Bad People Do Bad Things

Kotare sent me this al Jazeera article that discusses the North Korean government's chemical and biological warfare program. It's not a happy story.

"If you are born mentally or physically deficient, says Im, the government says your best contribution to society… is as a guinea pig for biological and chemical weapons testing."

Even after settling into the relative safety of South Korea, for 10 years Im held on to this secret, saying it was too horrific to recount.
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One of Im's own men later gave him an eyewitness account of human-testing.

Asked to guard a secret facility on an island off North Korea's west coast, Im says the soldier saw a number of people forced into a glass chamber.

"Poisonous gas was injected in," Im says. "He watched doctors time how long it took for them to die."

This is not a new story. With a quick search, I found this BBC article dated 2004 that basically says the same thing. That's not to say that it's credible, though. There's pretty strong suspicion that North Korea has an active CB weapons program, but not a lot of details on it. During World War II, both the German and Japanese governments did their own human experimentation, but it was more aimed at determining the agent's efficacy. The German research was pretty good, the Japanese research, not so much. 

So is this "testing" to better understand the effects of CB weapons or just state executions? Hard to say. Again, not to say that this is true or not, but this kind of propaganda isn't new and there's been no official confirmation of any such efforts. It may be just an effort to convince the US government to get tough on the regime and to impose sanctions or pressure the North Koreans more. We'll just have to wait for the regime to collapse and then find out.

Comments

[tammy swofford]

Probably no true need for additional confirmation. All manner of evil exists. The Japanese military ran Unit 731 in WW II and performed vivisection on American POW's. Yeah, organ harvesting without anesthesia. Let that little fact sink in. They disassociated themselves from the horror of their varied experiments by referring to their test subjects as "logs".

Tammy