US bioweapons in Korea?
In Lobster 44, p. 27, I noted the ongoing controversy about the alleged use of biological weapons by the United States during the Korean War: material from Soviet archives appeared to show that the ‘evidence’ of said biological weapons had been faked to embarrass the Americans; but this ‘evidence’ has since been challenged by two Canadian historians. A new dimension to the story has been added by allegations made in a German book and TV documentary that Frank Olsen, the American army scientist who was thrown out of a hotel window in 1953, after being given LSD by the CIA, had been working on biological weapons.
A work colleague and friend of Olsen’s, Norman Cournoyer, told the German authors that the American Air Force had indeed tested biological weapons during the Korean War, that Frank Olson had learned about this, began to despair about what he was doing and that this was probably the reason for Olsen being murdered. According to Frank Olsen’s son, Eric, his mother used to say: ‘Your father was always worried about Korea.’ (1)
Further, according to Eric, while he and everyone else were fixated for years on his father’s role in ‘mind control’ experiments, Frank Olsen’s speciality was actually the aerosol delivery of anthrax. This only emerged in late 2002 in the wake of the anthrax scare in the United States, the source of which is certainly but not yet provably the US military or one of its contractors. (2)
It is now suspected that the reason for the Ford administration’s rush to settle with Olsen’s widow in 1975 was the link with Korean biowar experiments not ‘mind control’. Eric Olsen now regards the latter as disinformation.
Illustrating the continuity in American national security circles is the fact that a declassified 1975 White House memorandum which suggested the settlement and compensation for Olsen’s widow, was written by the then Deputy White House Chief of Staff, Dick Cheney, to his then boss, Donald Rumsfeld. The memo recommended an official apology by the president so as to forestall any trial or official hearing on the Olson case. Otherwise, the memo said, ‘it might be necessary to disclose highly classified national security information’. Ten days later President Ford met with the Olson family in the White House.
Faking it
More reported examples of British public employees responding to the pressure of the target-setting culture by faking the statistics.
- One in three hospitals are fiddling their waiting list figures, says the Audit Commission. (3)
- Ambulance authorities are fiddling their records to make ministers believe they are meeting national targets for quicker response times. In evidence to MPs, the British Medical Association recently warned that hospital managers were using ambulances parked outside A&E departments to hold patients. ‘Once the patients are unloaded the clock starts ticking in A&E and they add to the figures on 12-hour trolley waits,’ the BMA told the Public Administration Select Committee. (4)
- ‘A senior health service official who was fired after revealing his hospital’s financial problems yesterday lifted the lid on what he claims is the culture of deception now endemic in the NHS…. Ian Perkin, who was finance director of St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust in Tooting, south London, the tenth largest NHS organisation in the country, said the pressure from Ministers on managers to meet government targets was making it impossible to talk openly about problems in the NHS.’ (5)
- ‘Customs officers, underfunded and desperate for results, were encouraging crimes to take place, in collusion with informants, in order to boost their arrest rates.’ (6)The government has been leaning on the Audit Commission. In an interview with The Times, its retiring controller, Sir Andrew Foster, cited three examples of how officials, political advisers and ministers tried to influence Audit Commission reports.
- Whitehall demanded that councils with failing schools be marked down in last year’s Comprehensive Performance Assessment because the Government wanted to demonstrate a commitment to tackling problems in state education.
- A Commission report criticising the value for money of privately financed new schools was delayed because ministers were unhappy with the message.
- The Health Department tried to minimise the impact of a Commission report on Accident and Emergency waiting times in 2001 because Health Minister Alan Milburn was very unhappy because it did not give a positive image. (7)
TWA Flight 800
Lobster 42 carried an analysis by Gavin Phillips of the crash of TWA Flight 800 which suggested that the crash was not the result of an explosion in a fuel tank but the result of the plane being hit by a missile, probably from a US naval ship below it. As per usual the US state had not taken kindly to investigation of its error and persecuted those doing so, journalist James Sanders and his wife. In an article on WorldNetDaily.com on 13 March, Sander’s co-author Jack Cashill reported that the Justice Department had now admitted that (under the previous administration) it had ‘used its considerable powers to thwart Sanders’ by denying his standing as a journalist and ‘conspired to print factually false information in a Justice Department letter to deprive [James Sanders] of his civil rights…. fabricated a defense where none existed’ in earlier opposing the Sanders’ civil action.
Notes
1 </www.wsws.org/articles/2002/nov2002/arti-n13.shtml >
2 See Billy Cox, ‘Agency Hushed Anthrax Scandal’, originally in Florida Today, 13 August 2002, and now on the big Olsen case Website < http://www.frankolson project.org/Contents.html >
3 The Times 23 December 2002
4 ‘Patients “kept in ambulances to meet casualty targets”‘, The Guardian 13 January 2003 at < http://society.guardian.co.uk/nhsperformance/story/ 0,8150,873825,00.html >
5 Jo Revill, ‘Whistleblower lifts lid on NHS culture of secrecy’, The Observer, January 26, 2003.
6 Sylvia Jones and James Oliver, ‘Lies, frauds and pressure on customs to boost arrests’, The Guardian, 26 November 2002.
7 Tom Baldwin, ‘Watchdog barks at ministers who try and interfere’, 12 February 2003, < http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,172-574701,00.html >