CHARGES OF TORTURE

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27112, 7 August 1953, Page 9

CHARGES OF TORTURE

Ordeal Of U.S. Colonel

(Rec. 10 p.m.) MUNSAN, August 6. Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Harri•on, a second cousin of the Allied truce negotiator, Lieutenant-General William Harrison, declared today that the North Korea civil police used *the water treatment’’ in an effort to prise military secrets out of him. Colonel Harrison was shot down in August, 1951. while leading a squadron of Shooting Star fighter-bombers. “In November I was taken to Pyongyang,” Colonel Harrison said. "They took me to a room, removed my clothing, sat me in a chair, then held my head back, put a towel over it and kept pouring water on the towel. They call this ‘the water treatment.’

“It’s just like drowning. I kept passing out and they brought me to with lighted cigarettes. It was cold and water was freezing round my feet. They kept me there three days and then they let me go?’ Colonel Harrison said that before that he was given other torture treatment. being kept seven days without food in a room where he was forced to sit watching other people eat.

Colonel Harrison returned to freedom on crutches with his left leg amputated. He was badly injured in the leg when he was shot down and then he was marched north to the prison camp. “We had winter clothing before we started, but the Koreans this away.” he said.

Colonel Harrison said there was a marked difference between the treatment given bv Koreans and the Chinese. The Chinese gave him back w»rm clothing and did not torture h J m. although thev took swings at him with a pickaxe “in a playful manner” when he said he liked President Truman and General MacArthur.

The Chinese had refused to return him with other sick and wounded last April because he had been “a bad boy” and used his “rank and eloquence” to influence other prisoners in the camp. March to the North Describing the march north. Colonel Harrison said: “We had pretty rough treatment. Quite a few died, not of violence but of cold or starvation.” From the prison camp on the Yalu river Colonel Harrison said he could often seen crippled Communist MIG jets making for Manchurian, bases after sky battles. “They were trailing smoke and •parks and we knew we were winning the air war,” he said.

Colonel Harrison spent four months in a Chinese hospital where he was treated for the leg wound.