Department of Justice Official Releases Letter Admitting U.S. Amnesty of Japan’s Unit 731 War Criminals

[The following is a portion of an article published initially at Medium.com. The length of the article (over 7000 words) precludes my reposting the full essay here. But approximately half is posted below. Please follow this link to read the entire work.]

Upon my request, both the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center have released copies of a December 1998 letter from DOJ official Eli Rosenbaum to Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In the letter, Rosenbaum admitted to Cooper that after World War II the United States government had classified records pertaining to a Japanese military unit that engaged in biological warfare experimentation and field trials on humans.

The letter, one of two released to this author, confirmed the U.S. "essentially assisted Japan in covering up the atrocities perpetrated by the unit.”


In 1998, Rosenbaum was director of DOJ’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), while Rabbi Cooper was associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center. The occasion for the correspondence was the Wiesenthal Center’s sponsorship of a “Trans-Pacific Video-Conference on Japanese Wartime Atrocities,” held at the Center’s own Museum of Tolerance on August 16, 1998.[1]

Reported briefly in the press at the time [2], Rosenbaum’s letter of December 17, 1998 ended any doubts that the U.S. government had given scientists and military personnel associated with the notorious Japanese biological warfare program of the 1930s-1940s “immunity [from prosecution at the International Military Tribunal, Far East] in return for their human experimentation research data.”[3]

This appears to have been the first time that any U.S. government official admitted publicly and officially that the U.S. had proposed an amnesty for the members of Japan’s Unit 731 and assorted components, known to have murdered thousands of prisoners in illegal biological experiments, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians in biological warfare operations predominantly in China, but also the Soviet Union, from 1939 until nearly the end of World War II.

While Rosenbaum’s letter was quoted in the press, and in a 2002 Congressional Research Service report, the letter itself, and a November 1998 letter to Cooper also on the subject of Japan’s war crimes, were never released publicly. These letters are now available with the publication of this article, along with supporting documentation that until now was also not available.

This article looks at some of the salient issues in regards to aspects of these new documents, including the motivation for the U.S. amnesty action, the question of experimentation on U.S. and allied prisoners of war (and its possible cover-up), and the question of assigning culpability to those involved. The article concludes with remarks on these matters by both Rosenbaum and Cooper, who were interviewed for this article in Spring 2013. (The delay in publishing this information was occasioned by personal matters.)

Unit 731

Beginning with John Powell’s 1980 article, “Japan’s Germ Warfare: The US Coverup of a War Crime,” and a subsequent article in the October 1981 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, “A Hidden Chapter in History”, revelations concerning long-hidden or suppressed aspects of Japanese war crimes began to surface in the U.S. and Western press. Powell shocked the American public by writing about and producing documentary evidence of a cover-up of “Japan’s use of biological warfare against China and the Soviet Union.”[4]

The primary Japanese military unit associated with the biological warfare research and production of weaponry was known as Unit 731, although there were a number of other military units also involved. Powell (1981) wrote, “The American government’s participation in the cover-up, it is now disclosed, stemmed from Washington’s desire to secure exclusive possession of Japan’s expertise in using germs as lethal weapons.”

The original promise of amnesty for information was made after a discussion some months after the end of World War II between the Ft. Detrick’s Colonel Murray Sanders and General Douglas MacArthur, according to numerous accounts of Unit 731’s history. The finalization of such a deal, however, took a few years, and was not without controversy within government circles.

Powell (1980) quoted a July 1, 1947 memo from two U.S. doctors associated with bacteriological research that Japanese researchers had thousands of slides of human tissues taken from their experiments on prisoners. The slides and reports from the Unit 731 researchers were available if the U.S. could provide assurances the Japanese doctors and scientists would be saved from war crimes prosecution. The two doctors, Edward Wetter and H. I. Stubblefield argued that since "any 'war crimes' trial would completely reveal such data to all nations, it is felt that such publicity must be avoided in the interests of defense and national security of the U.S."

The vagueness of the language – “it is felt” – appears to indicate their message was something discussed comprehensively in their circle, in particular by scientists from the Army’s Ft. Detrick, which was the center of a major crash program in biological warfare research begun during the war, and intelligence officers.[5]  Ft. Detrick personnel had been in charge of the debriefing of the Unit 731 doctors and scientists, while various documents speak to the sharing of such information with intelligence agencies.

According to Powell, Wetter and Stubblefield furthermore indicated “the knowledge gained by the Japanese from their experiments ‘will be of great value to the U.S. BW research program’ and added: ‘The value to the U.S. of Japanese BW data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from war crimes prosecution.’”

The furor over Powell’s revelations peaked in the mid-1980s with public controversies over Japanese biological warfare (BW) experiments on U.S. and allied prisoners of wars. Congressional investigators ignored evidence of such experiments on U.S. POWs. It wasn’t until the publication of Linda Goetz Holmes’s book, Guests of the Emperor: The Secret History of Japan's Mukden POW Camp (Naval Institute Press, June 2010) that any mainstream historian accepted such experiments even took place. The entire episode is still ignored in the press accounts of World War II history.

Subsequently, the scandal around Unit 731 appeared to die down publicly, until it was revived approximately a decade later. In 1995, there were two major narratives published on Unit 731 and the U.S. immunity deal. One was an article by Nicolas Kristof in the New York Times. The other was historian Sheldon Harris’s book, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the American Cover-up.[6]  The publication and controversy surrounding the publication of Iris Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking, in November 1997, also brought greater attention to the issue of Japanese atrocities during World War II.

Amnesty to Protect Collaboration and to Protect U.S. Biowar “Expertise”

The supporting documentation for this article includes two memoranda for the record from the early 1980s by Norman Covert, then Chief of Public Affairs and historian for the U.S. Army at Ft. Detrick, Maryland. Rosenbaum’s December 17 letter had quoted liberally from the latter of these two memoranda.[7]  While it is worth considering the portions Rosenbaum did not quote, the selection revealed to Rabbi Cooper, taken from Covert’s May 5, 1982 Memorandum for the Record, explained the U.S. rationale for the Unit 731 amnesty:

The Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to keep Top Secret any information about the Japanese Biological Warfare Program. The Joint State, War, Navy Coordinating Committee expressed its desire that the information be retained in US hands exclusively and certainly it should be kept from the Soviet Union....

In the [June 26, 1947] memorandum written by Dr. Edward Wetter and Mr. H. I. Stubblefield[8] for the State, War, Navy Coordinating Committee for the Far East, the decision not to prosecute LTG [Lieutenant General Shiro] Ishii [founder and leader of Unit 731 and the biological warfare program] was discussed. “An agreement with Ishii and his associates that information given by them on the Japanese BW program will be retained in intelligence channels is equivalent to an agreement that this government will not prosecute any of those involved in BW activities in which war crimes were committed.”

.... Scientists in the US program said the information was not of significant value, but it was the first data in which human subjects were described. It indicated the Japanese program reached a level of expertise in 1939 that was never advanced because of lack of resources. Any prosecution of LTG Ishii and his associates would have exposed the Japanese capability in addition to US expertise. It would have been difficult to retain such information in US-only hands in such a case. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and SCAP [Supreme Command Allied Powers] agreed there would be little gained by such prosecution and deferred, offering LTG Ishii immunity in exchange for detailed information. [bold added for emphasis]

The Covert memorandum was certainly a kind of spin, although Mr. Covert himself may not have been aware of the full extent of U.S. crimes. Even so, he admitted to this author in an interview for this article that at the time he wrote the memos he was concerned mainly with “protecting Ft. Detrick[‘s]” reputation. The May 5 memo, and an earlier one Covert wrote on November 17, 1981, were a response to media attention following the Powell disclosures. The November 17 memo was undertaken as a rewrite of the May 5 memo for the purpose of submission to the Secretary of the Army.

“News media was beating me to death on that,” Covert said, referring to the strong response to the Powell articles. “The Memorandum for the Record was to cover your ass, a record of what I had done.”

Covert added there had also been “several legislative requests” for more information on the Unit 731 material as well. He also recalled that the Department of Justice had also contacted him on one occasion during this period, although he did not remember the details. Rosenbaum indicated in his interview that DOJ had likely been involved in some capacity in the postwar discussions surrounding the granting of amnesty to Ishii and associates.

The question of the value of the Japanese data and biological samples is a matter of conjecture, while the controversy over the use of such data (and similar data from the Nazi concentration camp experiments), including use of operational knowledge in purported U.S. germ warfare attacks on North Korea and China during the Korean War, is a separate, though related issue.[9]  At one point, Covert said U.S. scientists found the Japanese research “not of significant value.” He appeared to have gotten this information from speaking to Ft. Detrick scientists still resident in the Frederick, Virginia area. In addition, Covert appeared to give little credence to evidence that came from Soviet sources.

But elsewhere, writing about Ft. Detrick representative Dr. Norbert Fell's interrogation of Shiro Ishii, Covert wrote in his November 17, 1981 memo, "The data on human testing appeared to have significant value to the U.S. BW Research programs at Camp Detrick." Some months later, in his May 5, 1982 memo, Covert concluded, “It is certain the Japanese had a full-scale BW effort and achieved a level of expertise working with many traditional BW agents.”

A later report by Doctors Edwin Hill and Joseph Victor, also from Ft. Detrick, was quite direct when considering the value of getting the Unit 731 data. “Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation,” they wrote.[10]

To conclude the discussion on the value of Unit 731’s data, it is worth noting a May 1947 memo from MacArthur’s office to the War Department and Major General Alden Wiatt of the Chemical Warfare Service on the BW human experiments, “confirmed tacitly by Ishii” to interrogators. The memo was obtained by author William Triplett, and also describes the intersection of the amnesty agreement with unnamed intelligence agencies:

"Data already obtained from Ishii and his colleagues have proven to be of great value in confirming, supplementing and completing several phases of U.S. research in BW, and may suggest new fields for future research.... For all practical purposes an agreement with Ishii and his associates that information given by them on the Japanese BW program will be retained in intelligence channels is equivalent to an agreement that this Government will not prosecute any of those involved in BW activities in which war crimes were committed."[11]

MacArthur’s command told the War Department, “valuable technical BW information as to results of human experiments and research in BW for crop destruction probably can be obtained….”

Ft. Detrick’s Norbert Fell resumed interrogations of Shiro Ishii two days after this memo was sent....

[To see the rest of this article, click through to read at Medium.com - Relevant footnotes for portion published here are posted below - JK]

[1] China News Daily, Aug. 14, 1998, http://www.cnd.org/CND-US/CND-US.98/CND-US.98-08-14.html. CNET reported on the conference at the time: URL http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-214541.html. See also the original announcement of the event by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, archived online at http://web.archive.org/web/19981203135255/http://events.broadcast.com/events/swc/nanjingmassacre/ (all accessed May 14, 2017).

[2] See Stars and Stripes, week of March 15 – 28, 1999, vol. 122, no. 6, reposted online at http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/5850/deathcamp.html (accessed May 14, 2017).

Reference was also made in a Congressional Research Service report by Gary K. Reynolds in December 2002, “U.S. Prisoners of War and Civilian American Citizens Captured and Interned by Japan in World War II: the Issue of Compensation by Japan,” online at http://web.archive.org/web/20080406073324/http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/usprisoners_japancomp.htm (accessed May 14, 2017).

[3] Letter, Eli Rosenbaum to Abraham Cooper, December 17, 1998.

[4] Powell’s 1980 article was published in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, “Japan’s Germ Warfare: The US Coverup of a War Crime” (Oct.-Dec. 1980, vol. 12, no. 4.) See URL: http://criticalasianstudies.org/assets/files/bcas/v12n04.pdf (accessed May 14, 2017).

Powell’s 1981 article is available online, reproduced as part of the Congressional Record on November 10, 1999, http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/1999/11/feinstein.html (accessed May 14, 2017) Powell died in Dec. 2008.

In the middle 1970s, John Saar at the Washington Post wrote a story, “Japan Accused of WW II Germ Deaths” (Nov. 19, 1976), that described a Japanese documentary by Haruko Yoshinaga, aired by the Tokyo Broadcasting System on Unit 731. “Japanese scientists killed at least 3,000 Chinese prisoners in World War II in bacteriological warfare experiments and escaped prosecution by sharing the findings with US occupation forces…. Press officers at the US Defense and Justice Departments said they had no information on the charges but would investigate,” Saar wrote. (See URL: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19761119&id=5E0aAAAAIBAJ&sjid=XCkEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6053,6138361 - accessed May 14, 2017) But no one in the Western press pursued the story further until Powell published his first article four years later.

The impact of Powell’s expose can be gauged by the fact that 60 Minutes interviewed Powell for an on-air segment, “War Crime,” on April 4, 1982. The transcript for this episode is available beginning on pg. 352 in this large PDF file online: URL http://philippine-defenders.lib.wv.us/pdf/bios/sandy_and_search_for_truth.pdf.

Morley Safer narrated: "During World War II, the Japanese military experimented with germ warfare. Their guinea pigs were Chinese, Russian and American prisoners of war. For a variety of reasons, the American government kept it all a secret."

[5] The U.S. World War II program in both chemical and biological warfare is discussed in Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare, Random House, 2002.

[6] Nicolas D. Kristof, “Unmasking Horror -- A special report. Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity,” New York Times, March 17, 1995, URL: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/world/unmasking-horror-a-special-report-japan-confronting-gruesome-war-atrocity.html (accessed May 14, 2017).

Routledge published an expanded, revised version of Factories of Death in 2002. Harris died a few months later.

[7] My thanks to Mr. Norman Covert for sharing certain documents. The attempt to obtain the documents through official channels is a story in itself. A DoD spokesman had referred my query to Fort Detrick. Ft. Detrick’s FOIA office referred me to the National Archives. But the documents did not apparently exist there either. They may or may not constitute documents that Mr. Covert claims were destroyed by order of Ft. Detrick’s commanding officer in 1998.

[8] “Mr. H. I. Stubblefield” was in fact Dr. Henry I. Stubblefield, a bacteriologist who we know, at least in 1954, was on the Chemical Corps Advisory Council, according to an in-house history of Ft. Detrick written by Norman Covert. See URL: http://www.detrick.army.mil/cutting_edge/chapter09.cfm. Coincidentally, along with two other researchers, he had co-authored with Andrew C. Ivy an article in 1934, “Protective Action of Sodium Thiocyanate against Dysentery Toxin (Shiga): An Experimental Study in Dogs and Rabbits.” Ivy was later to be a major figure testifying on medical ethics at the Nuremberg trials.

According to Powell (1980), Dr. Wetter was at the time of the SWNCC memo “Panel Director” of the “Committee on Biological Warfare.” Powell does not say, but it appears likely this was the secret “DEF” committee, the third of three secret committees formed during the World War II years by the National Academy of Sciences and National Research Council. See URL: http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/history/archives/collections/cbw-1941-1948.html (accessed May 14, 2017). Wetter later went to work as a civilian employee for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development (http://www.archive.org/stream/officialregister1955unit/officialregister1955unit_djvu.txt). According to the 1955 Official Register of the United States, p. 114, Wetter worked in this office as “Executive Secretary, Committee and Panel on Special Operations.”

[9] See Till Bärnighausen, “Data generated in Japan’s biowarfare experiments on human victims in China, 1932–1945, and the ethics of using them,” Japan's Wartime Medical Atrocities: Comparative Inquiries in Science, History, and Ethics, Taylor and Francis, 2010.

On the Korean War allegations, see Stephen Endicott & Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea, Indiana University Press, 1998.

[10] Op. cit., Bärnighausen, p. 97.

[11] See William Triplett, Flowering of the Bamboo, Woodbine House, 1985, pp. 241-250.

[To see the rest of this article, click through to read at Medium.com]

Proof US Agencies Destroyed Evidence of Japan's WWII Medical War Crimes

The letter published below came from the November 19, 1999 Congressional Record (pp. S14542-S14543). Sheldon Harris, a historian at California State University, Northridge, wrote the letter, which alleged the destruction by various U.S. military agencies of records concerning Japanese war crimes during World War II. Harris had been investigating these crimes, as well as actions by the U.S. government to cover-up them up. In one instance, Harris claimed "sensitive" documents were destroyed at Dugway Proving Ground as "a direct result" of research he had initiated there.

Harris' letter was entered into the record by Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was speaking about the controversies at the time about the ongoing classification even 50 or more years after the fact of documents pertaining to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan war crimes. In particular, the 1990s had seen a growing campaign to expose the activities of Japan's World War II biological warfare experiments and subsequent operational bacteriological and chemical warfare campaigns, which have collectively come to be known under the rubric of the campaign's most notorious brigade, Unit 731, led by Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii.

The kick-off for the controversy was the publication in the Oct. 1981 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of "Japan's Biological Weapons: 1930-1945 - A Hidden Chapter in History," written by Robert Gomer, John W. Powell, and Bert V.A. Roling. Feinstein entered the entire article into the Congressional Record, along with another letter from historian Sheldon Harris, who had written a book on Unit 731 and the U.S. cover-up of their activities. According to Harris and Gomer/Powell/Roling, the U.S. had amnestied the Unit 731 scientists in order to get at the unethical data from human experiments on prisoners, data derived from intentional infliction of disease followed often enough by vivisection. The 731 survivors were incinerated or buried in mass graves.

Historians have documented the massive amount of destruction of records by the Japanese military, including many if not most of the records for Unit 731 and associated units. Professor Harris's letter references the U.S. destruction of records, and not the larger, and even more problematic destruction of records by the Japanese authorities.

The Japanese government denied any biological/chemical war crimes, while the U.S. slowly declassified some incriminating documents, but would not come out and say what the U.S. had done in relation to the Japanese doctors and scientists. Some of the Unit 731 personnel were tried in 1949 in a special war crimes trial by the Soviet Union. Much of what we know about Unit 731 and associated biological and chemical warfare divisions comes from this trial, which for years was derided in the West. (Google Books has republished a free ebook of the Soviet transcripts from the trial.)

In January 1999, President Bill Clinton, "in accordance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (PL 105-246)... established the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG)." But it wasn't until May 2000 that Congress, "as part of the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2001... extended the IWG's life to December 2004 through passage of the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act, P. L. 106-567." The IWG's name was accordingly changed to the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group. According to the IWG website, declassification of U. S. Government records related to imperial Japan's war crimes then became an official part of the IWG's mission.

The IWG ended its declassification mission in March 2007 (extended from an original 2004 ending date). It subsequently published a final report to Congress in September 2007. Some resources have been placed online for researchers, primarily Select Documents on Japanese War Crimes and Japanese Biological Warfare, 1934-2006.

While over 100,000 previously unclassified documents related to Imperial Japan's biological warfare program were reportedly released via IWG's efforts, no further discussion or elaboration took place regarding Professor Harris's documentation of the destruction of records held by different U.S. military agencies.

The following is the text of Professor Harris's letter, which can be found online as part of the Congressional Record, or also here. It can also be accessed here.

GRANADA HILLS, CA,
October 7, 1999

Hon. SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN,
Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC. 

DEAR SENATOR FEINSTEIN: Several Asian American activists organizations in California, and organizations representing former Prisoners of War and Internees of the Japanese Imperial Army, have indicated to me that you are proposing to introduce legislation into the United States Senate that calls for full disclosure by the United States Government of records it possesses concerning war crimes committed by members of the Japanese Imperial Army. I endorse such legislation enthusiastically. 

My support for the full disclosure of American held records relating to the Japanese Imperial Army’s wartime crimes against humanity is both personal and professional. I am aware of the terrible suffering members of the Imperial Japanese Army imposed upon innocent Asians, prisoners of war of various nationalists and civilian internees of Allied nations. These inhumane acts were condoned, if not ordered, by the highest authorities in both the civilian and military branches of the Japanese government. As a consequence, millions of persons were killed, maimed, tortured, or experienced acts of violence that included human experiments relating to biological and chemical warfare research. Many of these actions meet the definition of "war crimes" under both the Potsdam Declaration and the various Nuremberg War Crimes trials held in the post-war period. 

I am the author of "Factories of Death, Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American Cover-up" (Routlege: London and New York; hard cover edition 1994; paperback printings, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999). [Note: a revised edition was published in 2002 - ed.] I discovered in the course of my research for this book, and scholarly articles that I published on the subject of Japanese biological and chemical warfare preparations, that members of the Japanese Imperial Army Medical Corps committed heinous war crimes. These included involuntary laboratory tests of various pathogens on humans—Chinese, Korean, other Asian nationalities, and Allied prisoners of war, including Americans. Barbarous acts encompassed live vivisections, amputations of body parts (frequently without the use of anesthesia), frost bite exposure to temperatures of 40–50 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, injection of horse blood and other animal blood into humans, as well as other horrific experiments. When a test was completed, the human experimented was "sacrificed", the euphemism used by Japanese scientists as a substitute term for "killed." 

In my capacity as an academic Historian, I can testify to the difficulty researchers have in unearthing documents and personal testimony concerning these war crimes. I, and other researchers, have been denied access to military archives in Japan. These archives cover activities by the Imperial Japanese Army that occurred more than 50 years ago. The documents in question cannot conceivably contain information that would be considered of importance to "National Security" today. The various governments in Japan for the past half century have kept these archives firmly closed. The fear is that the information contained in the archives will embarrass previous governments. 

Here in the United States, despite the Freedom of Information Act, some archives remain closed to investigators. At best, the archivists in charge, or the Freedom of Information Officer at the archive in question, select what documents they will allow to become public. This is an unconscionable act of arrogance and a betrayal of the trust they have been given by the Congress and the President of the United States. Moreover, ‘‘sensitive’’ documents—as defined by archivists and FOIA officers—are at the moment being destroyed. Thus, historians and concerned citizens are being denied factual evidence that can shed some light on the terrible atrocities committed by Japanese militarists in the past. 

Three examples of this wanton destruction should be sufficiently illustrative of the dangers that exist, and should reinforce the obvious necessity for prompt passage of legislation you propose to introduce into the Congress: 

1. In 1991, the Librarian at Dugway Proving Grounds, Dugway, Utah, denied me access to the archives at the facility. It was only through the intervention of then U.S. Representative Wayne Owens, Dem., Utah, that I was given permission to visit the facility. I was not shown all the holdings relating to Japanese medical experiments, but the little I was permitted to examine revealed a great deal of information about medical war crimes. Sometimes after my visit, a person with intimate knowledge of Dugway’s operations, informed me that "sensitive" documents were destroyed there as a direct result of my research in their library. 

2. I conducted much of my American research at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. The Public Information Officer there was extremely helpful to me. Two weeks ago I telephoned Detrick, was informed that the PIO had retired last May. I spoke with the new PIO, who told me that Detrick no longer would discuss past research activities, but would disclose information only on current projects. Later that day I telephoned the retired PIO at his home. He informed me that upon retiring he was told to ‘‘get rid of that stuff’’, meaning incriminating documents relating to Japanese medical war crimes. Detrick no longer is a viable research center for historians. 

3. Within the past 2 weeks, I was informed that the Pentagon, for ‘‘space reasons’’, decided to rid itself of all biological warfare documents in its holdings prior to 1949. The date is important, because all war crimes trials against accused Japanese war criminals were terminated by 1949. Thus, current Pentagon materials could not implicate alleged Japanese war criminals. Fortunately, a private research facility in Washington volunteered to retrieve the documents in question. This research facility now holds the documents, is currently cataloguing them (estimated completion time, at least twelve months), and is guarding the documents under ‘‘tight security.’’ 

Your proposed legislation must be acted upon promptly. Many of the victims of Japanese war crimes are elderly. Some of the victims pass away daily. Their suffering should receive recognition and some compensation. Moreover, History is being cheated. As documents disappear, the story of war crimes committed in the War In The Pacific becomes increasingly difficult to describe. The end result will be a distorted picture of reality. As an Historian, I cannot accept this inevitability without vigorous protest. 

Please excuse the length of this letter. However, I do hope that some of the arguments I made in comments above will be of some assistance to you as you press for passage of the proposed legislation. I will be happy to be of any additional assistance to you, should you wish to call upon me for further information or documentation. 

Sincerely yours,
SHELDON H. HARRIS,
Professor of History emeritus,
California State University, Northridge

In a March 30, 2007 Memorandum for the "Director, US Army Records Management and Declassification Agency" on the matter of "Japanese War Crimes - Record Search at Fort Detrick, Maryland", William H. Thresher, Chief of Staff at US Army Medical Command, referenced the Harris charges of destruction of records at Fort Detrick. Thresher was responding to a request from the Headquarters, Department of the Army (HQDA) "for information concerning records of interest to the Nazi/Japanese War Crimes Interagency Working Group (IWG)."

It is worth noting that this memorandum was written even as the IWG had just finished its declassification project.

Thresher wrote, "In early 2007, the USAMRIID [US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases] performed a thorough search for any remaining responsive records, including records regarding Unit 731, and found no records." The search included "the Commander and other senior personnel."

Thresher then turned to allegations by Professor Sheldon Harris concerning possible destruction of records at Fort Detrick. He reviewed the controversy:

Professor Harris, in his letter, dated 7 October 1999, stated that the recently-retired Public Information Officer at Fort Detrick (Mr. Norman Covert) told Professor Harris that upon retiring he was told to get rid of documents relating to Japanese war crimes. 

The USAMRMC [US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command] is unaware of any authority at Fort Detrick or the USAMRMC requesting destruction of any responsive original records, or of copies of Fort Detrick or USAMRMC documents not previously provided to Dugway or NARA.

Professor Harris died on August 31, 2002. To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has written about his 1999 letter to Senator Feinstein detailing his charges about the destruction of records by US military officials. If it were up to the powers that be, this would be an example of government censorship lost in the whirlwind of moving events. But it seems an episode worth reviving, if nothing else as a documentation of an important episode in the history of exposing U.S. and Japanese biological warfare history.

A few years back, Norman Covert confirmed to this author his contention that his commanding officer at Ft. Detrick was the superior officer who told him to destroy the weapons.

And there the controversy stands to this day.

Google Publishes Free Ebook Facsimile of Famous Soviet 1949 War Crimes Trial of Unit 731

"Question: So it would be correct to say that all persons brought to Detachment 100 for experimental purposes, were doomed to die.
"Answer: That is so."

-- Page 325, Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons

Google Books is to be congratulated for shining a light on one of the most heinous and yet still largely unknown episodes of World War II, via the free publication for the general public of the English language version of the materials released on the 1949 Khabarovsk War Crimes trial. Published originally by Moscow's Foreign Languages Publishing House in 1950 (see full title above), "Materials" documents the examination of the use of biological weapons and illegal human experimentation, including thousands of "terminal" experiments, by members of the Japanese military unit most closely identified with this program, Unit 731.

Written off by some as a Stalinist "show trial" -- and there undoubtedly are some elements of that here -- the facts examined at Khabarovsk have been established to be true by Western historians. "Materials" is divided into pages of documentary proof, testimony by the accused and various witnesses, the state prosecutor's case, statements by the defendant's attorneys, and of course the verdict itself. I have personally found the reading of this trial material to be one of the most amazing and emotional experiences I've ever had. You cannot read this book and be unaffected.

It may be of interest to readers to know that none of the criminals indicted and convicted were executed for their crimes, though some did die in captivity. The majority were released early, as the USSR in the 1950s trying to win political points with the post-WWII Japanese state.

The question remains: why has the worst use of biological weapons and illegal human experiments, even dwarfing the crimes of the Nazis, gone mostly unremarked for almost three generations?

The ramifications of the decision by the Japanese government to research bacteriological or "germ" warfare on prisoners, killing thousands of them via inoculation of biological toxins, and then wage biological warfare across China and parts of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, are still resonant in Asia today. It is not unusual to hear in Chinese or North Korean propaganda references to the crimes of Unit 731. An article by AFP, and published in Feb. 2015 by Japan Times, documents the fact that "70 years on, Unit 731’s wartime atrocities fester in China’s memory."

The actions of the Japanese emperor and his Army to unleash biological warfare -- led by the infamous general Shiro Ishii -- went unremarked during the Toyko War Crimes trials at the end of World War II. The reason for this was likely due to the established fact that the U.S. made at the time a secret agreement to amnesty all the personnel involved in Japan's Unit 731, "Detachment 100," and other assorted BW experimental and operational units, with the aim of gathering all the data gathered by Japan's illegal human experiments and operational experience with biological weapons for itself.

The Soviets, stymied in their attempt to get the matter brought up at the Tokyo trials -- the U.S. dragged its feet on even letting the Soviets interview BW chief Ishii, who was under house arrest by the Americans -- turned to their own separate trial of captured personnel from Unit 731 and the Kwantung Army, spurred on by popular resentment against the Japanese imperialist army and the dreaded Kampetei, who had kidnapped hundreds of Soviet and Chinese citizens for terminal use as guinea pigs in the Unit 731 dungeons at Pingfan, Manchuria. At moments, the anger of those in attendance at trial is even noted in the proceedings.

Some of the documentary material regarding the decision by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, or Tokyo War Crimes trials) not to pursue biological warfare charges against the Japanese have been published digitally online at a special site dedicated to the Tokyo trials by the University of Virginia Law Library.

The information obtained by the Americans, and, if some reports are true, in some cases the personnel, went to the U.S. Army's biological weapons labs at Fort Detrick, Maryland. (According to the official military historian at Ft. Detrick, years later documents about Unit 731 were destroyed by order of Ft. Detrick's commander, leading to Congressional action to release what documentation still existed.) During the Korean War, the Chinese and the Soviets claimed the U.S. tested use of such materials during limited biological warfare operations against North Korea and China. Famously, captured U.S. airmen confessed to such use after interrogation (leading to the "brainwashing" scare pushed by the CIA and the U.S. media in the 1950s and 1960). The U.S. strenuously denied using biological weapons, but the accusations remain, and the evidence is still being sifted, much of it still classified after 60 years.

Indeed, for historians, both amateur and professional, finding original materials, such as the prosecutor's examination of the general leading the Kwantung Army's BW unit during WWII, was next to impossible, unless you had the money and perspicacity to search out rare copies of the printed version of selected materials. Now, thanks to a review of the copyright legality of publishing this material, initiated at my request, Google has published this important historical text for all readers to use. I am grateful to them, and hope that the general availability of this important original documentation will facilitate greater recognition of the crimes that took place during World War II, and throw greater light on the aftermath of the Unit 731 episode, one that reaches far across the historical divide to allegations of the use of biological and chemical weapons today.

For further reading: Here are two articles of interest. The first from a bioethics journal, "The West's dismissal of the Khabarovsk trial as 'communist propaganda': ideology, evidence and international bioethics."

The second article is a 2001 article in The Japan Times, which recounts the trial itself: "The trial of Unit 731". The following is an excerpt from that article (the link to Harris's book is added):

Russians aware of the atrocities in Harbin were outraged. Josef Stalin responded by ordering trials of his own. On Dec. 25, 1949, the trial of Unit 731’s doctors began, with orders to finish by the end of the year, before implementation of a decree reinstating the death penalty in the Soviet Union. Stalin apparently feared that Japan might execute Soviet prisoners of war if the physicians were hanged in Khabarovsk, Permyakov said.

Nevertheless, the proceedings “were not a show trial on the Stalinist model,” said Sheldon Harris, the American author of “Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45.”

“It was a strange affair, having the trial take place in Khabarovsk rather than in Moscow or Leningrad,” Harris said. “However, the evidence presented at the trial was reasonably faithful to the facts. It was discredited in the U.S. and elsewhere because of the notoriety of earlier show trials in the U.S.S.R. Nevertheless, the [U.S.] State Department and MacArthur’s people were in a panic that some evidence would come out at the trial that there were American POWs who were [victims of] human experiments.”

Man Who Sought Truth in Mass Murder Teigin Case Dies in Tokyo

FORGET FORGET FORGET

"But something is wrong, very wrong..."

The Google Alert notified me a few days ago that, according to The Japan Times, a 54-year-old Japanese man, Takehiko Hirasawa, died alone and unheralded in Suginami Ward, Tokyo. Cause of death is unknown. When the crime that obsessed him most of his adult life occurred, he had not yet been born. He was not yet the son of two fathers. He was not yet the head of the Society to Save Sadamichi Hirasawa.

He was no one any of you were likely to have heard of. (I see The Wrongful Convictions Blog noticed Takehiko's death, though.) Nor would you likely have known about those who died in the criminal events that pursued Takehiko's conscience, all 12 of them. Nor was the story of his adopted father, sent to death row where he would never be executed, even after over 30 years, likely known to many of you, as past crimes fade like letters written upon a mystic writing pad.

The date of the crime was January 26, 1948. It was by all accounts a most extraordinary event. The intervention of the Americans into the Tokyo police investigation was documented by William Triplett in his 1985 book, The Flowering of the Bamboo. The crime story made the U.S. press over the years, only to repeatedly slip and slosh back into the inky depths of press oblivion.

Here's what went down: in the western Tokyo district of Shinjuku, 16 people had been at a Tokyo branch of the Teikoku Ginko bank (abbreviated as "Teigin"). It was closing time on a wet afternoon, the streets muddy, the city still reeling from the massive incendiary bombings by the Americans less than three years before. Now the Americans were the occupiers. Japanese imprisoned abroad during the war were still trickling back into Japan. Some of them were war criminals. Some had belonged to a notorious but ultra-secret military unit involved in biological warfare experimentation and operations.

"And now I look him in his face. It is round, very round. Like an egg."

Much later... Much, much later, decades later, we would learn the U.S. had a hand in covering up this BW unit, known as Unit 731. (Actually, there turned out to be many such units scattered throughout the Japanese Army, and included contacts at prestigious universities and medical schools.) We learned that thousands of prisoners had been experimented on, inoculated with disease, shot with poisoned bullets, exposed to germ bombs, forced to impregnate each other with syphilis, subjected to vivisection (dissected alive).

Only later, much, much later, would we learn that Japanese biological warfare operations would kill hundreds of thousands in China during World War 2. It was by far the greatest sustained use of BW in warfare up to that time, but it was hidden, giving the lie to the supposed truth that no huge conspiracy could ever succeed for long. (For most scholarly treatment of the entire historical event, though still incomplete on its own, see Sheldon Harris's book, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up.)

FORGET

"This serum is very strong and if it touches your teeth or gums it can cause great damage. So please listen and watch carefully as I demonstrate how to swallow the serum safely."

A man came to the bank. He wore an armband that identified him as a health official. He said he was a doctor. There had been a dysentery outbreak and he was working with the Americans to prevent an outbreak. Would each bank worker please take the specially-derived antidote please? The workers looked at the bottles the "doctor" had brought. They were marked in English "First Drug" and "Second Drug." They drank, and within minutes, 12 were dead. The "doctor," who also drank from the bottles but apparently was unfazed by their contents, disappeared with a small amount of cash. One woman staggered into the street and gathered the attention of stunned pedestrians.

The investigation was huge, and the Tokyo press, like all reporters, were hungry for a big story. The Japanese cops went to the Americans, who still controlled censorship over the Japanese press in Jan. 1948. Would they help suppress this story? They would, replied the Americans. (See Triplett's documents at the rear of his book.)

"Now drip the liquid onto your tongues."

FORGET FORGET FORGET

There was one other wrinkle. The cops were getting tips. According to sources, the killer was linked to Unit 731 (or perhaps an affiliated unit). This was inconvenient to say the least, because only months before, the U.S. had solidified a deal with Gen. Shiro Ishii, the head of Unit 731, and his associates and workers, to hide the evidence of their crimes in exchange for extensive debriefings about what they had discovered about using BW agents on humans. They were also getting slides of human tissues from Unit 731's experiments, at least 8,000 such slides, which were sent on to researchers at Ft. Detrick.

The Americans knew, too, that some of the experiments had likely been conducted on U.S. and British POWs at Mukden POW camp, and possibly other sites. They had kept the whole affair out of the Tokyo International Military Tribunal, even as similar crimes were being prosecuted at Nuremberg. But the "Teigin Incident" threatened to blow the whole story.

Commander in Chief, Far Eastern Command (May 47): "Data already obtained from Ishii and his colleagues have proven to be of great value in confirming, supplementing and complementing several phases of U.S. research in BW, and may suggest new fields for future research.... the only known source of data from scientifically controlled experiments showing the direct effect of BW agents on man.... The BW information obtained from Japanese sources should be retained in intelligence channels and should not be employed as 'war crimes' evidence."

But the tale of the bizarre bank killings wouldn't die. The press kept at it. The police needed to find someone to charge with the crime. They found someone. Sadamichi Hirasawa, a painter and sometime pornographer who had no experience with the military or chemistry, unless it was on how to mix a drink. He was interrogated for hours on end and confessed, though he swiftly withdrew his confession as coerced. Too late. Evidence was concealed at trial. The confession was ruled valid by the court. In the end, Sadamichi Hirasawa was sentenced to death.

But that was not the end of the story. There were appeals, denials of appeals, and after many years, a decided policy by the Japanese government never to sign an actual death warrant for Sadamichi's hanging. Appeals and decades both passed. Hirasawa died on Japan's death row in 1985. The New York Times noticed the event.

He was 95 years old, and maintained his innocence to the end. Long before he died, in 1962 a famous Japanese writer, Tetsuro Morikawa, founded a Society to Save Hirawawa. According to Triplett, "The Society filed sixteen appeals for retrial and four appeals for pardon. All had been rejected."

Astoundingly, when his health failed, Tetsuro had his son Takehiko become adopted by Sadamichi, as the latter needed "relatives" if further appeals were to be pursued. In fact, as The Japan Times story makes clear, there was still an active appeal on file, which may (or may not, as the vagaries of the law go) be moot now that Takehiko is dead.

And so it was that Takehiko Morikawa became Takehiko Hirasawa. (Morikawa died in 1983.)
"-- and now I see everyone rushing for the sink, for the tap, for the water, and now I am rushing for the sink, for the tap, for the water, and now I see people falling to the floor... people coughing, people retching, people vomiting, and now I can feel people pushing past me... and now the light is leaving us, leaving us here..."

VERGESSEN FORGET

But perhaps the reader wants to know why Takehiko's death has any significance now. I cannot tell the reader that. It is already written: in the news about threats of use of biological and chemical weapons by terrorists, by the forgotten tales of use of such weapons by the U.S. and their allies, by some small number of historians who will not let the truth die.

Even a portion of the U.S. government got into the act, late in the game then, long ago now, as judged by many for whom 9/11 "changed everything."  With 9/11 it seemed as if a veil descended on all that went before it, erasing much of history, so those in power could get away with their crimes.

But before 9/11, in 1999, there were hearings. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who castigated Edward Snowden for the release of documents showing U.S. wrong-doing, helped sponsor the Japanese Imperial Army Disclosure Act of 1999. More information to come out. But not the name of the man who killed a dozen innocent people in one of the strangest poisoning killings on record. That name is not known. Could it have been Sadamichi Hirasawa? Takehiko Hirasawa spent his life trying to prove it was not so.

Takehiko Hirasawa is dead, following his mother by almost a year. The police have ruled out foul play, although it is clear the investigation has not even been completed. Japan is rearming. The US is telling us to fear BW from Syria and Iran (see this Washington Post article from October). The US is pushing experimentation on children to develop an anthrax vaccine to "protect" the US from biological weapons attack.

The victims at the Teikoku Ginko bank call out to us across the decades.

"I am falling, I am falling, I am falling into the grey-ness, I am falling, falling and falling away, away from the light...."

FORGET FORGET FORGET

[The italicized text is taken from David Peace's novelization of the Teigin Incident, Occupied City. The text in bold is from a document reproduced in the appendix to Triplett's book, labelled as from the War Crimes Office, Judge Advocate General's Office, US War Department. -- This posting was cross-posted at The Dissenter/FDL]

US Covered-Up for Decades the Largest Use of Biological & Chemical Weapons in History

Crossposted from The Dissenter/FDL

There are many reasons why one should oppose the military action against Syria being planned by the Obama administration. But given that the action is being trumpeted as a righteous response to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government, there is one reason to oppose the U.S. action that carries with it more than the usual amount of painful irony.


It is difficult to know how to introduce this subject, as it is so dark and evil, and the U.S. population has been lied to for so long about it, that I fear the initial reaction very likely can only be shock and denial. And yet, the crimes to which I am about to refer are quite well documented, and were themselves the focus of a Congressional bill in 2000 directing the National Archives to specially search for and release the relevant documentation. The deaths involved are said to approach half-a-million souls, and the injuries of many are still ongoing.

Kept "Top Secret" in "Intelligence Channels"

Here, in summary, are the primary facts. As you read this, remember that the U.S. government not only amnestied those involved in the following war crimes, but paid them for the information they could provide, and in some cases hired them. The decision was made by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department, and possibly the new CIA and the new president, Truman. The idea for the deal was prompted by General Douglas MacArthur, military doctors at Ft. Detrick, and officials in the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service. It was famously decided that all that you are about to read now would be kept as "top secret," not to be released outside "intelligence channels." And it wasn't... for about 35 years.

From the time the Japanese Imperial Army occupied Manchuria (in the early 1930s) until the end of World War II, its special Unit 731, and dozens of associated units, engaged in wide-scale lethal experiments on biological and chemical warfare, including the use of poisons for assassination purposes and the wide-scale use of herbicides. These experiments were conducted on thousands of prisoners, estimates ranging from 3000 to 20,000 POWs and civilian prisoners. The exact number may never be known.

Many of these prisoners were experimented upon without anaesthesia and by way of vivisection. The prisoners at the central Unit 731 facility at Pingfan in Manchuria were incinerated in crematoria after the military doctors were done with them. As I recently was able to derive by research into Soviet documents, some of the prisoners -- called "marutas" or "logs" by Japanese researchers and military officials -- sent for lethal experimentation by Unit 731, Unit 100, and like facilities were military or intelligence agency prisoners who could not be trusted to remain silent about the torture they had received from Japanese interrogators.

As did the Nazis, Japanese researchers conducted experiments on malaria, syphilis, and on freezing. (Japanese and German collaboration on these programs was likely closer than previously thought.) Male prisoners were forced to rape female prisoners in order to inoculate them with venereal disease. Other prisoners were forced to stay outside in sub-zero temperatures, as part of Japanese military frostbite experiments. Some prisoners were tied to stakes and had munitions loaded with bacteria exploded nearby them, the shrapnel embedding itself in their exposed skin. Other prisoners were tricked into taking food or medications that had cyanide, hallucinogenic substances, and opiates.

Though the US government specifically denies it, some of the prisoners were also US POWs held at Japan's Mukden POW camp, and possibly other camps as well. (An academic book on the subject was published by Naval Institute Press a few years ago.)

Large-scale Use of Biological Weapons in War Was Covered-Up

But the experiments were only part of the crimes, as the Imperial Army implemented the use of the bacteriological weapons against the Chinese and Soviets during World War II, killing, according to recent estimates, somewhere between a quarter and half-a-million people with plague, typhoid, and other diseases, and leaving others injured for life. Japan bombed cities with specially constructed bacterial bombs, as part of a plan that included well-poisonings, the release of infected rats and fleas (bred specially for the purpose), and other forms of mass inoculations.

After World War II and the blanket amnesty for all the BW researchers, who were led by Kwantung Army Lt. General Shiro Ishii, British and Canadian researchers have alleged that some of the Japanese personnel were utilized in a campaign of biological warfare by the United States during the Korean War. The issue is still hotly debated today, and the U.S. still keeps secret today many documents related to that war.

The crimes of Unit 731 and assorted entities, the U.S. amnesty of those involved, and collaboration with Ishii and others in collecting the "scientific" information taken from the murder of thousands, would have remained secret forever, had it not been for the conscience of a few of those Japanese scientists and technicians involved who came forward to talk to Japanese researchers in the mid-1970s. In America, the revelations were due to the tireless work of journalist John W. Powell, who used FOIA extensively to document the case of the U.S. cover-up, publishing in 1981. Even so, the subject has never entirely entered the mainstream of U.S. consciousness.

Japan's Use of Chemical Weapons in China

[This section on chemical weapons has been augmented from the original posting, taken from a 9/11/13 version of this article posted as a diary at Daily Kos.]

The crimes of the Japanese Imperial Army were not limited to bacteriological weapons. They also used chemical weapons extensively in China from 1937 until 1945, according to declassified US records. None of the Japanese military hierarchy tried after the war for war crimes were charged with use of chemical or bacteriological weapons. Those involved were protected by the U.S. military and amnestied for any crimes. The knowledge of the weaponry involved, including that derived through lethal experiments, was sent to Ft. Detrick, the CIA, and other "intelligence channels."

If anything, the size of the chemical war and the damages and fatalities wrought thereby are even more secret today than Japan's biological weapons program. A diligent search finds very, very little published in English on this issue. One prominent exception is Yuki Tanaka's article, "Poison Gas: the Story Japan Would Like to Forget," in the October 1988 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Japanese researcher also unearthed evidence of the cover-up of the CW war crimes at the trials of Japanese Imperial officers after WWII, noting that because chemical warfare and bacteriological warfare were linked in the same treaties that banned them, to prosecute on chemical warfare experiments and tests would have been "difficult to bring up... while covering up the use of bacteriological warfare."

There's no question the U.S. knew of such crimes, as Col. Thomas Morrow, who worked for the International Prosecution Section of the Tokyo war crimes department sent two different memos to the Chief Prosecutor on exactly this subject, detailing the use of specific poison gases, and a discussion of casualties. But Morrow was unexpectedly sent back to the U.S., and his reports classified and put away for decades.

The scope of the chemical war unleashed in China can be ascertained by the damage left afterward. According to Nationalist Chinese sources in Taipei, approximately 700,000 chemical munitions were left abandoned in China after World War II. The Chinese government says that approximately 2,000 people still die each year from encounters with such ordinance. An ongoing clean-up of the chemical mess, in part paid for by Japan, is still ongoing in 2013.

Discoveries regarding the scope of the chemical warfare experiments and operational use of the weapons are still ongoing. A 2005 article in the UK Independent announced the discovery of a huge Japanese chemical weapons plant "20 miles south-east of Hulun Buir city in the far north of Inner Mongolia." Covering approximately 40 square miles, a Chinese researcher said, "It may be the largest and best-preserved gas experiment site in the world. We've found more than a thousand pits that were used for experiments, as well as trenches and shelters for people and vehicles."

When recently, for a longer article I am writing relating to this subject, I asked DoD for official response to these issues, the DoD spokesperson referred me to Ft. Detrick's public affairs office. The official at Ft. Detrick said they had no knowledge of these events and could not comment, all relevant material having been sent to the National Archives years ago. Meanwhile, a former official at Ft. Detrick confirmed to me a statement that he made to historian Sheldon Harris in 1999 concerning the destruction of records on Unit 731 at Ft. Detrick occurring as late as 1998. I'll have more to say about that in the future, but meanwhile those interested can pursue the matter at this link from the Congressional Record.

U.S. Record Makes It Impossible to Trust Their Statements on Chemical or Biological Warfare Dangers

The final point concerns the relevancy of the material above with the aims of the U.S. government to bomb Syria for the purported use of chemical weapons. The argument is simple. The actions of the U.S. government for decades on the matter of biological and chemical weapons demonstrate that it cannot be trusted on this matter. The government was intimately involved with cover-ups on the use of these weapons. Their cover-up is likely still ongoing.

Recently, the Washington Post published an article by Joby Warrick on possible dangers from Syrian use of biological weaponry. The story is specious on its own account, but it is also telling that Warrick never refers to any of the facts I've related above about the U.S. history with Unit 731.

Furthermore, as awful as the material involved here is, it must be assessed in the context of other U.S. criminal activities associated with biological and chemical warfare, from the lies told about WMD, leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to experiments done on U.S. citizens, to the facilitation of chemical weapon attacks by other countries, e.g., Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Certainly, the videos released on the Internet, most lately with the imprimatur of Congressional Intelligence committees, contain scenes of ghastly deaths that are frightening to watch. The constant bombardment of propaganda from media and government sources, not least supposed "liberal" or "progressive" politicians, is meant to achieve a sense of urgency and fear in the population that will allow at the least acquiescence towards the military's new war actions in the Middle East.

I hope that bringing up the history of the United States in relation to the largest operational use of biological and chemical weapons in history will give pause to those who are otherwise credulous of U.S. intentions. The record is clear: the U.S. has lied and covered-up when it comes to biological and chemical weapons, and government sources cannot be trusted, certainly not when the bulk of their information is kept secret from the public.

Chief of Iraq Torture Commandos: "The Americans knew about everything I did"

On March 6, the UK Guardian posted a very important story, with accompanying videos, examining in details and with witnesses the extraordinary efforts by US military and civilian personnel to assemble, train, and direct Shi'a commando brigades in Iraq. These police brigades and paramilitary units unleashed a hellish reign of terror, with massive round-ups, torture, and death squad killings.

The Guardian reveals from photos, interviews, and documentary evidence the chief role of former US Special Operations Colonel James Steele, as well as General Petraeus and other US officials in organizing this counterinsurgency-cum-terror campaign.

Steele had been in charge of training Salvadoran army personnel linked to a campaign of extrajudicial killings, disappearances, and torture during the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s. Back in those days, Petraeus was an ambitious up-and-comer, reportedly all too willing to learn what Steele, who'd learned counter-terror techniques in Vietnam, had to teach him, even staying in Steele's house.

Steele came to Iraq as a supposed civilian adviser. He carried a lot of authority, however, according to the Guardian investigation. From whence did that authority derive? Was he on special assignment for Rumsfeld (Rummy apparently is the one who sent him to Iraq)? For the National Security Council and/or the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Was he working with the CIA or JSOC's shadowy Intelligence Support Activity (ISA)? Steele, who is described in the Guardian video as someone who is extremely cold, without feeling, is unlikely ever to reveal that himself.

The Guardian also describes how military authorities commanded US soldiers on the scene, witness to such atrocities, not to intervene when present at such crimes. The order was first issued as FRAGO (Fragmentary Order) 242. The film interviews one of these brave soldiers, a military medic, who describes what he saw when the torture commandos were unleashed in Samarra.

Others interviewed for the film include Adnan Thabit, the chief of the Iraqi Special Police Commandos from 2004-06. The Guardian has excerpted his interview for a short video highlighing Thabit explaining, "The Americans knew about everything I did."

The main article, "From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington's man behind brutal police squads," notes that the Guardian tried to contact Steele for a year to get his side of the matter. He did not respond, and that is not surprising. Spooks never talk about what they are doing, and he may wish to note that anything said could be produced in court someday, because he appears to be a major war criminal, the hatchet man for the murderous policies of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.

US Connivance in Torture and the Case of Bradley Manning

The Guardian piece fleshes out the case I presented in my own story from August 2011 at FDL's The Dissenter, The Forgotten History of David Petraeus, including using evidence I had linked to the Petraeus-Iraq torture scandal, such as the protests of the Oregon National Guard over the stand-down on torture.

The article relies on the release of Wikileaks Iraq War Logs, which documented US knowledge of torture and the orders to soldiers to ignore it. It also interviews Peter Maass, whose 2005 investigatory report in the New York Times first concentrated on the role of Steele. The Guardian appears to be the first to have highlighted the role of Colonel James Coffman, a Petraeus adviser to Thabit's torture thugs.

The role of Wikileaks here is of piquant significance, as Wikileaks' leader, Julian Assange remains huddled up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, having claimed political asylum in the wake of persistent demands for his extradition to Sweden on what appear to be shaky sexual offense charges. The Swedish prosecutors have reportedly refused to come and interview Assange in London. The impact of this and other repressive and financial pressures on Wikileaks may have affected their operations in strange ways.

But in even more dire straits is Private Bradley Manning, who has admitted in military court to turning over documents to Wikileaks. Manning revealed his motivation: he was moved to act after he was forced to help cover-up corruption by the Iraq National Police, and participate in round-ups of men who he strongly suspected would be tortured. Indeed, as Kevin Kosztola pointed out in a March 5 article at The Dissenter, Manning had been powerfully affected by this incident in comments he purportedly made to Adrian Lamo in computer chat logs.

Manning was even more direct in his statement to the military court: he decided to leak information because the US military had turned a blind eye to corruption and torture.

As the Guardian article and documentary on Steele show, Manning was certainly correct to fear the consequences of helping turn prisoners over to Iraq authorities. Yet Manning is on trial with life imprisonment hanging over his head, while David Petraeus, James Steele, Donald Rumsfeld and others walk free, able to enjoy the good life of the freedom this country allows those who play by the rules and ignore crimes against humanity, if not engage in them.

Kosztola also reports that Wikileaks has decided to withhold (for now) the documents that would illuminate just what Manning was referring to in the incident with the INP. Apparently they think they are protecting Manning. Under such dire circumstances as Manning faces, I suppose such release should really be up to Manning and/or his attorneys.

US Denial Over Government Use of Torture

The US counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, including the organization of police commando torture squads and secret prisons, cost over millions, perhaps billions of dollars. The Guardian explains:

In June 2004 Petraeus arrived in Baghdad with the brief to train a new Iraqi police force with an emphasis on counterinsurgency. Steele and serving US colonel James Coffman introduced Petraeus to a small hardened group of police commandos.... [Gen. Thabit] developed a close relationship with the new advisers. "They became my friends. My advisers, James Steele and Colonel Coffman, were all from special forces, so I benefited from their experience... but the main person I used to contact was David Petraeus."

With Steele and Coffman as his point men, Petraeus began pouring money from a multimillion dollar fund into what would become the Special Police Commandos. According to the US Government Accounts Office, they received a share of an $8.2bn (£5.4bn) fund paid for by the US taxpayer. The exact amount they received is classified.

With Petraeus's almost unlimited access to money and weapons, and Steele's field expertise in counterinsurgency the stage was set for the commandos to emerge as a terrifying force. One more element would complete the picture. The US had barred members of the violent Shia militias like the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army from joining the security forces, but by the summer of 2004 they had lifted the ban.

The Guardian report should shake up US denial over torture and the role of top US officials, such as former CIA director Petraeus, Obama's choice for the position after Panetta left to be Secretary of Defense. But US news media have largely ignored the story (though the New York Times noted it, relegating the story to a brief blog commentary), even though a report by Philip Bump at The Atlantic Wire called the Guardian story and video "staggering... blockbuster." Yet Bump's March 6 article only has (to date) about 3,600 views.

In a healthy democracy, there would immediate calls for Congressional investigations and hearings. But instead we have silence, as the US state rushes to maintain its right to project organized violence and terror wherever it wishes. A similar cover-up over the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture is now unfolding, as Marcy Wheeler reports.

The full 51-minute documentary can only for now be viewed at the Guardian site, and I have no way to embed it here. It is essential viewing for anyone who wishes to know the full history of the US invasion and policy in Iraq. Click on the video title here to watch the documentary: James Steele: America's mystery man in Iraq.

Cross-posted at FDL/The Dissenter

"The Atomic Victims as Human Guinea Pigs"

While much has been written about the victims of the Atomic Bombs dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II, very little is known by Americans of the fate of the victims of that bombing.

Known as the Hibakusha, their medical condition for years was the subject of U.S. occupational and later Japanese censorship. Studied and examined by U.S. doctors and scientists organized as the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, in conjunction with staff from the Japanese National Institute of Health (JNIH), researchers withheld medical treatment from the atomic bomb victims, arguably because it interfered with their research goals.

Researcher Susan Lindee wrote about these topics in her excellent 1994 book, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima. But few others ever took up the subject, and Lindee's book has been largely ignored, especially in recent years (not even one review at Amazon, for instance).

Another barely known essay on the subject was written by Shingo Shibata, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at Hiroshima University, in Seisen Review (No. 4, 1996). The full essay is nowhere to found on the Internet... until now. (A portion of it -- approximately 8 of its 20 pages -- has been published on this webpage.)

In "The Atomic Victims as Human Guinea Pigs,"Shibata relates the history of the early days of ABCC/JNIH cooperation. He highlights the fact that ABCC was subordinate to the General Head Quarters and U.S. occupational authorities. He also documents how the JNIH utilized scientists who previously worked as part of the notorious Unit 731 of Ishii Shiro, a large-scale bacteriological and chemical warfare research center run by the Japanese military. After World War II, the Americans amnestied the Japanese war criminals involved in the biowar and chemical warfare research programs, even though they had experimented on thousands of civilian and military POW victims, killing all of them in concentration camp-like environs.

The latter tale has been told many times, most recently by the late U.S. historian Sheldon Harris in the revised version of his book, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up (Routledge: 2002). It is an evil tale, as dark as they come, of how Cold War political exigency and hypocrisy was used to cover-up, especially for the American public, an alliance with some of the worst war criminals ever -- all to get access to their data and expertise, honed from over a decade of barbaric experiments on prisoners, including, many believe, U.S. POWs.

Later, according to a number of scholarly researchers, Unit 731 members or data taken from them, was used in a highly secret campaign of bacteriological warfare conducted by the U.S. during the Korean War. When news of the this war crime leaked out, including signed confessions from U.S. pilots, the U.S. government began a propaganda campaign deriding the confessions as the result of Chinese "brainwashing" and torture. A covert campaign to study these techniques was the supposed origin of the CIA's MKULTRA program.

It is not an exaggeration to say that much of our modern history, including even the recent turn (or re-turn) of the U.S. clandestine agencies and military to the "dark side" use of torture and drugs on prisoners, had its origins in this diabolical deal made with war criminals from Japan and Nazi Germany (the latter in Operation Paperclip and other similar programs).

I am pleased to bring this important piece of historical writing to U.S. readers and other with Internet access. Below is a selection from the essay. Note, references and footnotes are not reproduced here but can be read in the original essay (PDF link).

The first order of the U.S. Forces immediately after the occupation was to ban all publication of reports concerning the genocide and destruction caused by the atomic bombs. Thus they wanted to monopolize all information on the bombing. Until the end of the occupation on 28 April 1952, Japanese journalists, writers, cameramen, novelists and scientists were prohibited from reporting on the real situations of the atomic destruction. If they dared to do so, they were threatened with trial before the military tribunals of the Occupation Forces. Many books, including novels, poems and accounts of the events, were censored and often confiscated by American authorities. (Braw, 1986; Horiba, 1995a and 1995b) As a result, the urgent necessity to give medical and other social aid to the atomic victims (the “Hibakusha” in Japanese) was not reported even among Japanese.

Their second step was to prohibit all doctors in Japan from communicating and exchanging, even among themselves, the records of clinical experience and research on the Hibakusha. At that time they, especially in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, tried to do their best to find ways to cure the unheard-of terrible burns and internal disorders caused by atomic heat and radiation. The U.S. Forces further confiscated the samples of burnt or keloid skins, internal organs and blood and the clinical records of the dead and living Hibakusha. (Committee, 1981)

Their third step was to force the Japanese government to refuse any medical aid offered by the International Red Cross.

If a laboratory animal were cured, it would be utterly useless from the standpoint of medical scientific observers. Maybe it was by the same reasoning that the U.S. authorities did their utmost to prevent any medical treatment given to the Hibakusha. “As far as medical aid is concerned, the less the better” was their policy.

Their fourth step was to establish the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) as two institutions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the purpose of observing, not curing, of the hibakusha. Thus, almost all Hibakusha have been treated as if they were only human guinea pigs. Suppose that an assailant continues only to observe a wounded victim for many years after an assault. There is no doubt that such observance itself is nothing but an infringement on human rights.

What did the Japanese Government do to aid the Hibakusha?

I am ashamed to say that the Japanese government did nothing to help the Hibakusha either.

Firstly, its bureaucrats did their utmost to cooperate with the above policy of the U.S. Army toward the Hibakusha. Only two months after the atomic bombing they dissolved the governmental hospitals in charge of medical treatment of the Hibakusha in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a result, many Hibakusha were left on the streets of the devastated cities without any medical treatment, compounding the many difficult post-war economic and social conditions they had to contend with.

Secondly, by orders of the General Head Quarters (GHQ) of the U.S. Occupation Forces, on 21 May 1947, the Japanese National Institute of Health (JNIH, YOKEN in Japanese abbreviation) was founded with half of the staff of the Institute of Infectious Diseases (IID) attached to the University of Tokyo.

During the period of the Japanese invasion of China from 1931 to 1945, the IID had fully cooperated with the notorious Unit 731, that is, the Army unit for bacteriological warfare. (Williams & Wallace, 1989; Harris, 1994) Most of the staff of the JNIH transferred from the University of Tokyo to the Health and Welfare Ministry were medical scientists who had intimately cooperated with the network of Unit 731 in China and Singapore as well as the Laboratory for Infectious Disease Control (LIDC) attached to the Imperial Army's Medical College. The LIDC in Toyama, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, was the headquarters for the network of the bacteriological warfare program and its institutions, including most of the medical schools of many universities.

The officially declared aims of the JNIH were to make research on pathogens and vaccines and also to screen the safety of biological products (vaccines, blood products and antibiotics), and thereby to contribute toward preventive medicine and public health under the control of the GHQ. However, there were two hidden objectives of the JNIH. The first was to cooperate with the ABCC. The second was to continue, under the guidance and control of the U.S. Army 406th Medical Laboratory,(1) some uncompleted studies of biological warfare program as schemed up by Unit 731. (Shibata, 1989 and 1990)

As for the first hidden objective, only 13 days after the establishment of the JNIH the GHQ asked it to help the ABCC. Dr. Saburo Kojima, then the first Vice-Director and later the second Director of the JNIH, in his commemorative essay, “Memories on the Past Ten Years of the JNIH,” looking back on its initial stage of cooperation with the ABCC, wrote, “We, the intelligent scientists had equally thought that we must not miss this golden opportunity”(2) to record the medical effects of the A-bomb on humans. He was reportedly one of the leading medical scientists who committed vivisection on Chinese prisoners as human guinea pigs in the network of Unit 731 in China.(3) As such a scientist, very positively appreciating the proposal of the GHQ, he never showed humanistic sentiments towards the Hibakusha, still less a counter-proposal for medical treatment of them. He only betrayed such cold-blooded and calculating words as is cited above.

Click here to read the complete essay, "The Atomic Victims as Human Guinea Pigs."

Additional reading:
"Japanese Biomedical Experimentation During the World-War-II Era" by Sheldon Harris, Ch. 16 of Military Medical Ethics, Vol. 2

"The Pentagon and the Japanese Mengele: The Abominable Dr. Ishii" by Christopher Reed, published at Counterpunch, May 27, 2006

Commission and Omission of History in Occupied Japan (1945-1949) by Stephen Buono, Journal of History, SUNY Binghamton, no date (Accessed 12/8/2012)

Former Guantanamo Psychiatrist Promotes Dubious Drug Theory on Afghan Killings

Originally posted at Truthout.org

A tag team of two contributors to Time Magazine's Battleland blog have misrepresented the facts concerning the possibility that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales may have been under the influence of the controversial antimalarial drug mefloquine (also known as Lariam) when he allegedly killed 17 men, women and children in two villages outside Kandahar last March.

Using false information; faulty interpretation of documents and innuendo; and in one case, withholding key disclosures regarding their background, these authors took a serious issue - the dangerous psychiatric and neurotoxic effects of mefloquine on some people and the history of the use of this drug by the military - and twisted it to further an agenda that just happened to match US interests in limiting speculation about the Kandahar massacre to Bales.

One of the two authors, Mark Benjamin, who years ago had written a number of articles on mefloquine's terrible side-effects, published his article on Bales and mefloquine at Huffington Post.

The other author, a former top Army psychiatrist, Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, has written three articles for Time's Battleland that have strongly suggested Bales' alleged crime was linked to mefloquine use. She recently also gave an interview on the topic to Nina Shapiro at Seattle Weekly.

Ritchie's background in certain aspects is not well known and certainly is surprising, given the mefloquine issue. Currently, she is chief clinical officer for the District of Columbia's Department of Mental Health. But back in 2002, she was Lieutenant Colonel Ritchie, program director for mental health policy for the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs and consultant on suicidal detainees at Guantanamo. Interestingly, this was at the same time all incoming detainees were forced to take large treatment doses of mefloquine, even as she likely had access to their medical records.

In addition, at an unspecified time between 2002 and 2007, she trained psychiatrists for Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) that worked closely with Guantanamo interrogators. While the UN and numerous human rights groups have decried the use of health professionals in interrogations, Ritchie continues to defend the policy.

An "Emergency" Review of Mefloquine?

When it was first leaked that a single soldier, part of an Army Stryker Brigade, was in custody for the March 11 killings of up to 17 men, women and children in two villages near a counterinsurgency-inspired "Village Stability Platform" [VSP]), the horror of the massacre made it difficult to understand how the soldier - later identified as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales - could have done the killings.

Accordingly, a slew of news media reports focused on Bales' family life, his police record, his associates, the history of his duty postings and the possibility of his having post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), even while the Department of Defense (DoD) was quickly pulling off the Internet as many references to and pictures of Bales from military sources that it could. Meanwhile, reports were leaking out, including a major investigative piece by Australian SBS reporter Yalda Hakim, broadcast on March 28 atCNN, that a number of witnesses, including those in US custody, were saying there was more than one soldier present at the killings and perhaps as many as 20.

It is not surprising that some of the speculation surrounding the DoD's account of Bales as a lone shooter should focus upon what drugs he had been taking. One of the drugs discussed, mefloquine, is a controversial antimalarial drug known to have possible psychiatric and neurotoxic side effects. The first article proposing a Bales-mefloquine link appeared in the March 16 edition of Counterpunch.

But it wasn't until Benjamin's March 25 Huffington Post article that the mefloquine hypothesis took off in the press, leading to interviews for Benjamin at Democracy Now! and CNN. The reason for the heightened interest was Benjamin's contention that nine days after the killings, "a top-level Pentagon official ordered a widespread, emergency review" of how the drug was administered to troops. The implication was that a mefloquine-induced psychosis in Bales was possibly connected to the murders. [As described below, Benjamin's contention was later dropped, but the original version, including the quotes above, can be viewed at this linked web site.]

Yet, as a March 27 Truthout critique of Benjamin's article noted, there was no "widespread, emergency review" of mefloquine undertaken after the Kandahar killings, undermining the very premises of The Huffington Post piece. Benjamin had mistaken a March 20 "tasker" memo by a regional US medical command for the original order, which had been given by the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs (ASD-HA) back on January 17.

In his article, Benjamin quoted a March 20 Battleland post by Ritchie where she first raised the Bales-mefloquine link:

"'One obvious question to consider is whether he was on mefloquine (Lariam), an antimalarial medication,' Elspeth Cameron Ritchie wrote this week in TIME's "Battleland" blog, noting that the drug is still used in Afghanistan. "'This medication has been increasingly associated with neuropsychiatric side effects, including depression, psychosis and suicidal ideation.'"

In an email response to queries from Truthout, Benjamin would not comment upon any collaboration between himself and Ritchie. "My discussions with people who may or not be my sources will remain private."

Subsequently, Ritchie returned the favor to Benjamin, mentioning his Huffington Post article in an April 2 Battleland post. Ritchie asked "whether mefloquine or other toxic exposures - to licit or illicit drugs - might have been a contributing factor in the Afghan massacre."

Bales' attorney has picked up on the Benjamin-Ritchie mefloquine angle, telling CNN that he was interested in mefloquine as one of many possible drugs that might have affected his client's behavior.

Army Policy on Antimalarial Drugs

Bales was assigned to the Army's Third Stryker Brigade and, as such, his medical protocols fell under Central Command (CENTCOM) policy. According to CENTCOM rules, the antibiotic doxycycline, not mefloquine, is to be used for all malaria prophylaxis in Afghanistan, unless specifically medically contraindicated. This has been the case since, as Benjamin himself reported, the DoD in 2009 pulled back from use of Lariam except in special circumstances.

Moreover, according to CENTCOM orders, all departing soldiers are given "enough [antimalarial] medication for their deployment" when they leave the US. For soldiers deploying to Afghanistan, that medication has been overwhelmingly doxycycline, not mefloquine. There is no evidence that Bales was ever prescribed mefloquine, and while the Army's January review was prompted by known failures to prescribe the drug correctly, there is no evidence that this happened to Bales.

According to prescription figures provided to Truthout by DoD officials, mefloquine prescriptions have been declining for some time. In 2011, the Army gave out 169,690 scripts for doxycycline to 151,802 soldiers. (The DoD could not say if all of these were for malaria, or for other antibiotic use.) At the same time, only 1,780 soldiers (utilizing 1,921 scripts) were prescribed mefloquine, down approximately one-third from 2009 levels.

Bales' Stryker unit was part of I Corps stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McCord. In 2011, there were 6,566 scripts written for I Corps personnel and only 150 for mefloquine. On December 2, 2002, right around the time of Bales' actual deployment, the Army's policy changed again and mefloquine was downgraded from a second-line to a third-line malaria prophylactic drug. While none of the above proves Bales did or did not take mefloquine in Afghanistan, it makes the likelihood quite small.

[UPDATE 4/20 9:55 pm PST: The statistics for the number of DoD prescriptions of antimalarials were derived from the DOD Pharmaeconomic Center, which, as a DoD official explained to Truthout, "can pull data stateside because that reporting system exists." However, "this record of systems for visibility from Afghanistan (or Iraq) back to the states does not exist." Hence, there is no way to specifically say how many prescriptions of mefloquine (or any other antimalarial drug) was given inside Afghanistan. The official added, "within theater they certainly have visibility as to what is being dispensed and to who."

Yet, as explained in the article, as someone deployed from a stateside base to Afghanistan, Bales would have been prescribed enough antimalarial medication for his entire deployment before he left. Hence, assuming Bales correctly was prescribed doxycycline upon deployment, one would have to posit that Bales somehow lost his medication and then wrongly was prescribed mefloquine by some doctor in theater. There is no evidence or claim to date that this ever happened, though anecdotal reports have suggested that some events like this have occurred from time to time.]

Amplifying the problem with Benjamin and Ritchie's hypothesis concerning Bales and mefloquine is Ritchie's own contrasting history concerning mefloquine policy, some of it known and some of which can only be presumed or remain subject to speculation.

Ritchie, Guantanamo and Mefloquine

Ritchie had gone to Guantanamo, by her own account, four times. In October 2002, Ritchie indicated she first went to Guantanamo in order to "review all the suicidal gestures among the detainees." She said she "recommended many basic changes."

One can't say exactly how effective her recommendations were, in part because DoD figures concerning the number of suicide attempts and gestures by Guantanamo detainees has changed over the years and because the DoD labels some of the suicide gestures as attempts at "self-harm," but not suicide. But one damning report by BBC in 2005 noted that, in the year after Ritchie left, there were "350 incidents of self-harm, including 120 'hanging gestures."

In a 2003 New York Times article, a Guantanamo spokesman, Capt. Warren Neary, is quoted as saying that in the "18 months since the detention camp opened," there had been 28 suicide attempts by 18 individuals." "Most of those attempts" had been made in the first six months of 2003, that is, in the period just after, or even during, Ritchie's intervention on Guantanamo suicides.

As a physician, Ritchie likely reviewed the medical records for some or many of the detainees under her review. As previously reported at Truthout, the records would have shown that every detainee had been administered treatment doses of mefloquine upon arrival.

The treatment dose is a single 1,250 mg dose, versus the weekly 250 mg dose given for malaria prophylaxis, and what Bales would have taken (if he had taken mefloquine) upon arrival in Afghanistan.

Both treatment and prophylaxis dosages of mefloquine can cause serious side effects, according to medical reports. An April 16, 2002, meeting of the Interagency Working Group for Antimalarial Chemotherapy, which included DoD officials, the Working Group warned, "other treatment regimes should be carefully considered before mefloquine is used at the doses required for treatment." At this point, mefloquine had been given in treatment doses to all incoming detainees for three months and the policy would continue for years to come.

[UPDATE, May 19, 2012: The minutes of an Armed Forces Epidemiological Board Meeting on May 20, 2003 describes the presence of "Cameron Ritchie" at the IWG group meeting in January 2003. The speaker, Dr. Monica Parise, noted that the group specifically looked at the neuropsychiatric side effects of mefloquine. While the "serious reactions" were said to be "pretty rare," something along the order of "1 in 200 or so up to 1 in 10,000 of seizures or major psychiatric problems," she noted "there are a host of other more acute less severe neuropsychiatric issues that occur short-term, such as insomnia, strange dreams, fatigue, lack of energy, inability to concentrate, and some people have reported that those effects  have lasted a very long time."

Parise continued (bold emphasis added): "I've heard cases that this has just ruined people's lives. I don't if anybody  -- I had heard that there may be some data in DOD about how some of the studies that might shed light on that, but I've not seen anything in terms of effect on the brain. But I don't really think we have a good explanation of what that is. I mean, as I mentioned, at the meeting there was discussion -- and we did have a psychiatrist there -- of, well, are people susceptible, are they susceptible to these problems and this drug has brought that out?"

Presumably this psychiatrist was Dr. Ritchie.]

An Army physician who has published many journal articles on mefloquine called the mass presumptive treatment with mefloquine "pharmacological waterboarding."

Truthout's investigation determined that no US soldiers or contractors, even those brought from malarial-endemic regions by Halliburton subsidiary KBR, were administered presumptive doses of any anti-malaria drug, including mefloquine at Guantanamo.

Ritchie has never spoken out on the detainees' mefloquine dosing, which continued at least through 2005. She did not return a request for comment for this article.

Ritchie returned to Guantanamo in 2007 and/or 2008 to work in a forensic capacity on psychiatric evaluations of prisoners slated for trial by military commissions. In one high-profile evaluation, of Salim Hamden - whose case ultimately led to the Hamden v. Rumsfeld Supreme Court case in 2006, which threw out the first version of the military commissions as violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions - Ritchie disagreed with the defense psychiatrist that Hamden, who had been tortured, suffered from PTSD and found him "manipulative."

In any case, Ritchie certainly would have looked at the medical records for the detainees she examined and could hardly have overlooked the presence of mefloquine. Given Ritchie's interest in suicide and her history of consulting on suicides at Guantanamo, one wonders if she were aware of the toxicology results for reported 2007 Guantanamo "suicide" Abdul Rahman Al Amri, which made special note of looking for mefloquine in his blood.

As reported by Truthout, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions is looking into the Al Amri case, as well as that of 2009 reported suicide, Mohammad Al Hanashi.

Ritchie and the BSCTs

It is not known if Ritchie did more at Guantanamo, however, in an October 2008 article at Psychiatric News examining ongoing controversies over the use of psychiatrists in military interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere, Ritchie revealed she had taken a leading role in bringing psychiatrists onto the BSCTs. "The Army requires psychiatrists to complete a 136-hour course before taking part in interrogations," the article said. "Ritchie has taught parts of that program and said that four psychiatrists have attended it so far."

Ritchie may have taught the BSCTs when she worked in the Office of the Army Surgeon General (OASG) under Maj. Gen. Kevin Kiley. In 2006, a controversy arose when it was discovered that Kiley's office had continued to recommend the use of psychiatrists in interrogations, despite a policy statement from the American Psychiatric Association against use of doctors or psychiatrists in interrogations.

An October 20, 2006 OASG/MEDCOM policy memo issued by Kiley discussed BSCT training, including instruction in the "application" of "learned helplessness" "to the interrogation/debriefing processes."

"Learned helplessness" is a psychological syndrome so named by psychologist Martin Seligman, who was invited by the CIA to lecture on the topic at a Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school in May 2002. Both James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen have said they relied on the theory in their construction of a torture program for the CIA that same year.

An important 2007 article by Dr. Steven Miles in the American Journal of Bioethics looked closely at the experience of psychiatrists and psychologists working for the BSCT at Guantanamo. The article focused on the interrogation of Mohammad Al Qahtani in late 2002, an interrogation the Guantanamo military commissions convening authority admitted amounted to torture.

"Clinicians were integral to this abusive interrogation," Miles wrote.

In the 2008 Psychiatric News article, Ritchie defended the use of psychiatrists in interrogations, claiming, "Psychologists and psychiatrists are experts at enhancing rapport.... They also can counteract behavioral drift, the spiraling down of interrogation into a culture of coercion." Ritchie also defended the BSCT policy in an interview with NPR in September 2008. NPR said Ritchie contended "at the beginning of the war on terror, there was misunderstanding of 'what the rules were' for interrogations." Ritchie added, ""We don't try to defend (that)."

Ritchie has not changed her beliefs in these regards over the years. In the 2012 book "Women in Psychiatry: Personal Perspectives," Ritchie wrote, "Although controversial in the American Psychiatric Association and the media, I continue to believe that psychologists and forensic psychiatrists can contribute in a very positive way to legal, safe and effective interrogation."

A Mefloquine "Expert"

In January 2003, not long after she first went to Guantanamo, Ritchie, then working in the office of the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, attended an "Experts Meeting" on malaria chemoprophylaxis organized by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). A year later, in 2004, Ritchie, now "Psychiatry Consultant to the Army Surgeon General," gave a presentation to the DoD's Deployment Health Clinical Center on the "Neuropsychiatric Side-Effects of Mefloquine."

No published work by Ritchie could be found that referenced mefloquine or anti-malaria treatment or medication. Ritchie mentioned, as if in passing, her 2004 presentation in an April 4 article at Battleland two days after this author informed an anti-Lariam activist of its existence. In a very brief posting, Ritchie wrote, "There is a lot more in the literature since a 2004 talk I gave on the neuropsychiatric effects of the medication. There followed a flood of anecdotal information and articles in the media, but rigorous scientific literature was limited."

In fact, there were dozens, if not hundreds of studies and articles on mefloquine prior to her 2004 talk. Indeed, a 2004 review article on antimalarial drug toxicity in the journal Drug Safety listed dozens of peer-reviewed articles on mefloquine, its efficacy as a drug and its potential side effects. In the same year, the CDC issued guidelines indicating mefloquine should only be used when other standard drugs were not available, as it "associated with a higher rate of severe neuropsychiatric reactions when used at treatment doses."

In her April 4 article, Ritchie coyly did not indicate what the substance of her 2004 presentation was, nor what data she drew upon. For full disclosure sake, she should release her paper or notes pertaining to that presentation.

Why Push a Bales-Mefloquine Link?

Both Benjamin and Ritchie appear to have had an agenda: to make it appear far more probable than any facts would admit that Bales could have gone psychotic on mefloquine.

None of their articles ever considers that Bales may not have acted alone, or that indeed, is not proven to have killed anyone in those hamlets where 17 died. Most of all, their stories ignore problems with the DoD's narrative of events, with charges by Bales' attorney that the DoD has hidden evidence from his defense team, or, as this USA Today article notes, "blocked them from interviewing survivors and are withholding evidence of the March 11 attacks ..."

Key evidence that eyewitnesses to the attacks saw helicopters, men with walkie-talkies and upwards of 15 soldiers, as evidenced by this CNN interview and this Global Post article, is never mentioned by Ritchie or Benjamin.

Lacking such balanced reporting, it would seem the anti-torture journalist Benjamin and the former trainer for Guantanamo interrogation consultants have joined up to help promote the mainstream narrative of Bales as a single and possibly deranged killer. Together, they were quite successful in spreading the idea that Bales might have gone crazy from mefloquine.

Deranged Bales may have been, but whether his actions, if proven, were taken alone or as part of a larger US military or Special Forces operation that dark March night are matters for full investigation.