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by KennyBlanken 1119 days ago
I stopped reading when the author categorized "prisoners of war being told to read confessions over Chinese propaganda radio" as "testifying publicly", almost at the start of the piece:

> It was the propaganda version of an incendiary bomb. In 1952 U.S. Air Force and Marine flyers, shot down during the Korean War, testified publicly that they had been ordered to drop biological weapons (BW) on China and North Korea.

The two sentences feel intentionally written to obfuscate the fact that the statements were made under duress as POWs; it strongly implies that they testified, after the war, about dropping biological weapons.

Even if much of what he does discuss did happen (the US secretly pardoning Japanese units that did absolutely horrific experiments on people for chemical and biological warfare, for example, and of course we used a lot of horrific shit in Korea and Vietnam), there's so much that is unsourced / uncited mixed in.

Half the links in the text are to his own writing, another chunk are to other Medium blogs, with a sprinkling of newspaper clippings (because the newspapers were so trustworthy back during that time)...pass.

4 comments

I really don't know what to think of HN these days. You're absolutely right, and yet this post is at the bottom being downvoted.

If the pilots knew, then a large number of support crew also would have known. But the only "testimony" we have is from captured PoWs, after how many decades of opportunities for deathbed confessions? Give me a break.

I ignore any kind of political discussion on HN after the dominant narrative on a couple of Ukraine threads was straight Russian propaganda and "Ukraine is doomed" etc etc.
Yeah, this is just a weird ass conspiratorial article. I didn’t read the whole thing, but I kept scanning for FOIA documents and the like, and never found any. It’s just captured pilots said so in North Korean media. Well, that’s not very reliable source.

Did the US do a bunch of sketchy things in the 1950s and 60s? Absolutely. How do we know? We have the government documents. This guy has nothing, except sources of very dubious reliability and his own biases.

Most of these documents came from FOIA. See the author's Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Ajeff_kaye%20foia&src=typ...
>it strongly implies that they testified, after the war, about dropping biological weapons.

It directly says it happened in 1952, and links to a newspaper clearly saying the 'confession' was made by captured American officers. How does it imply the exact opposite of what it says?

You should have kept reading. The article goes into quite a bit of detail on this debate and how the CIA was preparing before their confessions to explain that they were forced to say things. There is a rich story around many people and their different accounts.
The US government had two years of POW "confessions" trickling out before the POW confession parade started in 1952.

Of course they would have prepared. They knew what was coming.

If one believes these confessions THEY MUST ALSO believe confessions obtained under police torture, right?

After someone was tortured by police and he is safely home away from the police, we should listen to what he says. If he is no longer under coercion, it is more likely to be honest.