Are Search Engines or AI Suppressing Revelations About U.S. Use of Bioweapons in the Korean War?
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On February 8, The New York Times published a glowing story about how Microsoft’s Bing search engine had embraced “artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, the maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT.”
The Times reporter wrote, “I tested the new Bing for a few hours on Tuesday afternoon, and it’s a marked improvement over Google.”
So I decided to see how the new Bing would respond to a query about what is admittedly a very controversial subject: the alleged use of U.S. biological weapons against China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) during the Korean War.
I had my own reasons for testing Bing on this. I’ve been investigating the subject for a number of years. In September 2020, I published an article analyzing two dozen formerly top secret CIA communications reports that themselves quoted classified U.S. military intelligence intercepts of Communist military units reporting attacks by U.S. biological weapons, their effects, and the responses of such units to the attacks. I also posted the intercepts themselves, which were declassified in 2010.
For a blog post, the story was fairly successful, garnering over 15 thousand views to date, and a minimum of one thousand “reads.” The story was also posted at Counterpunch, though I don’t know how many have seen the story there. I also wrote some special stories just for Counterpunch on the subject, including one that looked at unexpected connections between the U.S. biological warfare program and the CIA’s MKULTRA program.
Other stories I wrote about the BW Korean War charges included one that made substantial quotes about the program from captured U.S. military officers, and one that analyzed U.S. government admissions made during a controversial, if unsuccessful, prosecution of journalists for reporting on the program in the 1950s.
I also wrote a book review of Nicholson Baker’s book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, which had also made some use of the communications intelligence documents described above and other research showing a plausible case for U.S. use of the weapons during the Korean War.
