Lies and damned lies

IN A PROFILE in the May Scientific American of Joseph Needham, a distinguished 91-year-old British scientist, Marguerite Holloway discusses Mr. Needham's service in a 1952 commission that determined that "the U.S. had employed biological warfare during the Korean War." She leaves the impression that the "derisive and bitter reactions" to Mr. Needham's role were essentially political, an overreaction to the "inflammatory ... inclusion of the testimony" of POWs. "But others, including a few scholars and journalists who have researched the matter, believe his observations were correct."

In fact, as a simple check shows--say, in David Rees's excellent Korea: The Limited War--the six-man commission was an arm of the World Peace Council, a notorious Soviet front, and part and papers of a disinformation campaign that began with a Moscow Radio Korean-language broadcast accusing the U.S. of "poisoning wells" and "the sending of lepers secretly into North Korea." Miss Holloway does not mention that the "testimony" of American POWs was 1) coerced through months of torture directed by Soviet personnel, 2) edited by the "journalist" Wilfred Burchett, then secretly a member of the Australian Communist Party, and 3) universally recanted by those victims who returned home. Miss Holloway leaves the impression that Mr. Needham actually used his scientific expertise to weigh the evidence; in fact, he told a 1952 London press conference: "We accepted the word of the Chinese scientists. It is possible to maintain that the whole thing was a kind of patriotic conspiracy. I prefer to believe that the Chinese were not acting parts."

We can pass over the prevarications of a old man justifying past follies, and are unsurprised that a credulous writer will jump at any chance to bash the United States. What we cannot understand, however, is how such an old, nasty, and bald lie made its way into the pages of a magazine which presumably has some familiarity with the concept of evidence.