New York Times Swallows Pentagon "Whitewash":
Korea massacre probe needs independent investigation
January 23, 2001
The New York Times has given a pass to a deceptive Pentagon investigation
into the No Gun Ri massacre. Sixteen months after the Associated Press
published its Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of the massacre by U.S. forces in
the Korean War (9/30/99), the Pentagon report states that although "an
unknown number of Korean civilians were killed or injured" by U.S. troops,
"the deaths and injuries of civilians, where they occurred, were an
unfortunate tragedy inherent to war and not a deliberate killing." Since the
AP story first ran, damning new evidence has come to light in the form of
declassified military documents showing clearly that orders were given to
shoot all refugees approaching American lines. In addition, testimony from
American veterans shows that these orders were passed on to U.S. soldiers at
No Gun Ri and several veterans who were at the scene recalled being under
orders to shoot. In order to "conclude" that the refugee shootings were not
deliberate, the Pentagon resorted to concocting a series of tortured
rationalizations for ignoring many of the inconvenient facts turned up by its
own investigators. Korean survivors of the massacre have called the report a
"whitewash" (Agence France Presse, 1/11/01). Yet New York Times reporter
Elizabeth Becker (1/12/01) took the Pentagon's self-exoneration entirely at
face value. No criticism or dissent from the Pentagon's spin was reported in
her piece. Later in the week, AP sent out an analysis (1/13/01) highlighting
some of the Pentagon report's omissions (written by the lead reporter on AP's
original prize-winning investigation), but it was ignored by the Times, even
though the paper originally ran the agency's 1999 No Gun Ri story on its
front page. Becker's article failed to point out that the Army's lengthy
Inspector General report at one point admitted-- albeit in an evasive way--
that "several soldiers" interviewed by Army investigators "were adamant that
there was an order" to fire on refugees at No Gun Ri. According to the South
Korean report of the same investigation, there were in fact 17 such soldiers.
But the Pentagon dismissed the testimony of these 17 veterans because "they
had no information to support their assertions"-- they did not personally
receive the order from their commander and they did not know where the order
originated. Among the 17 veterans who said there were orders to shoot
refugees were two men, Lawrence Levine and James Crume, who handled radio and
message traffic for the Army regiment at No Gun Ri. An AP article last
November (11/22/00) reported that the two men gave the Army sworn statements
saying that orders to fire on civilians came down the Army chain of command
and were passed on to the units at No Gun Ri. "I'm sure the battalion
commander and the S3 [operations officer] discussed it even before they put
the order out to stop the refugees," Crume told AP. "All I know is that the
order was given-- 'you're not going through'-- and the order was given to the
heavy weapons company, and that was it." Levine and Crume's statements were
never quoted or mentioned in the Pentagon report. Becker's article ignored
them as well. Another crucial piece of evidence ignored by Becker-- though it
has been publicly known since last June-- is a declassified memo written by a
top Air Force officer in Korea one day before the No Gun Ri massacre. The
memo said: "The Army has requested that we strafe all civilian refugee
parties that are noted approaching our positions. To date we have complied
with the Army request in this respect." The memo went on to note that the
policy "is sure to receive wide publicity and may cause embarrassment to the
U.S. Air Force and to the U.S. government in its relations with the United
Nations." The Pentagon investigators dismissed the memo-- which was titled
"Policy on Strafing Civilian Refugees"-- because it was referring to a
"request," "not an order." (Newsday highlighted the Air Force memo in a
January 19 piece headlined "New Account of No Gun Ri; AF Memo: Army Sought
Strafing.") Another order to shoot civilian refugees, which was reported in
the AP's original No Gun Ri story, was given by an 8th Cavalry Regiment
liason officer in charge of relaying orders from the headquarters of the 1st
Cavalry Division. The officer gave the following instructions to his
regiment: "No refugees to cross the front lines. Fire everyone trying to
cross lines. Use discretion in case of women and children." The Pentagon
report explained that this was "not an order" but "more likely the liaison
officer's misinterpretation" of orders that were issued 48 hours later.
Becker falsely reported that "the South Korean team [of investigators] agreed
with the Army that American soldiers were not ordered to shoot at the
refugees." Becker was apparently referring to the joint U.S.-South Korean
"Statement of Mutual Understanding," which included several carefully worded
sentences crafted to give the impression that no evidence of orders was
found. But the joint statement pointedly omits any definitive judgement that
soldiers were not under orders to shoot. In fact, the South Koreans' own
report, published separately from the American one, states: "We cannot rule
out the possibility that there was an order for a mortar attack." Indeed, AP
reported last December (12/20/00) that South Korean officials were hoping "to
persuade the Pentagon to drop its insistence that no evidence exists that the
shootings were carried out under orders." The Pentagon report says there is
no documentary evidence that orders to shoot refugees were passed to the
troops at No Gun Ri. But neither the report nor Becker's article mentioned
that the 7th Cavalry regiment's journal for July 1950-- the one document that
shows which orders were given to the No Gun Ri units on the day of the
massacre-- is missing from the National Archives. (The journals of the other
two regiments in the 1st Cavalry Division are not missing.) In contrast to
Becker's article, Agence France Presse (1/12/01) ran an excellent and
balanced account of the Pentagon report by Washington reporter Jim Mannion.
The dispatch began:
"U.S. soldiers killed or injured an unconfirmed number of refugees near No
Gun Ri during a confused withdrawal in the early days of the Korean War,
but U.S. commanders did not order troops to shoot and kill civilians, an
army investigation concluded Thursday. "The army reached that no-fault
conclusion despite finding references in U.S. military records that appear
to authorize firing on Korean civilians, including an air force memo
stating that it had complied with an army request to strafe all civilian
refugees approaching U.S. positions."
ACTION:
Contact the New York Times and ask them to publish a serious examination of
the Pentagon's No Gun Ri report, looking at all the available evidence and
not just at what the U.S. Army has said.
CONTACT:
New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036-3959
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Toll free comment line: 1-888-NYT-NEWS
As always, please remember that your comments will be more effective if you
maintain a polite tone. Please cc [EMAIL PROTECTED] with your correspondence.
To read the full New York Times article by Elizabeth Becker, see:
http://www.fair.org/articles/times-nogunri.html
For more background, read:
--"Digging Too Deep at No Gun Ri"
http://www.fair.org/extra/0009/nogunri.html
--The Pentagon's "Report of the No Gun Ri Review"
http://www.army.mil/nogunri/
http://www.fair.org/activism/nogunri-times.html
