Tag: wwii

Washington Post Still Covers Up U.S. War Crimes And Use Of Biological Weapons

The Washington Post is still covering up U.S. war crimes.

Seiichi Morimura, who exposed Japanese atrocities in WWII, dies at 90
His book about Unit 731, a secret biological warfare branch of the Imperial Army, helped force Japan to confront its wartime past

The obituary says:

Seiichi Morimura, a Japanese writer who helped force a reckoning upon his country with his 1981 exposé of Unit 731, a secret biological warfare branch of the Imperial Army that subjected thousands of people in occupied China to sadistic medical experiments during World War II, died July 24 at a hospital in Tokyo. He was 90.

Morimura’s book sold astonishingly well even when it was unusual to confronted people in Japan with the imperial crimes of their nation.

Unit 731 was at its time only comparable to some Nazi doctors who widely experimented on humans:

At a time when Japanese textbooks often minimized atrocities committed by Japan during the war, Mr. Morimura interviewed dozens of veterans of Unit 731 and documented in harrowing detail the conduct of the operation, which was established in 1938 near the Chinese city of Harbin by Japanese medical officer Shiro Ishii.

Disguised as an epidemic prevention and water purification department, the unit functioned through the end of the war as a testing ground for agents of biological warfare. Mr. Morimura’s work helped prompt more investigations in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn led to a court case that further revealed the extent of the atrocities.

The perpetrators included many respected Japanese physicians. Thousands of people — mainly Chinese, but also Koreans, Russians and prisoners of eight total nationalities, according to Mr. Morimura — endured medical experiments that have been compared to those of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Victims, referred to in Japanese as “marutas,” or wooden logs, were infected with typhus, typhoid, cholera, anthrax and the plague with the goal of perfecting biological weapons. Some prisoners were then vivisected without anesthetic so that researchers could observe the effects of the disease on the human body.

“I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped,” one unnamed member of the unit told the New York Times in 1995, recalling a victim who had been infected with the plague. “This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”

Several thousand people, and maybe many more, were experimented to death by the unit.

When the second world war was over Unit 731 members were supposed to be put on trial for the war crimes they had committed. The U.S. military stopped that as it had planned to use what Unit 731 had learned for its own wars:

The same year that Mr. Morimura’s book was released, an American journalist, John W. Powell, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the U.S. government had granted immunity to members of Unit 731 in exchange for the laboratory records from their research. Mr. Morimura alleged the same. For years, the United States dismissed reports of the unit’s experiments as Cold War propaganda.

There is no further mentioning of this in the rest of the Washington Post obit.

The reader is left hanging without learning if those U.S. government claims of ‘Cold War propaganda’ were true or false.

The U.S. did of course do what had been alleged. Documents were released that proved it. The U.S. had done much more.

The Post also repeats false U.S. claims that the Japanese government had hindered war crime trials against the units members:

However, according to U.S. officials, the Japanese government continued to decline to assist American efforts to place perpetrators on a list of war criminals prohibited from entering the United States. Ishii lived in freedom until he died of throat cancer in 1959. The Times reported that other Unit 731 veterans became governor of Tokyo, president of the Japan Medical Association and chief of the Japanese Olympic Committee.

It was the U.S. government, not the Japanese one, which gave immunity to Unit 731 members. It even paid them high amounts for their knowledge:

The US government offered full political immunity to high-ranking officials who were instrumental in perpetrating crimes against humanity, in exchange of the data about their experiments. Among those was Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731. During the cover-up operation, the U.S. government paid money to obtain data on human experiments conducted in China, according to two declassified U.S. government documents.

The total amount paid to unnamed former members of the infamous unit was somewhere between 150,000 yen to 200,000 yen. An amount of 200,000 yen at that time is the equivalent of 20 million yen to 40 million yen today.

40 million yen today are the equivalent of $284,000. Nicer to have than not to have …

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Trinity Nuclear Test Fallout Impacted 46 States, Canada, and Mexico

A recently released study exposes the “widespread dispersion” of radioactive fallout and devastation caused by the US government’s first detonation of a nuclear weapon. The “Trinity” atomic bomb test which caused  “environmental contamination and population exposures” was carried out in New Mexico on July 16th, 1945. This new research shows within 10 days of the explosion, which saw a mushroom cloud as high as 50,000 – 70,000 feet, radioactive deposits were dispersed across 46 states, and even parts of Canada as well as Mexico.

The study covers the Trinity test as well as dozens more, above-ground, “atmospheric” nuclear tests, conducted as a result of the Manhattan Project. Not included in the study are the myriad underground nuclear weapons tests. Between 1951 and 1998, Washington blew up more than 800 subterranean nuclear weapons.

Utilizing a combination of data previously unavailable during past studies, the researchers used “high-resolution reanalyzed historical weather fields, U.S. government data, and complex atmospheric modeling to try to chart the distribution of radioactive fallout in the days following historical nuclear tests,” reports Gizmodo. The study was led by Sébastien Philippe, a scientist and researcher from Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. “Our results show the significant contribution of the Trinity fallout to the total deposition density across the contiguous U.S….and in New Mexico in particular,” the study reads.

During the time period analyzed by the researchers, there were 101 nuclear tests conducted. Since Trinity, there were subsequently 93 more atmospheric tests in Nevada which saw nuclear fallout distributed across the country yet again by radioactive mushroom clouds. The US government also launched 45 “airburst” tests, which saw nuclear bombs, tipped on rockets, detonated within the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

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‘Atomic Fallout’: Records reveal government downplayed, ignored health risks of St. Louis radioactive waste for decades

For kids like Sandy Mitchell, Ted Theis and Janet Johnson, childhood in the North St. Louis County suburbs in the 1960s and ‘70s meant days playing along the banks or splashing in the knee-deep waters of Coldwater Creek.

They caught turtles and tadpoles, jumped into deep stretches of the creek from rope swings and ate mulberries that grew on the banks.

Their families — along with tens of thousands of others — flocked to the burgeoning suburbs and new ranch style homes built in Florissant, Hazelwood and other communities shortly after World War II. When the creek flooded, as it often did, so did their basements. They went to nearby Jana Elementary School and hiked and biked throughout Fort Belle Fontaine Park.

Growing up, they never knew they were surrounded by massive piles of nuclear waste left over from the war.

Generations of children who grew up alongside Coldwater Creek have, in recent decades, faced rare cancers, autoimmune disorders and other mysterious illnesses they have come to believe were the result of exposure to its waters and sediment.

“People in our neighborhood are dropping like flies,” Mitchell said.

The earliest known public reference to Coldwater Creek’s pollution came in 1981, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency listed it as one of the most polluted waterways in the U.S.

By 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was advising residents to avoid Coldwater Creek entirely. Cleanup of the creek is expected to take until 2038. A federal study found elevated rates of breast, colon, prostate, kidney and bladder cancers as well as leukemia in the area. Childhood brain and nervous system cancer rates are also higher.

“Young families moved into the area,” Johnson said, “and they were never aware of the situation.”

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A Researcher Says the First UFO Really Crashed in Italy in 1933. And He Has Evidence.

Is Italy—not Roswell, New Mexico—the actual site of the first UFO crash on Earth?

An Italian researcher claims to have proof that backs up recent allegations that a crashed UFO was recovered in Italy in 1933. It adds to a growing interest in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) that now includes elected officials and a NASA panel—even in the face of broad scientific skepticism.

In an interview published by the Daily Mail, Italian ufologist Roberto Pinotti says that fascist dictator Benito Mussolini got his hands on a flying saucer after it crashed on June 13, 1933. But the alien craft, Pinotti said, was captured by American forces at the end of World War II and sent to the U.S.

Pinotti showed documents to the newspaper that he claims are evidence of both the crash and a secret department set up by Mussolini to study the alleged saucer.

“I and my colleague Alfredo Lissoni began investigating the story of the 1933 UFO crash in Lombardy in 1996 when we received some original secret documents about the case,” Pinotti told the newspaper.

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That time the US military tried to make foxes glow in the dark to freak out Japanese soldiers

The US military has been known for hare-brained hoaxes to try to scare enemies by exploiting what they think are the opposing group’s cultural beliefs and superstitions. For example, in the early 1950s, the US Air Force created a vampire hoax by killing a Filipino guerrilla and poking holes in his neck. Over at Mysterious Universe, Nick Redfern tells several other similar psy-ops stories, including an absurd tale from the 1950s of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the predecessor to the CIA—who coated foxes with glow-in-the-dark (and radioactive) paint to freak out Japanese soldiers. From Mysterious Universe:

[Psychological operations strategist Ed] Salinger proposed that they focus on using the Japanese fox spirit and Shinto harbinger of doom the kitsune, which were said to have all manner of magical powers and which Salinger insisted many Japanese believed actually existed. They went about fashioning whistles that made the sound of a foxlike “call of the damned,” a spray which smelled like fox, and the piece de la resistance, actual live foxes that would be made up to look like the magical kitsune spirits. They went about catching live foxes and then moving on to the next step of the plan, which involved somehow making them glow in the dark. There were several ideas spitballed around before they settled on using glow-in-the-dark paint using the very radioactive and very dangerous substance radium. The next step was to see if the glowing foxes would actually accomplish what they were meant to do, which meant testing them out, and the next stage of this bonkers operation was launched.

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Railway Track Unearthed at Nazi Bunker Complex Sparks Amber Room Speculation

An unearthed railway line within a Nazi bunker complex in Poland has sparked speculation that it could lead to the legendary lost Amber Room. The remarkable discovery was reportedly made by researchers in the town of Mamerski, where the German Army Supreme Command was headquartered during World War II. A recent deforestation project saw the site cleared of trees, which allowed experts from the Jaćwież-Elk, Augustów Historical and Exploration Association to survey the area. To their amazement, they discovered a set of railway tracks and wagon wheels at a depth of around five feet below the ground, leading into what would have been the bunker system.

Detailing the find on social media, the Mamerki museum’s Bartlomiej Plebańczyk marveled that “this is a huge surprise as we did not know that there was a railroad inside the complex.” He went on to observe that “the railway line and the wagon were covered up on purpose, but we have no idea who did, when they did it and why.” The mysterious nature of the discovery led Plebańczyk to theorize that it could possibly be connected to the apocryphal Nazi ‘gold train’ which is said to have been stuffed with a slew of pilfered treasures, including the ornate gold and amber paneling stolen from a Russian palace, and subsequently hidden at the end of WWII.

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REVEALED: How America’s CIA Merged With Nazi Intelligence

“Honest and idealist….enjoys good food and wine.…unprejudiced mind…”

That’s how a 1952 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assessment described Nazi ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at the infamous Wannsee Institute, the SS think tank involved in planning the Final Solution. Augsburg’s SS unit performed “special duties,” a euphemism for exterminating Jews and other “undesirables” during the Second World War. Although he was wanted in Poland for war crimes, Augsburg managed to ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA, which employed him in the late 1940s as an expert on Soviet affairs. Recently released CIA records indicate that Augsburg was among a rogue’s gallery of Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S. intelligence agencies shortly after Germany surrendered to the Allies. Pried loose by Congress, which passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act three years ago, a long-hidden trove of once-classified CIA documents confirms one of the worst-kept secrets of the cold war–the CIA’s use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a clandestine campaign against the Soviet Union.

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The Complicated Legacy Of The V-2 Rocket And Its Designer

In the final installment of his series of articles on the history of the V-2 rocket, historian Dr. Charlie Hall explores the legacy of the V-2 in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Be sure to read parts one and two in our series on the terrorizing Nazi weapon that failed to change the course of World War II, but drastically altered warfare and gave birth to mankind’s access to space, and the man behind it.

In February 1970, at a ceremony attended by the governor of Alabama, a U.S. senator, various other local dignitaries, and his wife and three children, Wernher von Braun was honored with a plaque in the state of Huntsville. The plaque listed his achievements in both missile development and the U.S. space program and concluded by saying that “he will forever be respected and admired by his local fellow citizens.”

The plaque did not mention von Braun’s membership of the Nazi Party or the SS, his meetings with Adolf Hitler, his frequent visits to the Mittelwerk underground factory where V-2 rockets were built by slave laborers in appalling conditions, or the number of people killed in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands in 1944-45 by the rockets he designed. When he died in 1977, von Braun was remembered not as a Nazi war criminal, but as an American hero with a favorable legacy that he had worked hard to cement.

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Bat-bombs, mind control and umbrella guns: This over-the-top spy agency was the forerunner of the CIA

As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in his wheelchair in the Oval Office, dictating a letter to his secretary, in sneaked William Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, armed with a loaded pistol.

At Donovan’s feet was a bag of sand.

As the president continued working, oblivious to Donovan’s presence, the OSS chief quickly fired 10 bullets into the sand — and still Roosevelt knew nothing, only turning round when he could smell burnt gun powder in the air.

“He looked up with wide eyes and saw Donovan standing behind him with a smoking gun in his hand,” writes John Lisle in “The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare” (St. Martin’s Press).

Donovan wrapped the pistol in a handkerchief and gave it to the president, introducing it as the OSS’s new firearm, silent and flashless.

A forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency, the OSS was formed in June 1942 to coordinate the espionage activities of the country’s armed forces during World War II.

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Ex-Nazis in the service of Uncle Sam: How the US took control of Germany’s main intelligence service

“The United States still essentially occupies Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and other countries. At the same time, it cynically calls them equal allies… What kind of cooperation is that?”. This question was posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin during his speech in the Kremlin on September 30, 2022, when agreements on the entry of the new regions into the Russian Federation were signed.

The Russian president did not go into further detail, but it’s hard to argue against his words. Western Europe’s strongest country, Germany, increasingly acts against its national interests. Berlin coordinates its foreign policy course with Washington not only at regular NATO and G7 summits, but also through more private channels. One of these is Germany’s foreign intelligence service, officially called the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND).

This department was created in the post-WWII years by former Nazis and SS officers as a private intelligence organization. Control over the service was entirely in the hands of the United States, and major intelligence operations were carried out in the US interest. Numerous journalistic investigations allow us to conclude that the situation has not changed much to this day.

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