Suppressing US War Crimes:
The Cold War Denial Machine Lives On
By Thomas Powell
June 24, 2018
“A shadowy chapter of US Cold War history involving germ warfare
allegations in 1952 recently played out in the New York Review of Books: In
February, Michael Ignatieff, former Canadian politician and international
political scholar, wrote a movie review of Errol Morris’s recent six-part
Netflix docudrama, “Wormwood.”
“Wormwood” investigates the mysterious 1953 death of a top US
germ war scientist and CIA employee, Frank Olson. Olson was bludgeoned on the
back of the head and “dropped” from the 13th floor window of his Manhattan
hotel room under orders from his CIA bosses, according to his son, Eric Olson.
The US government was at that time very actively engaged in an
international denial effort to brand claims of widespread US biological warfare
use during the Korean War as communist propaganda.
As a top scientist at the Army Chemical Corp’s biological
warfare lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Frank Olson was in the unique position
to spill the beans on this cover-up. He did not fully grasp how dangerous his
CIA associates were, how freely they operated outside the law, or his own
imminent peril...
The American use of bioweapons in Korea is known and accepted as
fact by most Cold War scholars outside the US, but domestically, biological
warfare remains one of the deepest kept secrets of the Cold War. That secret,
even today 66 years after the fact, still has professional gatekeepers…
…The hidden history of the Korean War — the 4 million dead
Koreans, the carpet bombing, firebombing, germ bombing, the entire built
infrastructure of North Korea reduced to rubble, the prisoner torture, civilian
massacres, suppression of war crime evidence, the lies and the silent
forgetting — all this is now coming into the sunshine.
Going forward toward Korean unification, nobody should agree to
bury these truths again.”
READ the complete story:
George
Burchett’s review of “Wormwood” gives the back story not often heard of the
larger Korean War germ warfare story:
Wormwood and a Shocking Secret
of War: How Errol Morris Vindicated My Father, Wilfred Burchett
By GEORGE BURCHETT
JANUARY 12, 2018
“…this footage briefly appears on the screen. I recognise it. I
rewind and pause the film. The man on the far right in the white shirt is my
father, Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett.
My father, journalist Wilfred Burchett, was accused by the
Australian conservative establishment of fabricating the germ warfare story, of
torturing Allied POWs – including Australians – brainwashing them and
extracting confessions. He was branded a traitor and denied Australian
citizenship for 17 years. These accusations are repeated to this day…
Screenshot from “Wormwood.”
I’ve seen this footage before. It’s from a 1952 Chinese film
recording “Captured U.S. airmen Kenneth L. Enoch and John S. Quinn,
interrogated by the Joint Interrogation Group of Korean and Chinese specialists
and News Correspondents” in which the two airmen repeat what they had already
said in their “voluntary confessions”: that the U.S. was waging germ warfare in
Korea and that they had personally dropped germ bombs.
In fact, the
“interrogation” looks more like a press conference and, as the voice-over says,
“Wilfred Burchett, correspondent of the Paris Ce Soir, also joined the work of
the group by invitation.”
Other footage, used later in Wormwood, shows the International
Scientific Commission, led by one of Britain’s most distinguished scientists,
Joseph Needham, a fellow of the British Academy, who travelled to China and
Korea to investigate the allegations and attended the “interrogation” of the
captured U.S. pilots…
Among many other stories, he also reported and investigated
allegations made by the Chinese and North Koreans that the U.S. had used germ
warfare. Just as he was the first to report on the effects of the atomic bomb
dropped on Hiroshima, and just as he would be one of the first to accuse the
U.S. of using chemical defoliants in Vietnam, facts no one now denies. Most
people have heard of Agent Orange and its devastating effects on humans and the
environment…
…scientist Frank Olson, who worked on biological weapons
development for the U.S. military and secret interrogation and mind control
programs for the CIA was convinced that the U.S. was conducting germ warfare in
Korea. He was so tormented by this, that the CIA was afraid he’d reveal its
darkest secrets. And they killed him. Dropped him out of a window and claimed
it was suicide.
To this day, the US government dismisses the allegations of germ
warfare as communist propaganda. Some scholars argue that the germ warfare
“hoax” was concocted by Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-sung to tarnish the image of the
United States and its Allies in the eyes of world public opinion.
Really?...
…I’d like to quote Wilfred Burchett here: “I think that as a
journalist, there’s a very great responsibility, particularly journalists
reporting on international affairs, as I do, to get the facts right and to be
absolutely free of any doctrine or of any ideological optical devices. To be
free and really seek the truth, get the truth and publish the truth” (in Public
Enemy Number One, a film by David Bradbury, 1980).
Wilfred Burchett told the truth about Nazi Germany when the
Australian government was courting Hitler and helping arm Imperial Japan. He
told the truth about Hiroshima, as the first Western correspondent to report
from the city one month after the atomic bomb was dropped. He reported the
truth about germ warfare in Korea and the use of chemical defoliants in Vietnam
and the many other atrocities of both wars. None of this endeared him to the
Australian or US governments of the time. He was accused of treason, denied an
Australian passport, was vilified and is still vilified as a communist
propagandist, KGB agent and so on.
So, Mr Hersh, I challenge you to tell us the truth about Frank
Olson’s murder by the CIA, about germ warfare in Korea and the other dark
secrets that led to his elimination by the CIA. You owe it to his son Eric and
to the rest of us. You say you know the truth, so please share it with us.
I would like to thank Errol Morris for telling this important
story in such a brilliant, masterful and compelling way (and for including my
father, no matter how fleetingly, in the narrative). He is a filmmaker who has
spent most of his career examining how film and photography reveal and conceal
truth and reality, and in our current epoch, so obsessed with the idea of
“fake” news, his work is very much of the zeitgeist.
And I want to express my admiration and profound esteem for Eric
Olson’s sticking by his father, for seeking the truth about his death and for
unpeeling the layers of deceit that protect the dark secret at the heart of the
matter. I hope that one day the bitterness washes away, the secret is released
and light prevails over darkness.”
- George Burchett is an artist who lives in Hanoi.
READ the complete story:
READ more articles by George Burchett:
including:
How the CIA Tried to Bribe
Wilfred Burchett
By GEORGE BURCHETT
JANUARY 19, 2018
