you weren’t aware of it, it’s not your fault. For fifty years it has remained one of the best concealed chapters of U.S. military history.”

A NEW LOOK AT THE KOREAN WAR
by John H. Kim
http://www.usa-outofkorea.org/jkim.html

“The U.S. Army, Air Force and Navy were directly involved in the killing of about several million Korean civilians — both South Koreans and North Koreans — at many locations throughout Korea, including Masan, Sachon, Tanyang, Iksan, Changyong, Wegwan, Ducksung, Sinchun, Wonsan, Pyongyang, etc. Several hundreds of civilian refugees were blown apart when the U.S. Army blew up Wegwan and Ducksung bridges in S. Korea.”

KOREA
http://www.iacenter.org/korea_top.htm

Index page for a collection of articles and reports about American war crimes during the Korean genocide, as well as current events in Korea.

KOREA TRUTH COMMISSION / INTERNATIONAL ACTION CENTER
http://www.iacenter.org/korea_tc.htm

“Since September of 1999, evidences of more than 160 instances of US-led military attacks on more than 2.5 million Korean non-combatants (Washington Post, June 13, 2000 ) during the Korean War have surfaced. Hundreds of thousands of children, women, and elderly people are believed to have been massacred as a result of orders from the top U.S. military leadership.”

The People’s Korea
http://www.korea-np.co.jp/pk/

This North Korean website has important information on American war crimes during the Korean Genocide. In particular, see:

The Korean War http://www.korea-np.co.jp/pk/military/category36.htm This is an index page for many articles and documents. An example:

DPRK Foreign Ministry memorandum on GI mass killings http://www.korea-np.co.jp/pk/135th_issue/2000032902.htm

This page has a great deal of information, including the amount and type of bombings, the civilian targets and the many massacres carried out by American troops.

“The fact-finding group of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, in its report on the investigation made into the [American] GIs’ atrocities in the North Korea during the war, said:  ‘Every fact proves that this was a war of mass destruction, in which much more houses and food rather than military targets and war supplies were destroyed and more women and aged men than combatants killed. This war was against life itself.’”

Bibliography

The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951:
A Nonconformist History of Our Times
by I. F. Stone
Monthly Review Press, 1952; ASIN 0-316-81770-8

Rogue State:
A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
by William Blum

Killing Hope:
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII
by William Blum

The Origins of the Korean War
by Bruce Cumings
Princeton University Press, 1990

Blackshirts and Reds:
Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
by Michael Parenti

Apocalypse 1945:
The Destruction of Dresden
by David Irving

The Beast Reawakens
by Martin A. Lee

What Uncle Sam Really Wants
by Noam Chomsky

Bloody Hell:
The Price Soldiers Pay
by Daniel Hallock

The Fire This Time:
U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf
by Ramsey Clark

Desert Slaughter:
The Imperialist War Against Iraq
by the Workers League

Against Empire
by Michael Parenti

The Sword and the Dollar:
Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race
by Michael Parenti

Lies My Teacher Told Me:
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
by James Loewen

Deadly Deceits:
My 25 years in the CIA
by Ralph W. McGehee

A People’s History of the United States:
1492 — Present
by Howard Zinn

The Real Terror Network:
Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda
by Edward S. Herman

Pirates and Emperors, Old and New:
International Terrorism in the Real World
by Noam Chomsky

Western State Terrorism
Alexander George, editor; essays by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Gerry O’Sullivan and others

Terrorizing the Neighborhood:
American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era
by Noam Chomsky
Pressure Drop Press, 1991

The Culture of Terrorism
by Noam Chomsky

Inventing Reality:
The Politics of News Media
by Michael Parenti

The Hidden Persuaders:
What makes us buy, believe – and even vote – the way we do?
by Vance Packard

War, Lies & Videotape:
How media monopoly stifles truth
edited by Lenora Foerstel; multiple authors