Followings are the sentences extracted and cited from ;
Nazi War Crimes &
Japanese Imperial Government Records
Interagency Working Group
Final Report to the United States Congress
April 2007
http://www.archives.gov/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf
(A $30 million US Government Study specifically searched for evidence on Comfort Women allegations. After nearly seven years with many dozens of staff pouring through US archives -- and 30 million dollars down the drain -- we found a grand total of nothing. Nobody should be writing about Comfort Women issues without reading this report cover to cover. If you do not have time for the whole report, do a search inside the report for Comfort Women, and carefully read those parts:) the sentences cited from Michael Yon "The Truth Behind The Comfort Women"
I'd be glad if you could have time to visit his video "The Truth Behind The Comfort Women" The IWG (Interagency Working Group) and Global Alliance, Who is behind the Comfort Women Propaganda Deception? https://youtu.be/jlyHZWvGL20
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Japan Under Scrutiny
Public interest in Japanese war crimes arose intermittently in the postwar period as the stories of victims received public notice as a result of historical and popular studies and media attention. Books such as the late Sheldon Harris’ 1994 Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-1945 and the American Cover-up and the late Iris Chang’s 1997 best seller, The Rape of Nanking, helped give the subject visibility.44
The earliest groups to receive attention were American POWs and civilian internees who made claims under the War Claims Act after its passage in 1948. However, mistreated POWs, sex slaves (the so-called “comfort women”), civilian internees, and forced laborers remained dissatisfied with the extent of compensation—if any—for their suffering. Even more of an irritant to these groups, however, has been the failure of the Japanese Government to apologize fully for its wartime behavior with regard to acts of cruelty such as harsh forced labor, conditions aboard the POW transports known as “hell ships,” and the criminal brutality of the Bataan Death March. Victims have repeatedly called for redress, citing as precedent settlements in the late 1990s between victims of Nazi looting and the German Government and Swiss banks.
In the 1990s, no fewer than 16 measures dealing with Japanese war crimes were introduced in the Congress in attempts to secure some sort of redress for victims.45 For instance, in 1997 a joint resolution was introduced in Congress that expressed a number of groups’ frustration with the stance of the United States and Japanese governments with respect to Japanese accountability for war crimes committed by Imperial Japan. House Concurrent Resolution 126 sought to express the sense of Congress concerning war crimes committed by the Japanese military during World War II. After listing particular offenses, characterized as “atrocious crimes against humanity,”the resolution called on Japan to
(1) formally issue a clear and unambiguous apology for the atrocious war crimes committed by the Japanese military during World War II; and
(2) immediately pay reparations to the victims of those crimes, including United States military and civilian prisoners of war, people of Guam who were subjected to violence and imprisonment, survivors of the “Rape of Nanjing” from December, 1937, until February, 1938, and the women who were forced into sexual slavery and known by the Japanese military as “comfort women.”46
Although not passed, the resolution recognized the longstanding frustration of victims and registered dissatisfaction with the Government’s position that American lawsuits against Japan and Japanese companies over war crimes were precluded by the 1951 Peace Treaty between the United States and Japan, despite side agreements providing Americans with treatment comparable to that of compensated victims in other countries.
The movement to call Japan to account stemmed in part from dissatisfaction with perceived postwar leniency toward Japan and Japanese war criminals, a leniency that was part of the effort to get that country firmly in the American camp during the Cold War.
By February 2000, more than a dozen class-action lawsuits had been filed in the United States against Japanese corporations by former Allied prisoners of war, civilian internees, and Asian slave laborers. Additional suits were filed and in preparation for Japanese courts seeking redress for “comfort women,” slave laborers, and other victims of Japanese crimes, all of whom demanded a Japanese apology and compensation from Japanese courts. The Simon Wiesenthal Center lobbied Attorney General Janet Reno and the Pentagon for the release of U.S. documents concerning amnesties granted to Japanese war criminals, including amnesties granted to supervisors of Japan’s biological and chemical warfare program in exchange for the data obtained from experiments conducted on humans in the infamous Unit 731, Japan’s biological warfare unit.
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44. Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Secret Biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the American Coverup, Rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002); Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
45. Report by Jaryk Reynolds, “U.S. Prisoners of War and Civilian Citizens Captured and Interned by Japan in World War II:
The Issue of Compensation by Japan” (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, July 7, 2001).
46. House Concurrent Resolution 126 “Expressing the Sense of Congress Concerning War Crimes Committed By the Japanese Military During WWII,” 105th Congress. Available online at http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=105_cong_bills&docid=f:hc126ih.txt.
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Statutory Functions of the IWG
The Disclosure Acts required the IWG to locate classified Nazi and Japanese war criminal and war-crimes related records held by the United States, recommend the declassification of these records, and make them available to the public (with specific exceptions). The following sections detail the IWG’s approach to implementing the acts (illustrated by figure 3).58
Locating Records
On February 22, 1999, Samuel Berger, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, directed agencies to begin implementing the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.59 He ordered agencies to undertake a preliminary survey of their records, directing them to “take an expansive view of the act in making this survey and in subsequent identification of records and declassification review.” He attached to his memorandum the IWG’s initial guidance to the agencies, clarifying the types and topics of records considered relevant and reiterating the open spirit of the law. “To the extent permitted by law,” he stated, “such guidance should be considered authoritative.” He issued a similar directive on December 5, 2000, to initiate the search for Japanese war crimes related records.60
IWG Guidance on Preliminary Surveys
The IWG directed agencies to include in their preliminary surveys any records that were likely to contain information on war crimes, war criminals, acts of persecution, and looting of assets. Although the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act targeted records of crimes committed 1933–45 in particular geographic locations, relevant records could be dated up to the present, and they could be located among Government records relating to any country in the world. In his December 5, 2000, memorandum, Berger directed agencies to locate records held by the U.S. Government relating to war crimes committed by agents of the Government of Japan during the period 1931–45, although the records themselves could have been created later. The IWG advised agencies to give particular attention to locating any records related to topics of great interest to the public and to historians, particularly materials related to
・Japanese treatment of prisoners of war and civilian internees, including any materials related to forced or slave labor;
・persecution of and atrocities against civilian populations;
・development and use of chemical and biological warfare agents, especially the work of General Ishii, medical experimentation on humans, and Unit 731;
・the so-called “comfort women” program—the Japanese systematic enslavement of women of subject populations for sexual purposes; and
・the U.S. Government decision after the war not to prosecute the Emperor and certain war criminals.
The IWG enjoined agencies to conduct their surveys with the intention of discovering and eventually declassifying as many documents as possible, not merely those that were indisputably required by a narrow interpretation of the law.
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58. Chapter 5 provides details of each agency’s implementation process.
59. These agencies were the departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy, Justice, State, Treasury, CIA, FBI, NARA, FRB, NASA, and USIA.
60. The Berger directives are found in appendix 6
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