Straight from the scandal of its false accusations against Prime Minister Blair of “sexing up” the dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the British Broadcasting Corporation went a way toward redeeming itself last night with a chilling report on North Korea’s chemical experiments on political prisoners. Olenka Frenkiel, a reporter for BBC’s “This World” program, found one North Korean defector who, as the BBC’s Web site puts it, “says he witnessed chemical experiments being carried out on political prisoners in specially constructed gas chambers.” Another Korean human rights expert provided her with documents, apparently genuine, dated February 2002. The BBC Web report says the letters, marked “Top Secret” and titled “letter of transfer,” bear the names of male victims along with their dates and places of birth. The letters say, “The above person is transferred from Camp 22 for the purpose of human experimentation with liquid gas for chemical weapons.”

An advance account of the program published by the London Observer yesterday quotes one survivor of the North Korean gulag as recounting, “An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners. One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.” It’ll be illuminating to see whether all the hearings and commissions and political hand-wringing occasioned by the failure to find massive chemical weapons stashes in Iraq are matched by expressions of outrage over actual use of chemical weapons on humans in North Korea. If not, something poisonous is happening.