I posted this tonight on a board. the topic was to drop the A bombs or not ???
plenty of liberals chimed in. and you know what they think.
Unit 731
Yeah, those wuss Democrats like Truman!
So was the A-bombing just a retribution for japanes crimes?
I’m a liberal on most things and I know what I think.
Dropping the A bombs didn’t do a thing to punish what happened at Unit 731. It just got America into bed with those bastards quicker.
I think America should hang its head in shame for what it did, and didn’t do, in relation to Unit 731.
America carefully avoided bringing any war crimes charges against any Japanese over Unit 731, because America wanted the knowledge it thought had been gained at Unit 731 and gave immunity to Ishii Shiro, the head of the unit, and his staff.
When it had the chance to bring them to justice, America didn’t give a shit about any of its men tortured and killed at Unit 731, if any actually were.
Google Dr Cornelius Rhoads, who became head of US Army germ warfare research, and add in the search term ‘Puerto Rico cancer’, and see if he was much better than Shiro.
Check out the history of experimentation on American citizens who were prisoners in American gaols, e.g. well after WWII it was still going on http://www.angelfire.com/fl3/starke/fire.html
As for Unit 731
In his authoritative Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45, and the American Cover-up, Sheldon Harris recounts that the matter was raised only once at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal in 1946-48.
An American counsel assisting the Chinese, David N. Sutton, stunned the war crimes tribunal by saying: “The enemy . . . took our countrymen as prisoners and used them for drug experiments. They would inject various types of toxic bacteria into their bodies, and then perform experiments on how they reacted . . . this was an act of barbarism by our enemy.”
According to the book, the presiding chief judge, Australia’s Sir William Webb, asked: “Are you trying to tell us about a poison liquid being administered? Are you trying to provide more evidence? This is a new fact that you have presented before we judges.”
The writer Sheldon Harris says that after a brief pause, Webb said: “How about letting this item go?” Sutton replied: “Well, then, I’ll leave it.” The issue never surfaced again, Harris writes.
Would things have been different if Allied soldiers were involved? There have always been suspicions and allegations that this happened at Camp Mukden in China, where Allied prisoners - including Australians - were held. Yet Sheldon, in his extensive research that contains many examples of the unit’s activities, such as the frostbite experiments, was unable to find “substantive evidence” of this.
The immunity granted to those in Unit 731 saw the doctors involved return to mainstream Japanese society. In 1989, the now-defunct Japanese magazine Days Japan revealed how those who had escaped prosecution had gone on to take some of the most prestigious positions in the Japanese medical community.
The man who succeeded Ishii Shiro as commander of Unit 731, Dr Masaji Kitano, became head of Japan’s largest pharmaceutical company, the Green Cross. Others took up posts heading university medical schools, and also worked in the Japanese health ministry.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/28/1030508070534.html
Some more great events in America’s medical experimentation upon its own people.
Hornblum meticulously recounts appalling stories of prominent manufacturers testing their products: drugs, chocolate, dioxin, tobacco. From 1962 to 1966, a total of 33 pharmaceutical companies tested 153 experimental drugs at Holmesburg prison alone. But most abuses chronicled in the book relate to dermatology experiments at Holmesburg: facial creams, hair lotions, skin moisturizers, suntan products, foot powders, deodorants, detergents, anti-rash treatments, and many, many more. The author recounts the greed and borderline fraudulent research activities of one scientist, the éminence grise of experimental dermatology, Dr. Albert Kligman, Professor of Dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania. When Dr. Kligman entered the aging prison, he was awed by the bare torsos of hundreds of inmates walking aimlessly before him and by the potential they held for his research. In 1966, he recalled in a newspaper interview: “All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.” Hence the book’s title. But prisoners were also used in eye drop, toothpaste, liquid diet, and regeneration ointment studies and exposed to more hazardous and potentially lethal substances such as psychotropic drugs, radioactive isotopes and chemical warfare agents, often without being informed of the risks, nature and purpose of the experiments. Other experiments involved testicular radiation at Oregon and Washington state prisons (a total of more than 130 prisoners were irradiated), live cancer cell injection at the Ohio state prison, mind control performed by [End page 5] the CIA during World War II, antidotes for influenza, malaria, typhus, and dysentery, skin graft techniques, and exotic blood tests. Hornblum reports that in blood test experiments, for example, 64 volunteers were injected with an ounce of purified fraction of beef blood before the experiment was stopped. Twenty of the men became ill from serum sickness, eight seriously, “with high fever, rashes, and joint pain. One died.”
http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol6is1/shuster.html
Willowbrook Hepatitis Study (Mid 1950s to Early 1970s): The Willowbrook study involved infecting mentally retarded children with a Hepatitis virus to study the progression of the disease and to test vaccinations that were being developed at the time. Due to overcrowding, children were denied entrance to the Willowbrook State Mental Hospital unless parents enrolled their children into the less-crowded hepatitis ward. This practice did not allow for voluntary participation since there were scarce resources available to care for severely retarded children which limited the treatment options from which parents could select. The institution’s director was in charge of the study and conducted subject recruitment by sending a misleading informed consent to parents that included an exaggeration of the study benefits. Parents may have felt coerced and unduly influenced since the letter came from the institution’s director who was also the principal investigator. After a teacher in a neighboring school became infected with hepatitis which elicited public outcry, researchers defended their actions by claiming that children would have naturally become infected anyway during their stay at Willowbrook because of facility’s lack of sanitary conditions. Scientists have since argued that improving hygiene at the institution would have substantially reduced the transmission of hepatitis infection.
http://gra.sdsu.edu/irb/tutorial/m2s2.htm
Lest it be thought that I’m anti-American, we were just as enthusiastic and brutal in our own smaller way, such as by experimenting with chemical weapons on our own live soldiers during WWII, as detailed in Geoff Plunkett’s book Chemical Warfare in Australia:Australia’s Involvement in Chemical Warfare 1914-1945 and adverted to here http://home.st.net.au/~dunn/brook%20island%20trial.htm Needless to say, we never properly recognised or compensated the soldiers we used as guinea pigs, many of whom suffered much worse and more lasting injuries than those not suffered by REMF’s closer to the enemy.
Here is an interview about Unit 731 with Japanese scholar Yuki Tanaka who is the author of, among other things, Japan’s Comfort Women:Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation, London and New York:Routledge, 2002
http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue9/morris_review.html
Broadcast: 28/8/2002
Japan admits war crimes conducted in WWII
Professor Yuki Tanaka of the Hiroshima Peace Institute joined Lateline to discuss Unit 731.
Compere: Tony Jones
Reporter: Tony JonesProfessor Yuki Tanaka of the Hiroshima Peace Institute joined Lateline to discuss Unit 731.
Professor Tanaka has written extensively on Japanese war crimes, in particular, the medical experiments carried out by the Japanese on prisoners of war.
He is currently in Australia and he joins me now in our Melbourne studio.
Yuki Tanaka, we hear a great deal about weapons of mass distraction these days and of course, Unit 731 was set up precisely to perfect and test chemical and biological weapons.
How was their work conducted?
PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA, HIROSHIMA PEACE INSTITUTE: The Unit 731 was set up by a guy called Ishii, General Ishii, who became the Inventory General, an army General, but a very prominent physician and he went to Europe in 1928 in order to investigate the situations regarding biological weapons in western nations.
As the many western nations were conducting research on these weapons at that time.
When he returned to Japan, he set up the epidemic prevention laboratory within a medical school in Tokyo.
But that was expanded to a large research and production facilities in China, at a place called Pingfam - not very far from Haping in Manchuria.
Not only did they build the large complex of the research and production, but also they built the prisons next to these facilities so that they could utilise the prisoners, mainly Chinese prisoners, for the human experiments.
TONY JONES: What can you tell us about those human experiments that they conducted in those years?
PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA: Well, they used various type of pathogens bacterias and viruses, for example, typhoid, bubonic plague, anthrax, cholera, and the like, and tested those weapons on these prisoners.
Although you call prisoners, but they were not POWs.
They were mainly political dissidents who rebelled against the Japanese occupation in China.
TONY JONES: How widespread were these experiments?
I know you’ve done research looking at what the unit was responsible for closer to Australia, in Papua New Guinea.
PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA: Unit 731 was initially operating only in China, but when the Pacific war started, they set up the branch units, for example in Beijing, Nanjing, Quandong and Singapore and various other places, and even in New Guinea and New Ireland.
And those branch units were responsible for testing the biological and chemical weapons developed by Unit 731 in those regions and planned for the waging of biological warfare in those regions.
So the staff number of Unit 731 so far is about 3,000, but if you include the members who were working for the branch units, the total number was probably 20,000.
TONY JONES: Which is an astonishing number of war criminals, when you think about it.
We just heard that Chinese woman say after the court case was rejected in Tokyo, “Who’s going to punish these criminals?”
Why after all these years has nothing been done to punish the people who did these horrific things?
PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA: Partly because the United States was reluctant to prosecute those people who were responsible for committing such atrocious crimes against humanity because the Ishii unit asked for immunity from prosecution in return for providing vital information, the research results they accumulated during the operations of Unit 731 in China.
Although, the Soviet Union actually found that Unit 731 was conducting a human experiment in China, and to some members of Unit 731 who were arrested by the Soviet Union, and they were prosecuted, and the Soviets actually asked General Macarthur to prosecute Ishii, but Macarthur ignored the request from the Soviet Union in order to monopolise the result of the research that Unit 731 conducted.
TONY JONES: Do you know at all, is it documented, what use the United States actually made of this scientific data that was gathered through these inhuman experiments?
PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA: Yes, actually, the large number of research documents were translated into English and they were sent to a United States laboratory in Utah.
They’re still there. So the evidence is there, and also General Ishii was invited to the US after the war and he gave lectures to American scientists working for the US forces.
TONY JONES: Japan must have some complicity in this as well. I think it was in 1976 that Japanese journalists first exposed the crimes of Unit 731.
Why did the Japanese Government itself - successive governments indeed - never do anything about this?
PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA: Well, it’s a very complex issue.
It’s not just the Unit 731 issue, but the many other war crimes concerned, as far as many other war crimes are concerned, the Japanese governments are very reluctant to acknowledge the responsibility.
There are various reasons, but one reason is that many Japanese people see themselves as the victims of war, probably because of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Yes, it was the crimes against humanity, so there is no doubt that Japan and Japanese people were victims of the war crimes, but also they were the perpetrators of the war crimes.
Therefore, Japan have to acknowledge this fact in order to be seen as trustworthy and responsible nation.
Japan have to respond to the criticism from neighbouring nations, especially Chinese and Koreans.
TONY JONES: Yuki Tanaka, thank you for joining us tonight on Lateline.
PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA: Thank you.
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/stories/s661377.htm
In the end how you die is of no importance.
I’ve read that the American ex-POW’s who were held by the Japanese had to sign papers to the effect that they never could seek reperations from the Japanese Govt. for what happened to them while in Japanese hands. That to me is the ultimate disrespect to those who served and survived their capture.
Maybe, but the path to the end is important to the deceased; his or her loved ones; and those who judge the killers.
I haven’t heard that before.
It could make sense if it was a trade off for government to government reparations with the US government taking responsibility for compensating or caring for the ex-POW’s.
Do you have any more information?
The Treaty of San Francsico essentially removed from US and Japanese courts the right to hear any criminal or civil actions in relation to abuse or torture of POWs.