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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda.
Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys on the line.
I have our good friend Jeffrey Kay, expert on America's torture regime in the 21st century and in the 20th before that.
He's a psychologist and writes regularly for Truthout.
And he has his own personal blog, which is Invictus.
I'd forgotten about that.
Vaultinsblog.blogspot.com and find him at Truthout.
And then also at Truthout is this very important article by Thomas Powell.
And he is the author of Biological Warfare in the Korean War, Allegations and Cover Up, and also Korean War Biological Warfare Update, and on the biological warfare, quote unquote, hoax thesis.
And here he is at Truthout with this very important piece, Suppressing U.S. War Crimes.
The Cold War Denial Machine Lives On.
And you guys might remember I interviewed Jeff here about his research and some new documents that had come to light and some new research and this kind of thing on the subject of the use by the United States of biological weapons during the Korean War.
And so now Mr. Powell has this article following up and elaborating quite a bit.
And I just thought, you know what, I just don't know nearly enough to interview Powell.
I'm going to have Jeff Kay interview him.
So welcome both of you to the show.
Thank you.
Really appreciate it.
And now, so, you know what, I don't even know.
I think, Jeff, I just want to turn it over to you.
And I know you want to probably talk to us a little bit about who Thomas Powell is and then go ahead and get to what you think are the most important way to frame it and begin your questioning here.
Okay, great.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Well, Tom, I think you introduced Thomas.
Your audience may not know that he's also an accomplished artist and sculptor, and of course a researcher.
And he's the son of James W. Powell, who himself was a famous journalist who was persecuted.
He and his wife, who were persecuted for writing about the biological warfare campaign of the United States in North Korea and China in the early 1950s.
And was prosecuted for sedition, threatened with prosecution for treason.
And this persecution lasted for almost 10 years.
And maybe with that, Tom, I could just turn to you and ask, you know, how formative was that for you in terms of taking up this issue?
Now, here we are in almost 20 years into the 21st century.
And I wonder if you could say something about that and why it's relevant today.
Well, thank you, Jeff.
Really nice to be here on the Scott Horton Show.
My parents were indicted for sedition in 1956 for articles that they had published in their news magazine, the China Weekly Review, which was an English language news journal in Shanghai, China.
And in 1952, they were getting direct reports from the front lines in North Korea and China.
And these reports were very specific about US airplanes flying over and dropping canisters, bombs that were full of insects, which upon later analysis turned out to be carriers of plague and hemorrhagic fever and other pathogens that were being dispersed in this manner through aerial bombardment.
And so they reported this in their paper.
And then when we returned to the United States in 1953, later in 1956, they were indicted on this charge of sedition, of attempting to corrupt US soldiers on the battlefield.
Right.
And they were not the only people, of course, to observe this happen.
No.
There were many others, other reporters.
Wilford Burchette comes to mind.
He actively was there in North Korea and reported on these instances.
And yes, there were others.
It wasn't the only person.
Right.
There was also the Reverend James Endicott, who was a Christian missionary who came back to Canada, his home country, and to large audiences, talked about the terrible war crimes that he was seeing occurring in Korea, including biological warfare.
And of course, then finally, there was the International Scientific Commission led by the famous British scientist, Joseph Needham, who went and examined the evidence and found it to be trustworthy.
So coming back to what you got you involved, what got you started writing about this yourself?
Well, initially, I had no intent of ever sort of looking into this topic.
This was my father's subject.
I have a very different life.
And I was not particularly interested in this until a couple of years ago, I came across, quite coincidentally, an article by a scholar named Milton Lichtenberg, who completely denied the existence of American biological warfare use in the Korean War.
And I knew this was completely false from everything I'd heard growing up as a child, and listening to my parents' dinner table conversations and conversations with their friends.
And I just was sort of, first I was intrigued, but later after I started reading more of Lichtenberg's pronouncements, I was outraged.
And I began to see the scope of the cover up that had been put in place to deny and to suppress the evidence.
And I was outraged, and I felt that really to vindicate my parents, and myself, and as a patriot, and somebody who loves this country, it was important that the truth should be heard, and that these really vicious lies and cover-ups needed to be exposed.
All right.
Well, now let me butt in here for just a second, since we're all in so much agreement here.
Jeff, could you try to do the opposite of the straw man, the steel man argument, and make the best case for Lichtenberg's point of view here, that what is it that he says is false and debunkable, and is he right at all?
Sure.
Well, what happened was, at least according to Lichtenberg's own narrative, a Japanese right-wing journalist by the name of Naito Yasuo, worked for a very right-wing Japanese newspaper, was somehow given access to Soviet archives after the fall of the Soviet Union, and was shown 12, or maybe a little bit more, but the ones that got published were 12.
He was shown a number of documents, and when he found 12 of them, he felt were very relevant to the idea that there was a hoax going on over the famous biological warfare charges.
And these were famous.
I mean, these were headline news in 1951, 1952, 1953.
And he smuggled them, he copied, hand-copied them, and smuggled them back to the United States, or got them to Milton Lichtenberg, who then published them with commentary, along with another Cold War scholar, Catherine Weathersby, who did the actual translation of the documents which were copied into their native Russian.
And these documents, claimed to be Lichtenberg's straw man here, were letters that were going back and forth between the Presidium of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, high officials to the ambassador, Russian ambassador to China, and others, shortly after Stalin's death.
And leading to finally a decision, leading to a decision that the Soviets had been duped by the Chinese and the North Koreans, and there really was no biological warfare, it was a hoax.
And the Soviet officials were to mete out punishment to their own officials for deceiving the party and the government that way, and going along with the Chinese and the North Korean hoax about biological weapons.
And so, if you're Milton Lichtenberg, literally what he says is that, you know, these letters are evidence that just as the United States maintained from the very beginning, there was no biological warfare campaign, this was all just made up BS, and here's the documentary proof.
So what say you, Tom Powell?
Is that, in fact, the story?
No, that is a bogus story.
There is no real explanation as to how Mr. Naito came upon these documents, this dossier, the Soviet dossier.
These 12 documents mysteriously appeared upon his person without him knowing who gave them to him.
He has no idea the name of the individual who supposedly copied them, handwritten copies made of them in the presidential archive of the Soviet Union.
They're completely mysterious.
They're documents without any chain, causal chain or connective chain to their actual source.
So these documents are very likely complete frauds.
They list the names of people like Molotov and Beria, and they appear to have the appearance of true documents.
But what they propose is preposterous, that the members of Stalin's Politburo didn't know that germ warfare was occurring and was a complete sort of surprise to them, is completely unbelievable.
Yes, and I have to add, according to my own research, looking at actual CIA recently declassified files, internally the CIA was complaining that the Soviets were using propaganda as early as 1949, even before the war, 1950, saying that the United States was preparing for germ warfare campaigns in the East.
Throughout the Korean War, the Soviets were in close contact with both the Chinese and the North Korean commands.
To purport that they didn't know what was happening is absurd.
There's much more to I think your analysis and in the articles that you've put out, which there were a number of them published in the journal Socialism and Democracy.
I think the first one was Biological Warfare and the Korean War Allegations and Cover-Up back in April 2017.
I think you did an incredible job detailing just what was wrong with these documents, why they were a hoax.
I think that the documents just don't paint an accurate picture of geopolitics.
They pretend to put forward the notion that politicians are naive, that they don't really know what's going on, and nobody really believes that.
You can't be a leader of a country and not be intimately aware of the clandestine operations that are going on beneath you.
Stalin doesn't run a war or finance a war in Korea, funding both the Chinese army and the Korean army, without his staff knowing exactly what they're getting into, and without all of his members of his council being up to date on what's going on.
The claim that these documents are true and they represent some true picture of the confusion of the political world immediately following Stalin's death is absurd.
That's not the way politics happened in the real world.
All right, hang on just one second.
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Jeff, is there or is there not evidence far beyond what these documents claim to refute?
It says, there's a quote in here where, oh, it was a false alarm, there was no something.
The claim is, well, that's out of context.
Assume the document's legitimacy for the sake of argument.
This covers all the bases?
This debunks all the claims or all the substantive claims about biological warfare by the US in that war or not?
Well, no, they don't at all.
In fact, with your speech, the false alarm you mentioned is yet another more recently produced document by the same Milton Leittenberg, this Cold War scholar.
I think that, Tom, your article, A Truthout, and another recent article on the biological warfare hoax thesis goes into this new document now produced years later, but this time from a Chinese official, a solitary Chinese official, in the form of a posthumous memoir.
I wonder if you could say a little bit about that, Tom, and what that is, and maybe also go into, yeah, okay, what is the evidence countering these claims?
Okay, this is the first document we talked about, or 12 documents, the Soviet dossier.
This is a posthumous memoir by Wu Zili, who was a very important personage in public health administration in China.
He was a member of the People's Revolutionary Army, and he fought with the communists.
He was a communist.
He and his wife were both communists, and they were medical doctors, and were instrumental in setting up the public health infrastructure and combating the war through public health issues.
His memoir, the one that Leittenberg publishes, conflicts with an actual memoir which Wu Zili published in his lifetime.
We have two documents here that claim to be the memoir of Wu Zili regarding a specific incident that occurred at the beginning of the biological warfare campaign in 1952.
The document that Leittenberg has is a forgery.
It's not in Wu Zili's style of writing.
He was a very spare writer, wrote very few words, never used adjectives, just the facts kind of guy.
There's this rambling text that seems to fill in a lot of the missing gaps that Leittenberg needs in order to patch his thesis together, which is the actual memoir of Wu Zili.
I say that it is the one that he wrote in Chinese.
It's published and not this phony document that Leittenberg has come up with.
This is a forgery, and it's a fairly obvious and straightforward one once you read it.
Right.
And the evidence for the fact that there was biological warfare was put out in a book back in 1998.
I believe it was by the two Canadian scholars Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, United States and Biological Warfare, which is still in print at the University of Indiana Press, Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea.
And they lay out a lot of documentary evidence, including the documents from the Chinese that were opened in their archives, but also a lot of American declassified documents.
And they tried to interview Wu Zili, and he didn't speak to them.
So he certainly, if he wanted to unburden himself and get some kind of truth out, he certainly had that opportunity, something that they've made clear.
But probably the greatest source of, Scott, to answer your question of evidence, at least contemporaneously from that time, because there were a number of people who came and investigated these charges, because they were quite incendiary and worldwide, was the International Scientific Committee report on bacterial warfare I've mentioned before.
And this report was castigated, vilified, suppressed in the West, and only until recently became available on the internet or to people in general.
Otherwise, it was something that only a handful, literally, of libraries around the world had copies of.
And I wonder if you want to say anything about Joseph Needham or the International Scientific Commission and the importance of its work, Tom, for you or just for this subject in general?
Well, Needham was the leader of a committee of nine biologists who went to China to actually study the claims and to look at laboratory results and to go do fieldwork, interview people.
And they produced a report.
And this report is 669 pages long.
60 pages are the initial findings and the conclusion, make up the first 60 pages of the report.
And then the rest of it, the 600 plus pages, are all documentation.
And the documentation includes things like flight patterns of airplanes that were tracked entering the country, flyovers, bombing sorties, and their exit patterns, and then the appearance of disease vectors following airplanes departure.
It also includes the evidence of autopsy reports of people who died from a number of diseases, hemorrhagic meningitis, and plague, and a number of other smallpox and things like that nature, diseases.
And these are very thoroughly done.
And they're done by Chinese medics who are all trained for the most part in the West, in Europe, or in the United States, or in Japan, prior to the war.
And these were carried out in a very rigorous manner and documented.
And there are extensive interviews as well with eyewitnesses of farmers who watched airplanes pass over and drop bombs and have canisters that didn't explode and have went over to investigate afterwards and discovered these insects on the ground.
It also includes many, many...
Well, it includes the testimony of US POWs.
That's another important thing.
Exactly, Jeff.
They had four POWs that they interviewed that were very willing to tell their stories and handwrite out very lengthy confessions about being engaged in this process of spreading disease, which was very distasteful and was very upsetting to these Christian flyboys.
You know, they were good people.
They didn't want to be engaged in spreading disease.
And they were horrified, and they readily spoke their mind.
Right.
There are videotapes people can watch even today on YouTube of these flyers speaking to this, and people can judge for themselves.
Now, here we are, though, again, in 2018, we're discussing controversies that occurred almost 70 years ago.
Many of your listeners are only, you know, 10 or 20 years beyond the age of seven.
And, you know, why is this relevant today?
I mean, I will note that, of course, as you point out in your article, it seems some of the latest things was triggered off by something, some encounter that went on in the New York Review of Books.
I don't know if you want to talk about that, a Netflix documentary.
Yes.
What was that about?
Well, this whole story is intriguing because there's so many important people involved in it and strange characters.
But this is a story of Frank Olson was made into a Netflix series by Errol Morris called Wormwood.
And Frank Olson was- Oscar winning documentarian.
Yes.
Frank Olson was a biowarfare scientist at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
And he'd been very active and published papers on taking plague bacillus and turning it into an aerosol.
He was very proud of this achievement.
But anyway, he was also a CIA employee while he was working at the Fort Detrick labs.
And after the war ended, he was involved in some CIA activities.
He was taken to visit black sites in Germany where former SS officers were torturing alleged Russian spies or Soviet spies.
And he was appalled by this.
And then later, he was doped with LSD and he wanted out of the CIA.
And apparently, he tried to leverage his knowledge of biological warfare to exit the CIA.
And he was murdered for this.
And he was clubbed on the back of the head and dropped out of a hotel window on the 13th floor of a hotel in Manhattan.
And so that's what the Netflix video is about.
And so there was a review that was written in the New York Times, I mean, in the New York Review of Books regarding Netflix.
And Milton Lichtenberg was front and center to write a rebuttal of that, to claim that Frank Olson was not, in fact, murdered under orders of Helms and his bosses at the CIA because no BW had ever occurred.
So it was kind of a shallow and kind of...
And the author of that review, Michael Ignatius, capitulated to Lichtenberg, didn't he?
Yeah, he rolled right over.
Yeah, he publicly did.
I think that he wanted to not get involved in it.
He was writing the review on request of Eric Olson, Frank Olson's son, who was his colleague, roommate.
He didn't really want a deeper involvement in the story than just to sort of get through that part of it.
And so he really didn't want to take on Lichtenberg.
Lichtenberg plays a major role as a denier and as a molder of grant funding to researchers and stuff in the subject.
And so he's politically powerful and connected.
Ignatieff didn't want any part of that.
Right.
Well, in your Truthout article, you go into the whole point of this, our discussion, I think, is the U.S. denial machine, based originally, I'd say, in the covert operations of the Cold War, of which the biological warfare campaign was probably the largest.
And this machine, whatever, is still alive today.
We see it going on in the service to attack the ongoing attempt to have some kind of peace negotiations or some kind of negotiated settlement with North Korea over nuclear weapons and recognition of North Korea, etc.
Now, a country armed with hydrogen bombs.
And so this is very, very important.
The things we're discussing may seem like old news in the United States, but in China and Korea, these things are important today.
The victims of these crimes either live today, or their children live today, or their grandchildren live today, and they live continually with the results of these crimes.
There are many other crimes the U.S. committed in Korea, including the murder of civilians, saturation, napalm bombing, the damming of dams, excuse me, the bombing of dams, etc.
But I wanted to ask you, Tom, from your perspective, how powerful really is this U.S. denial machine?
How does one fight it?
Well, it's very powerful.
It's entrenched within government itself.
It's an interesting phenomenon logically to look at, because you can see it grow out of the Cold War, that following World War II, the United States and certain factions within the U.S. and U.S. government saw America as a new hegemonic global power.
And the main threat was, of course, the Soviet Union.
And so there was a huge shift at the end of World War II from anti-fascism and the fervor and patriotism of being an anti-fascist into being an anti-communist.
And this was sort of a very sharp right turn in American policy.
And so the practice of hegemony is a very brutal and vicious practice.
And few Americans realize just how brutal the Korean War was.
And just, I mean, we all are aware of how brutal the Vietnam War was.
But the Korean War was even more ugly.
We dropped 400,000 tons of explosive ordnance on that little country.
Another, over 30,000 tons of napalm were dropped on Korea.
It was firebombed.
Any building of more than two stories was destroyed.
Prisoners were tortured.
It was horrific, the war atrocities.
And there's a good reason why the Korean War is the forgotten war, because nobody wants it explained or pointed out just how viciously the U.S. prosecuted that war.
Yeah, well, nobody probably meant it this way, but the result of the TV show MASH being on for 15 years or 20 and reruns is that our image of the Korean War is Radar O'Reilly hanging out in North Hollywood at peace.
I mean, basically, that's where they got the hills for the backdrop in Korea.
That's just L.A.
And so, there's nothing to forget, right?
All we learn in the first place is just antics and one-liners and stuff.
Nobody ever teaches about the napalm.
There are no movies like we have all the film footage that we've seen of the bombing of North Vietnam, for example, or the recreations of what it was like out on a search and destroy mission in the South or this and that.
There's no representations of that at all.
We just have Clinger and Hawkeye and the Hot Lips Houlihan and the gang.
It is a big deal.
But anyway, so wait, I want to ask this.
What's the evidence on the Korean side?
I mean, do they have footage?
Do they have paperwork to try to back up their claims that on their end that they really were infected with all of these things, their civilian population?
And at the time, to coincide with the other information that you have from this end, either of you guys, about to confirm this from the other side of the story.
Tom, do you want to take that?
Thank you.
Yes, the Koreans, the North Koreans have a great deal of evidence.
They have a museum dedicated to the war that goes into great deal.
I understand.
I haven't been to it, but I understand they have lots of artifacts and things left over from the war itself that are on display there.
Of course, the U.S. denies the authenticity of any of the artifactual evidence that's there, just categorically deny it as communist propaganda, but in fact does exist.
But the main source of evidence has to be Joseph Needham's book, the International Scientific Committee's report, that there are the facts.
And then the work that Jeff mentioned by Endicott and Eggerman, where they very systematically document the whole atrocity of the bombing campaign.
I do want to say one thing, though, about the bombing campaign, in that apparently the effectiveness of it, we're not quite clear on, that there was both reason by the Chinese and the North Koreans to attempt to minimize and not to acknowledge the full extent of the damage that was caused by the biological warfare.
But also, apparently, it wasn't as effective and it was a considerable disappointment to the American generals that this new weapon that they had inherited from the Japanese was not an effective weapon in warfare.
I think you just made a good point in passing, and I'm sure we're getting close to time, but an important unstated factor also was the existence of a major Japanese biological warfare campaign that occurred in China as part of their war between China and Japan that merged in with World War II.
So in the late 1930s, but in the 40s, where Japan's Unit 731 did extensive experimentation on biological warfare, and then implemented it in a campaign that killed hundreds of thousands in China.
Both the research in that campaign, the news about it, knowledge of it was suppressed in the West because the United States had made an agreement with the captured scientists, biological warfare scientists, that they would, in fact, really surrendered to American forces so that they wouldn't be captured by the Soviets.
And they denied that these things had ever happened.
And in fact, in Tom's father's trial, the US government denied that there ever was a Unit 731, or certainly wasn't going to release any documents related to that.
And this falsification of history, this giant hoax that there had been no Japan Unit 731 was continued by the United States well until the news began to break both in Japan and in the West by the efforts of Tom's father, John W. Powell, who published on that and used FOIA documents to buttress his claims.
But the Unit 731, this was part of the International Scientific Commission report.
So the report had to be suppressed not just for the biological warfare campaign, but to protect the United States' own biological warfare research even prior to the Korean War, which was extensive and which included essentially pulling in all of the, not all, but a good portion, excuse me, of Japan's biological warfare experts, including Shiro Ishii, the head of Unit 731, in keeping this out of the Tokyo war crimes trials.
I mean, quite a lot was done to protect the US's biological warfare capacity.
And so I don't know if that answers your question.
Hey, I got another one.
How about, does there still exist a biological weapons program in the United States?
Well, yes, there does.
Go ahead, Tom.
There does.
It's secret.
The newest research all involves having genetic components, a really kind of hybridized genes and all kinds of ways of delivering these Russians who apparently were poisoned in England.
That's all part of this sort of attempts to murder people with this disease.
So it exists.
I thought that one sounded like nonsense, but anyway, the skip thing?
President Nixon outlawed it and signed a convention on biological warfare, but it's not been done away with by any means.
It just has gone deeper within the system.
Right.
They hide it under the idea that they're still doing, there's this distinction made between what is offensive research used for offensive purposes and work for defensive purposes.
And they've always claimed that, or usually have claimed that, particularly after Nixon's supposed ban of biological warfare research, that all the research is done for defensive purposes.
But a lot of strange things are happening.
One of them occurred just a few years ago when live samples of anthrax virus popped up in Korea and in other countries sent out by United States Port Detrick.
There was a real question of what are they doing sending live anthrax viruses around the world and in such a way that they weren't really controlled.
And this, of course, raised a huge stink in Korea, where North Korea certainly immediately brought up the question of what was the United States preparing yet another biological warfare campaign.
I think though that, of course, the research continues, but one reason that the Koreans and the Chinese did so well against the germ warfare campaign of the Americans was that they had experienced the germ warfare campaign of the Japanese.
In fact, Joseph Needham, the head of the ISC commission that looked into this, had been, I think, as Tom mentioned, in China during World War II and had seen firsthand the actions and the damage done by the Japanese so that they were experienced, if you will.
Not only were they the first victims of a biological warfare campaign, a major modern campaign, but they therefore learned the lessons of that.
And a very extensive public health campaign was organized and implemented.
Even Western scholars acknowledged this, that there was an incredibly powerful public health campaign instituted through the socialist governments of China and North Korea.
And this probably went a long way.
I would say too that this was also, and I think Tom has made this point, in fact, Tom, I will say one of the pieces of your research you've done added so much to this, was your recognition and really pointing out how there were two different periods of biological warfare used in Korea.
And that really a distinction needs to be made between the earlier, more experimental period and the second, seemingly more organized, more intensive period.
One occurred around late 1950, early 1951.
The second began in January 1952.
I don't know if you want to say anything about that, since I know that's kind of your finding.
Yes, that was interesting to discover because most of the outrage and most knowledgeable, most people who are knowledgeable about this are aware of the 1952 campaign, which started probably in about December or November, December 1951, and lasted until about October of 52.
But there was an earlier campaign when, in November of 1950, when the U.S. was back wheeling rapidly from the Yalu River, which when the Chinese invaded, counter-invaded across the Yalu, there was a major retreat then by U.S. soldiers, who were spread quite thin, to rush back towards Seoul.
And in retreat, there were instances then that were witnessed.
And Williams and Wallace quote, extensively quote, a British soldier who happened to witness American soldiers dressed in parkas, distributing chicken feathers in village homes behind what would then become enemy lines to sow disease in retreat.
So that was an interesting discovery to find, an earlier attempt at this.
Then there was a hiatus of several months while they organized a true campaign, a really serious, determined campaign.
And one of the most difficult parts of this campaign was how to get American pilots to go along with dropping dud bombs that didn't explode, that turned out to have germs.
And that whole sort of psychological manipulation of Air Force pilots and navigators became a huge part of the story as well.
Yeah, talk more about that.
Well, in order to get, I mean, it's pretty horrific to tell somebody there to distribute disease even against your enemy that most of us are totally appalled by that.
And it's abhorrent even in war to think about doing that.
And so to get these young men who were all highly educated to become a pilot, it's very rigorous educational process.
And so they were the cream of the crop.
They were the smart boys, the A students who were the pilots and the navigators.
And they were Christians.
They were not going to do something as fiendish as this.
And they were slowly brought into it and compromised in a way where they couldn't get out.
And they were started by being informed in the United States before they were shipped overseas that biological warfare, the U.S. would never do it, but it did exist.
And there was evidence that the Chinese and the Koreans were doing it.
Later when they got to Japan, they were briefed that definitely it was being used by the enemy.
And then when they got to the bases where they were actually doing the flights, they were briefed again that the U.S. was doing it.
And it was a big shock to them.
And they all say that in their confessions, how just sort of distraught they were, and that they were being ordered to disperse diseases, and how they also felt betrayed into doing this, that they'd been manipulated.
And there was no way out, that they could be court-martialed, or they could shut up and do what they were told.
And so they didn't have a viable option.
And so when they were shot down and captured, they confessed.
And they confessed very readily that the British pilots who were shot down never gave up anything but name, rank, and serial number as required.
But the American pilots spilled their guts.
And they gave very intimate details about the mechanisms of the bombs, about the pre-flight briefings, about life on the base, about orders not to discuss their payloads with any other personnel, including other pilots and others in the briefing room.
They were sworn to secrecy.
And it was shocking how they could be manipulated into doing these heinous crimes.
Well, and then it's interesting, right?
Real quick, just the narrative then was, well, these North Koreans have these fantastic torture brainwashing techniques to create these Manchurian candidates and brainwash these men into saying these horrible and true things, which I think it's pretty easy to imagine how our grandparents felt for that.
I don't know.
I guess so, right?
How do they know it's not true?
Whereas nowadays, you look at that and it's obviously nonsense, right?
There's no way.
Right.
Well, yeah, absolutely.
What's interesting to me though is, of course, when these flyers, these airmen, POWs who confessed to the use of biological warfare returned to the United States, all of them renounced the evidence they had given to the Chinese and North Korean interrogators.
And some of them, though not all, claimed they had been tortured to give that evidence.
Of course, they had to renounce their confessions, all of them as well, under threat of court martial.
And the records of those debriefings by American officials of the flyers have all been destroyed.
They were lost in a fire supposedly a number of years ago.
So there's no way to look back at that.
But what's interesting is that recently declassified CIA documents show that the discussion about brainwashing, which was done between the CIA and the US government's major covert, at that time covert, operations kind of control board known as the Psychology Strategy Board, discussed how they were going to approach these new confessions that were just then happening in Korea and China.
And a discussion like, what kind of language should they use?
How should we frame this to the American people?
And they decided that, one, they would not use the term at the time that some of them wanted to use.
They wanted to say that the Chinese were using menticide, that they were literally destroying these people's brains.
They came up with another meme or idea, and that was to use the term brainwashing.
And I should say, this was used before they had any evidence of what treatment or anything that was going on.
This was during the war, in early 1953, the memos between Allen Dulles and other high officials discussing how they were going to put this cover story out.
And even though they knew that among themselves would discuss, well, we know brainwashing doesn't really exist.
It's a made-up term, and you can't really make people do those things.
The truth is, do people confess under some kind of incredible or unendurable stress?
The fact is, they do, sometimes, and sometimes they don't.
And if you have information, you might make up information.
This is all a controversy that we know, looking back at post-911, Guantanamo, CIA black sites, et cetera.
But all of this stuff began back in Korea in the cover story that was made to cover for their own crimes of biological warfare and other crimes as well, to say that the United States prisoners had been brainwashed under torture.
And in fact, torture would not brainwash you.
What it would do is reduce your ability to function.
So the whole idea is nonsensical.
And modern neuroscientists have spoken to this.
And even at the time, CIA's own documents speak to the brain fog that comes over individuals that are tortured, and how they can't give information.
Whereas in fact, if you read the actual confessions that the U.S. airmen gave, they're quite extensively detailed.
And they differ one from the other, but they are mostly consistent.
And they show the personality of each of the flyers involved.
And they are not in any way programmed, you know, brainwashed products.
But of course, those things, here's the crux of all this, and that's why Tom's articles are so important to bring this to light today, is he's right.
I mean, these things, the denial machine or the suppression of history continues.
And if you wanted to read for many years, say, well, let me look at the facts myself, which is what I wanted to do.
Let me see the confessions of the flyers and read and see how crazy they are, or not.
Or read the report by Joseph Needham and his colleagues, the scientists who went to China and North Korea to examine the evidence.
You couldn't find it, you couldn't read it, it didn't exist.
It wasn't in your bookstore, it wasn't online.
You know, how could you find this out?
And the relevant secondary sources often were also difficult to find or cost a hand, you know, an arm and a leg to buy.
So a lot of what Tom and I know and others have been doing through the work recently constituted by a Weapon Truth Commission and others is to try and get these documents to the American people to back up the kind of work Tom is doing and show that these lies really cannot stand.
And we're looking at redoing a major portion of American history to show what really lies under that rock, and what lies under it isn't pretty at all.
But it's important.
All right.
Now, Thomas, I'll give you the last word here before we go.
Well, thank you.
I think that what we would like to see from our research and our work is a sort of a re-evaluation of U.S. history, that the direction of hegemony, this kind of brutal path to global domination is not well thought and beneficial to Americans at all, that we've lived in a state of perpetual warfare since World War II, and we've also invaded more than 30 countries in this period of time, and we've created this refugee problem now.
It's not the climate only.
It's all these disruptive wars.
We're going to have Yemeni refugees since Saudi Arabia has been bombing that country relentlessly for the past year.
It's just endless.
And so this whole concept of hegemony needs to be re-envisioned, and we need to get away from that as a society.
And people who think that that investigating the evils that your country does is unpatriotic are wrong, that if you don't look at it, then the people in power will continue to pursue these directions and drag us all into the same mire.
And so I feel what we're doing is very patriotic, and I consider myself a good American patriot in exposing the lies and the infamy of cabal of people in power.
All right.
Well, listen.
Oh, did we lose you there?
Yeah?
Hey, listen, I appreciate both of you coming on the show.
It's been really great.
That's the great Jeffrey Kaye, our good friend, regular writer at truthout.org.
And here also is Thomas Powell.
And in the bio at the bottom of this article, you can find all of his other great articles about this going back.
But this one is called Suppressing U.S. War Crimes.
The Cold War Denial Machine Lives On.
Thanks very much, guys.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Thank you, Tom.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
You know me, scotthorton.org, youtube.com, libertarianinstitute.org.
And buy my book, and it's now available in audiobook as well, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Hey, it's endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg and Stephen Walt and Peter Van Buren and Matthew Ho and Daniel Davis and Anand Gopal and Patrick Coburn and Eric Margulies.
You'll like it.
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Thanks, guys!
