A day after Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 8, 1941, German death squads in the Polish village of Chelmno gassed Jews in specially equipped vans for the first time. Far from generating banner headlines, the story did not appear in the New York Times until nearly seven months later, on Page 6. Like the Allied powers, the Times consistently ignored or buried such reports until it was too late for 6 million European Jews.

In 2005, the civilized world seems to be deploying the same dismissive, deadly strategy again. I recently returned from debriefing North Korean defectors in Seoul who told me of their involvement in the Pyongyang regime's gassing of political prisoners, dating back to the 1970s and continuing into the 21st century. I traveled to South Korea after officials in Seoul refused to grant a visa to Dr. Lee Byom-Shik (a pseudonym) to come to the United States to serve as a key witness about alleged murders by gassing in North Korea. He was to testify at a Simon Wiesenthal Center conference on human rights abuses in North Korea...

...Dr. Lee, 55, is a chemist who told me of his important "achievements" in serving the North Korean regime since the 1970s. He worked with one team that produced bogus Japanese diplomatic passports used by agents to smuggle aboard the bomb that brought down Korean Airlines Flight 001. He helped produce counterfeit $100 bills used by diplomats traveling abroad.

It took an hour into our debriefing for Dr. Lee to get around to the fact that he helped develop deadly agents at a secret underground poison and toxin research institute. In that connection, he matter-of-factly described how, in 1979, he was in charge of gassing two political prisoners. The victims' suffering was documented by scientists, who took notes outside glass-encased gas chambers that were also wired for sound. One prisoner died after 2 1/2 hours, the other after 3 1/2 hours of agony. Then a young scientist, Dr. Lee was rewarded with a medal and promotions for his role in these successful experiments. Twenty-five years later, he expressed no remorse, but his recall of details and dates make him a credible, if frightening, witness...