Awhile back, as I was still trying to put together an understanding of the charges of use of U.S. biological weaponry during the Korean War, one well-known scholar wrote to me (bold added for emphasis), “I have spent quite a bit of time and effort investigating the various and multiple allegations of BW, CW and other atrocities brought forward by the North Koreans and Chinese during the Korean War. …
The following article provides shocking details and facts about the U.S. biological warfare campaign undertaken during the Korean War, and in particular, the use of anthrax as a biological weapon against China, which had entered the Korean War in late 1950.
Most of what has been published in the U.S. about this in subsequent years is filled with disinformation, or mere dismissal of the charges. Those involved in covering up U.S. germ warfare counted on the suppression of evidence surrounding the covert campaign of biological weaponry attack.
It’s taken nearly 70 years, but two events have changed all that. First, there was the 2018 online release of the long-suppressed report by the International Scientific Commission (ISC), chaired by famed British scientist Joseph Needham, of a three-month investigation into the germ warfare allegations. Now, in 2020, we also have the publication of declassified CIA Communications Daily Reports from the Korean War, documenting reactions of Communist military units to biological weapons attack. …
“Bacteria bombs,” poisoned water, planes dropping contaminated flies, fleas and other insects, two nations grappling to understand and adapt to an attack by an unseen enemy, in the context of an epic war with the United States and allied countries that would kill millions… this is the hitherto untold story of what germ warfare looked like to those who were attacked, from documents kept secret for over 60 years!
In February 2013, the CIA posted over 1300 items online as part of their earlier “Baptism by Fire” document release commemorating the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. The bulk of their accompanying narrative material concerned long-time controversies as to whether the CIA had failed to anticipate both the North Korean invasion of the Republic of Korea in June 1950, and the Chinese entry into the war later that year. …
A newly declassified document, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, confirms that weeks after Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo started to receive detainees, Department of Defense officials expected some of these prisoners to die. Camp authorities were also informed that burial at the U.S.-run naval base in Cuba was “authorized for detainees.”
According to a February 4, 2002 directive to Camp X-Ray from the Mortuary Affairs division at Guantanamo’s new JTF-160 medical department, “As a consequence of disease, battle injury, and non-battle injury it is assumed that some loss of life may occur among detainees.”
Over the past year, a series of revelations at the 9/11 Military Commissions (M.C.) proceedings at Guantanamo have exposed the fact the FBI worked far more closely with the CIA on the tortured confessions of “black site” detainees than we had heretofore known.
The revelations culminated in an admission via a new declassification in the M.C. trials that contrary to what was previously thought or asserted, the FBI under the leadership of then-director Robert Mueller had, according to a September 19, 2019 New York Times report, “assigned agents to the [CIA] black site program.”
Furthermore, the FBI “sent hundreds of questions into the secret prison network where the C.I.A. used torture to interrogate its prisoners, a collaboration that the bureau has never acknowledged.” …
Torture, secret confessions and recantations, an ominous email, a mysterious death, a detainee found hanging in a recreation yard outside his cell in the middle of the night — this is the story of the sixth man said to have died from suicide at Guantanamo on May 18, 2011.
Up until now, his story has gone totally untold. Even the location of the camp inside Gitmo where he died was kept secret for years. What follows is an in-depth examination into what really happened.
The narrative is largely based on an Army report that is mandated after a serious event like a detainee’s death. It is known as an AR 15-6 report. The article also draws upon declassified legal documents included in the detainee’s habeas filings. The full AR 15-6 report and Naseem’s Legal Response to the government in his habeas case are embedded at the end of this article. …
On January 8, Carol Rosenberg at the Miami Herald reported that Trump’s CIA Director Gina Haspel had possibly been Chief of Base at a CIA black site at Guantanamo in 2003 and/or 2004.
The revelation was drawn from a redacted transcript of a classified 9/11 military commissions hearing on November 16, 2018. The redacted transcript of that meeting quoted Rita Radostitz, a defense attorney for Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), as saying Haspel was “chief of base” at Guantanamo during the time her client had been held in a CIA black site at the Cuba-based facility.
According to Rosenberg, “Chief of base is a CIA term for the officer in charge of a secret foreign outpost.” …
A major aspect of the CIA’s detention and interrogation operations has been purposefully hidden from view, primarily due to secrecy guidelines that make it illegal for anyone “read into” the program to reveal even its very existence.
Recent declassified documents make clear that there was not one, but two CIA torture programs. These programs used different interrogation techniques, responded to different bureaucracies within the CIA, and had very different levels of oversight.
This article reveals for the first time a crucial untold aspect of the story behind the construction and development of the CIA’s torture programs, such as we can understand them today (December 2018). …
The super-maximum security or administrative maximum (ADX) federal prison in Florence, Colorado is widely considered the most remote, the harshest, the most punishing prison in America. Its prisoners include Ted Kaczynski (the “Unibomber”), purported 9/11 would-be terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid, and many other political and convicted terrorist prisoners.
According to former ADX prisoner Eli Hager, “It’s just the harshest place you’ve ever seen. Nothing living, not so much as a blade of grass anywhere.”
“My cell was all concrete. Every single thing, made out of concrete. …
For some time now, military psychologists have been pressing to get back their positions working with detainees at Guantanamo. Three years ago, they lost their ability to work there, either assisting interrogations as members of the military’s Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs), or as therapists to the detainees, because of an outpouring of member revulsion to revelations about ways in which leading psychologists had worked with the military and CIA to maintain their status working at sites like Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.
With the opening of the 2018 convention of the American Psychological Association, APA Council members are set to consider a proposal by leading military psychology division members to modify an APA ban against psychologists working at Guantanamo or any “illegal” national security site that fails to abide by international laws, especially those against torture. …
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