Indeed, if anything, the Bushists have showed relative tenderness
toward the tens of thousands of people fleeing the bloody invasion of
Somalia by Ethiopia's U.S.-trained troops and their Somali warlord
allies, when compared to the treatment meted out to villagers in Korea
by American officials.
The Associated Press, using Freedom of
Information Act requests, archival research and the work of Harvard
historian Sahr Conway-Lanz, has shredded the Pentagon's whitewash
"investigation" of the killing of hundreds of Korean refugees at No Gun
Ri in 1950. That atrocity, long suppressed by both the Pentagon and the
brutal military dictatorships the United States empowered in South
Korea for decades, first became public in 1999, sparking a long,
obfuscating probe by the Pentagon. Not surprisingly, the Bush-era
Pentagon finally absolved its forbears of any blame in the incident,
and denied that there had ever been an official policy or orders to
shoot refugees as they approached American lines.
But Professor
Conway-Lanz found a letter directly refuting the Pentagon's assertion;
what's more, the Pentagon itself had the letter in hand when they
published their findings. AP has subsequently found much more material
deliberately omitted by the Pentagon investigation, confirming the
testimony not only of survivors of the multiple massacres, but also of
American veterans of the Korean War who took part in the killings.
And
although the scale of the Bush atrocities in Somalia have not -- yet --
reached the level reached by the bipartisan U.S. administrations
overseeing the Korean War, they do share one common element: a panicky
racism. In Korea, U.S. troops were ordered by officers -- acting with
the direct knowledge of the State Department -- to gun down approaching
refugees on the off-chance that North Korean agents might be hiding
among them. Similarly, in Somalia, U.S. planes bombed refugees and
locals on the off-chance that "al Qaeda" agents might be hiding among
them. This is the same "justification" offered for capturing many
Somali refugees at gunpoint and rendering them to Bush's proxy
torturers in Ethiopia. The basic premise seems to be that used by the
Catholic crusaders against Cathar heretics in the 13th century, when
they slaughtered the entire city of Beziers -- "good" Catholics and
heretics alike -- under the battle cry of Papal legate Arnaud-Amaury:
"Kill them all! God will know His own!"
After all, who could
hope to sort out enemy agents from a bunch of funny-looking foreigners?
Koreans, Africans, Arabs, Vietnamese -- they all look alike, and you
can't trust any of them. Best to sweep them all up -- or gun them all
down. It's not like they're real human beings anyway, right?
And
so, in Korea, hundreds of innocent women, children and men were riddled
by machine guns, strafed and bombed by aircraft and shelled from
warships, due to the merest possibility that an enemy agent might be
among their number. The case of No Gun Ri is staggering, not only in
the killings themselves but also in the sinister, sickening echoes of
the kind of "ethnic cleansing" operations carried about by those
upstanding defenders of Western civilization in Germany, just a few
years before. As AP reports:
No Gun Ri survivors said U.S.
soldiers first forced them from nearby villages on July 25, 1950, and
then stopped them in front of U.S. lines the next day, when they were
attacked without warning by aircraft as hundreds sat atop a railroad
embankment near No Gun Ri, a village in central South Korea. Troops of
the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment followed with ground fire as survivors
took shelter in twin underpasses of a concrete railroad bridge.
Forced
them from their villages. Set them out in the open. Attacked them with
airpower, then machine-gunned the survivors. All of this on orders from
on high. This exact scene could have been lifted from the Russian
steppes or the Ukrainian countryside during the Nazi invasion of the
Soviet Union. Yet it was directed and countenanced by officers and
officials who had only five years before been fighting the Nazis.
The
killings remained hidden from history until an AP report in 1999 cited
a dozen ex-soldiers who corroborated the Korean survivors' accounts,
prompting the Pentagon to open its inquiry after years of dismissing
the allegations.
The Army veterans' estimates of dead ranged
from under 100 to "hundreds." Korean survivors say they believe about
400 were killed. Korean authorities have certified the identities of at
least 163 dead or missing. No Gun Ri, where no evidence emerged of
enemy infiltrators, was not the only such incident. As 1950 wore on,
U.S. commanders repeatedly ordered refugees shot, according to
declassified documents obtained by the AP.
One incident, on
Sept. 1, 1950, has been confirmed by the declassified official diary of
the USS DeHaven, which says that the Navy destroyer, at Army
insistence, fired on a seaside refugee encampment at Pohang, South
Korea. Survivors say 100 to 200 people were killed. South Korean
officials announced in February they would investigate.
More
than a dozen documents — in which high-ranking U.S. officers tell
troops that refugees are "fair game," for example, and order them to
"shoot all refugees coming across river" — were found by the AP in the
investigators' own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those
documents was disclosed in the Army's 300-page public report.
South Koreans have filed reports with their government of more than 60 such episodes during the 1950-53 war.
Earlier,
Professor Conway-Lanz found this smoking gun in the archives, a letter
from John Muccio, U.S. ambassador in South Korea, to Dean Rusk, then
the assistant Secretary of State, and later the head honcho at State
during the Vietnam War. Conway-Lanz discovered the letter in 2006,
after the Pentagon whitewash. This prompted calls from South Korean
officials for further explanation:
After South Korea asked for
more information, however, the Pentagon acknowledged to the Seoul
government that it examined Muccio's letter in 2000 [after first
denying that it had been seen] but dismissed it. It did so because the
letter "outlined a proposed policy," not an approved one, Army
spokesman Paul Boyce argues in a recent e-mail to the AP.
But
Muccio's message to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk states
unambiguously that "decisions made" at a high-level U.S.-South Korean
meeting in Taegu, South Korea, on July 25, 1950, included a policy to
shoot approaching refugees. The reason: American commanders feared that
disguised North Korean enemy troops were infiltrating their lines via
refugee groups.
"If refugees do appear from north of US lines
they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing
they will be shot," the ambassador told Rusk, cautioning that these
shootings might cause "repercussions in the United States."
Deliberately attacking noncombatants is a war crime.
These orders were confirmed by the testimony of many American soldiers:
Other
ex-soldier eyewitnesses, including headquarters radiomen, told the AP
that orders came down to the 7th Cavalry's 2nd Battalion command post,
and were relayed through front-line companies at No Gun Ri, to open
fire on the mass of village families, baggage and farm animals.
Such
communications would have been recorded in the 7th Cavalry Regiment's
journal, but that log is missing without explanation from the National
Archives. Without disclosing this crucial gap, the Army's 2001 report
asserted there were no such orders. It suggested soldiers shot the
refugees in a panic, questioned estimates of hundreds of dead, and
absolved the U.S. military of liability.
The Army report didn't
disclose that veterans told Army investigators of "kill" orders, of
seeing stacks of dead at No Gun Ri, and of earlier documentation of the
killings. Such interview transcripts have been obtained via Freedom of
Information Act requests. Examples:
_Ex-Air Force pilot Clyde
Good, 87, of Melbourne, Fla., told investigators his four-plane
mission, under orders, attacked 300-400 refugees in mid-1950 on
suspicion the group harbored infiltrators. "I didn't like the idea," he
said. "They had some young ones, too. ... kids on the road." A South
Korean government report in 2001 said five ex-pilots told Pentagon
interviewers of such orders. The U.S. report claimed "all pilots
interviewed" knew nothing about such orders.
_The U.S. report
said the No Gun Ri shootings weren't documented at the time. It didn't
disclose that ex-Army clerk Mac W. Hilliard, 78, of Weed, Calif.,
testified he remembered typing into the now-missing regimental journal
an officer's handwritten report that 300 refugees had been fired on.
"If you see 'em, kill 'em" was the general attitude toward civilians,
Hilliard told the AP in reaffirming his testimony...
In a
transcript obtained by the AP, ex-soldier Homer Garza told a Pentagon
interrogator he was sent on patrol through one underpass and saw heaps
of bodies. "There were probably 200 or 300 civilians there — babies,
old papa-sans," Garza, 73, of Hurst, Texas, said in a subsequent AP
interview. Most may have been dead, but it was hard to tell because
"they were stacked on top of one another," said Garza, who retired as a
command sergeant major, the Army's highest enlisted rank.
In a separate story, AP also detailed other reported assaults on refugees. These include:
KOKAN-RI
SHRINE: On Aug. 10, 1950, survivors say, U.S. troops and aircraft fired
on villagers who had sought shelter from fighting in a large family
shrine in Kokan-ri in southernmost South Korea. They say 83 were
killed, including many children. Declassified documents show that
commanders of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division, operating in that area,
had issued orders two weeks earlier to shoot civilians found in the war
zone.
YOUNGCHOON CAVE: As many as 300 refugees were killed, many
suffocated, on Jan. 20, 1951, when U.S. warplanes dropped apparent
napalm firebombs at the entrance to a cavern where the South Koreans
were sheltering 90 miles southeast of Seoul, survivors say. An observer
plane had flown overhead beforehand. Declassified documents show U.S.
pilots were sometimes directed to attack large civilian groups on
suspicion they harbored infiltrators.
DOON-PO STOREHOUSE: Also
in January 1951, south of Seoul, U.S. warplanes killed 300 South Korean
refugees as they jammed into a storehouse at the village of Doon-po,
survivors say. They say the planes attacked without warning after the
refugees set a fire outside to keep warm.
SANSONG VILLAGE: In
another napalm attack that month, U.S. warplanes struck Sansong
village, 125 miles southeast of Seoul, killing 34 villagers, a
declassified U.S. military document said. It quoted U.S. officials
saying Sansong villagers had helped North Korean troops, who kept
supplies there, but it also reported "no enemy casualties" in the
strike. Survivors denied they had aided the enemy and said they had no
warning to evacuate.
Note that two of those attacks involved the
use of chemical weapons: napalm bombs, gruesome devices that sear their
targets with unquenchable fire. These incidents were of course minor
precursors to the tens of thousands of innocent people who would fall
victim to napalm and other aerial scourges during the Vietnam War --
and to the more than 600,000 innocent people killed by the Bushists in
Iraq. Although, to be fair, most of the latter have been killed with
good, old-fashioned ordnance like mother used to make, albeit with a
sprinkling of chemical weapons like white phosphorous and depleted
uranium.
At least, that's what we can say for sure right now.
But who knows how many hidden horrors, how many No Gun Ris, will be
dredged up from the Iraqi sands in the decades to come, as historians
and journalists slowly work through the mountainous slag-heap of lies
and false alibis that encrust every war?
We wrote here yesterday of the 
