That was then ... iht.com ... usa killing unarmed and large groups of refugees, men women and children, as a matter of policy approved at the highest levels, a war blatant crime, by the highest levels
Pentagon withheld document from report on Korean War killings
By Charles J. Hanley and Martha Mendoza The Associated PressPublished: April 15, 2007
Six years after declaring that the killing of Korean War refugees by U.S. troops at No Gun Ri was "not deliberate," the U.S. Army has acknowledged it had found, but had not divulged, a high-level document stating that the U.S. military had a policy of shooting approaching civilians in South Korea.
The document, a letter from the U.S. ambassador in South Korea to the State Department in Washington, is dated the day in 1950 when U.S. troops began the No Gun Ri shootings, in which, survivors said, hundreds of people, mostly women and children, were killed.
Exclusion of the embassy letter from the army's 2001 investigative report on No Gun Ri, a village in central South Korea, is the most significant of numerous omissions of documents and testimony pointing to a policy of firing on refugee groups. The undisclosed evidence was uncovered through Associated Press archival research and Freedom of Information Act requests.
South Korean petitioners say that hundreds more refugees died later in 1950 as a result of the U.S. practice. The Seoul government is investigating one such large-scale killing, of refugees stranded on a beach, newly confirmed by U.S. archives.
Sahr Conway-Lanz, a Harvard historian, disclosed the existence of Ambassador John Muccio's 1950 letter in a scholarly article and a 2006 book, "Collateral Damage." He found the declassified letter at the U.S. National Archives.
When asked about the letter last year, the Pentagon did not address the central question of whether U.S. investigators had seen the document before issuing their No Gun Ri report. Louis Caldera, a former army secretary, suggested to The Associated Press that army researchers may have missed it.
But after South Korea asked for more information, the Pentagon acknowledged to Seoul that it had examined the Muccio letter in 2000 but dismissed it. It did so because the letter "outlined a proposed policy," not an approved one, Paul Boyce, an army spokesman, argued in a recent e-mail message.
But Muccio's letter to Dean Rusk, then an assistant secretary of state, says unambiguously that "decisions made" at a high-level U.S.-South Korean meeting in Taegu, South Korea, on July 25, 1950, included a policy of shooting approaching refugees. The reason: U.S. commanders feared that disguised North Korean 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.
Told of the Pentagon rationale for excluding the letter from its report, Yi Mahn Yol, a retired head of the National Institute of Korean History in Seoul and an expert on No Gun Ri, suggested that it was suppressed because it was "disadvantageous" to the Pentagon's case.
"If they set it aside as nothing significant, we can say that it was an intentional exclusion," he said.
Conway-Lanz called the Pentagon's explanation "thoroughly unconvincing."
On July 25, 1950, survivors of the event said, U.S. soldiers forced them out of villages. On July 26th, survivors said, they were stopped in front of U.S. lines and attacked without warning by aircraft as hundreds sat atop a railroad embankment near No Gun Ri. Troops of the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment followed with ground fire, they said, as survivors took shelter in twin underpasses of a concrete railroad bridge.
The killings remained hidden from history until 1999, when an AP report cited a dozen former soldiers who corroborated the survivor accounts. The veterans' estimates of the dead ranged from fewer than 100 to hundreds. Survivors say they believe about 400 people were killed. No evidence emerged of enemy infiltrators at No Gun Ri.
As 1950 wore on, U.S. commanders repeatedly ordered refugees shot, according to declassified documents. One incident, on Sept. 1, 1950, has been confirmed by the declassified official diary of the USS DeHaven. The diary 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.
Writer Jae-soon Chang in Seoul and investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report. |
