AP Reporter Charles Hanley Responds to GI Korea Criticism
I have been working on transferring over comments from the old GI Korea Tripod site to my current WordPress site this week when I noticed this comment that had been posted on the old site. The comment was from someone claiming to be Charles Hanley, one of the Associated Press reporters who published the highly flawed No Gun-ri article that won the Pulitzer Prize. Here is what he had to say:
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Since your blog seems to have an interest in No Gun Ri, perhaps you’d like to see something reality-based (and based on actual professional news reporting). Here it is, published several months ago…
BC-No Gun Ri-Letter
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Ambassador’s 1950 letter says U.S. set policy of shooting refugees
Eds: A multimedia interactive is available in the nogunri folder and a document slugged nongunri.pdf will be available in the _documents folder on Monday.
AP Photos of May 25: NY517-519
AP Graphic NO GUN RI BRIDGE
By CHARLES J. HANLEY and MARTHA MENDOZA
Associated Press Writers
More than a half-century after hostilities ended in Korea, a document from the war’s chaotic early days has come to light _ a letter from the U.S. ambassador to Seoul, informing the State Department that American soldiers would shoot refugees approaching their lines.
The letter _ dated the day of the Army’s mass killing of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri in 1950 _ is the strongest indication yet that such a policy existed for all U.S. forces in Korea, and the first evidence that that policy was known to upper ranks of the U.S. government.
“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,” wrote Ambassador John J. Muccio, in his message to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
The letter reported on decisions made at a high-level meeting in South Korea on July 25, 1950, the night before the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment shot the refugees at No Gun Ri.
Estimates vary on the number of dead at No Gun Ri. American soldiers’ estimates ranged from under 100 to “hundreds” dead; Korean survivors say about 400, mostly women and children, were killed at the village 100 miles southeast of Seoul, the South Korean capital. Hundreds more refugees were killed in later, similar episodes, survivors say.
The No Gun Ri killings were documented in a Pulitzer Prize-winning story by The Associated Press in 1999, which prompted a 16-month Pentagon inquiry.
The Pentagon concluded that the No Gun Ri shootings, which lasted three days, were “an unfortunate tragedy” _ “not a deliberate killing.” It suggested panicky soldiers, acting without orders, opened fire because they feared that an approaching line of families, baggage and farm animals concealed enemy troops.
But Muccio’s letter indicates the actions of the 7th Cavalry were consistent with policy, adopted because of concern that North Koreans would infiltrate via refugee columns. And in subsequent months, U.S. commanders repeatedly ordered refugees shot, documents show.
The Muccio letter, declassified in 1982, is discussed in a new book by American historian Sahr Conway-Lanz, who discovered the document at the U.S. National Archives, where the AP also has obtained a copy.
Conway-Lanz, a former Harvard historian and now an archivist of the National Archives’ Nixon collection, was awarded the Stuart L. Bernath Award of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for the article on which the book is based.
“With this additional piece of evidence, the Pentagon report’s interpretation (of No Gun Ri) becomes difficult to sustain,” Conway-Lanz argues in his book, “Collateral Damage,” published this spring by Routledge.
The Army report’s own list of sources for the 1999-2001 investigation shows its researchers reviewed the microfilm containing the Muccio letter. But the 300-page report did not mention it.
Asked about this, Pentagon spokeswoman Betsy Weiner would say only that the Army inspector general’s report was “an accurate and objective portrayal of the available facts based on 13 months of work.”
Said Louis Caldera, who was Army secretary in 2001 and is now University of New Mexico president, “Millions of pages of files were reviewed and it is certainly possible they may have simply missed it.”
Ex-journalist and Korean War veteran Don Oberdorfer, a historian of Korea who served on a team of outside experts who reviewed the investigation, said he did not recall seeing the Muccio message. “I don’t know why, since the military claimed to have combed all records from any source.”
Muccio noted in his 1950 letter that U.S. commanders feared disguised North Korean soldiers were infiltrating American lines via refugee columns.
As a result, those meeting on the night of July 25, 1950 _ top staff officers of the U.S. 8th Army, Muccio’s representative Harold J. Noble and South Korean officials _ decided on a policy of air-dropping leaflets telling South Korean civilians not to head south toward U.S. defense lines, and of shooting them if they did approach U.S. lines despite warning shots, the ambassador wrote to Rusk.
Rusk, Muccio and Noble, who was embassy first secretary, are all dead. It is not known what action, if any, Rusk and others in Washington may have taken as a result of the letter.
Muccio told Rusk, who later served as U.S. secretary of state during the Vietnam War, that he was writing him “in view of the possibility of repercussions in the United States” from such deadly U.S. tactics.
But the No Gun Ri killings _ as well as others in the ensuing months _ remained hidden from history until the AP report of 1999, in which ex-soldiers who were at No Gun Ri corroborated the Korean survivors’ accounts.
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. Troops of the 7th Cavalry followed with ground fire as survivors took shelter under a railroad bridge.
The late Army Col. Robert M. Carroll, a lieutenant at No Gun Ri, said he remembered the order radioed across the warfront on the morning of July 26 to stop refugees from crossing battle lines. “What do you do when you’re told nobody comes through?” he said in a 1998 interview. “We had to shoot them to hold them back.”
Other soldier witnesses attested to radioed orders to open fire at No Gun Ri.
Since that episode was confirmed in 1999, South Koreans have lodged complaints with the Seoul government about more than 60 other alleged large-scale killings of refugees by the U.S. military in the 1950-53 war.
The Army report of 2001 acknowledged investigators learned of other, unspecified civilian killings, but said these would not be investigated.
Meanwhile, AP research uncovered at least 19 declassified U.S. military documents showing commanders ordered or authorized such killings in 1950-51.
The Army’s denial that the killings were ordered is a “deception of No Gun Ri victims and of U.S. citizens who value human rights,” Chung Koo-do, spokesman for the victims’ committee, told the AP in South Korea. He called the 2001 finding a “nasty” shifting of blame to rank-and-file soldiers, and called on President Bush to reopen the case.
Even if infiltrators are present, soldiers need to take “due precautions” to protect civilian lives, said Francois Bugnion, director for international law for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, global authority on the laws of war.
After reviewing the 1950 letter, Bugnion said the standard on war crimes is clear.
“In the case of a deliberate attack directed against civilians identified as such, then this would amount to a violation of the law of armed conflict,” he said.
Gary Solis, a West Point expert on war crimes, said the policy described by Muccio clearly “deviates from typical wartime procedures. It’s an obvious violation of the bedrock core principle of the law of armed conflict _ distinction.”
Solis said soldiers always have the right to defend themselves. But “noncombatants are not to be purposely targeted.”
But William Eckhardt, lead Army prosecutor in the My Lai atrocities case in Vietnam, sensed “angst, great angst” in the letter because officials worried about what might happen. “If a mob doesn’t stop when they’re coming at you, you fire over their heads and if they still don’t stop you fire at them. Standard procedure,” he said.
In South Korea, Yi Mahn-yol, head of the National Institute of Korean History and a member of a government panel on No Gun Ri, said the Muccio letter sheds an entirely new light on a case that “so far has been presented as an accidental incident that didn’t involve the command system.”
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AP Investigative Researcher Randy Herschaft in New York and AP Writer Jae-soon Chang in Seoul contributed to this report.
________________________________
In response to the AP Article and the AP’s corresponding book, a US Army Major, Robert Bateman was able to find a number of inaccuracies in the AP’s reporting and wrote his own book that clearly shows the inaccuracies in their reporting and uncovered witnesses that were not at No Gun-ri that the AP quoted in their reporting. Based on reading both books and reading endless amounts of articles and material about No Gun-ri I created my own series of posts about what happened.
Judging from Mr. Hanley’s comment he doesn’t seem to like me challenging his findings and appears to think Bateman’s research should be discounted because he is not a professional journalist. He links to his own AP article from May of 2006 as evidence that his views on what happened at No Gun-ri are validated. I had a good debate with Haisan over at the Marmot’s Hole over Handley’s article earlier this year that covered a lot of what I believe about what happened at No Gun-ri, but I’m going to put my thoughts together in a updated series posting for everyone to read over the coming days. I hope this will spark some debate about the actual historical evidence of what happened at No Gun-ri compared to the mythology advocated by many in the media.
The Nogunri AP debacle was about the last nail in the coffin for my already failing respect for the media. It played out very similar to a story on the Vietnam War some months before where a former soldier, couple with other "evidence", told about the US using nerve gas on the Cambodian border. The story was big news – so big other news agecies ran to jump on the bandwagon, but they started uncovering serious problems with the reporting — like not telling readers the main source that was quoted frequently happened to be in jail for fraud and other charges….
I remember well watching as the Nogunri stuff evolved. When it came out after the AP story started the feeding frenzy that the one guy they used to add so much punch with big time quotes throughout the piece —- was easy to verify as a liar – that he had lied about his service record and that he was not in the Nogunri area at the time of the event – the whole thing should have unravelled.
I'm not even sure the thing didn't eventually unravel in the press itself.
Can anybody think of a non-Korean press source that has touted the Norgunri case?
The only non-Koreans I can think of who bring it up are academics and some people on the blogs.
I thought the AP report was powerful when I first read it, but even before the other problems were discovered, I had some questions growing in my mind – like when I started noticing the ages of the Koreans used as sources:
they were all people who were either very old now or more commonly would have been just in their early teens or younger.
Using these people as giving definative proof of a massacre 50 years after they were in what at the time was a massively chaotic and mind-draining event – is questionable. Asking people from such experiences 50 years later to give pin-point information about facts is a little much – especially because we know about the mass confusion going on at the time.
But, as GI Korea noted, other media orgs and some others picked through the bones of the AP story and laid out more than enough information to make the Pultizer people embarrased.
But, nothing changes.
I've been following a series of blog entries at a conservative media watchdog group where the AP has been using an Iraqi police officer for big reports on violence and in particular the burning to death of worshippers at a mosque — but nobody else can locate said police officer.
I believe it was also the AP that had the scandal in the Israel-Lebanon conflict where photos were doctored to make the smoke and destruction look worse.
One of the biggest disappointments to me in my life has been coming to the realization that the media is a pile of poo pretty much across the board…
I find it interesting to compare No Gun Ri to how GI Korea and others view the media's handling of No Gun Ri. For No Gun Ri, Hanley says it was a systematic, orchestrated massacre. Bateman and others think it was a smaller tragedy, terrible but accidental.
And the media? GI Korea thinks their misreporting was a systematic, orchestrated massacring of the truth. I, on the other hand, think it was a smaller mishap, terrible but accidental.
The truth is that AP was not eager to print a juicy story, but editors there were extremely nervous about the story, and asked for a lot of clarifications and fact-checks over a year. The story was vetted by many, many layers there.
So why did the story get out with so many errors? Hanley has a lot of clout at AP, and once he was convinced he had a big story, I would imagine it would be hard for any editor to go toe-to-toe with him. But I have no idea how that story broke down, with which person doing what original research. I expect that Choe Sang-hun did most of the heavy lifting, while Hanley directed the work and did most of the writing. Which, while efficient, can cause you to overlook a lot of things. But I don't know… I should ask Mr. Choe the next time I see him.
FYI, Hanley bio: http://www.sbu.edu/index.cfm?objectId=E36FC9D0-11…
Journalists make plenty of mistakes, and some have egos, fears or vanities, and some are just jerks (as in all walks of life). But to imagine that they are somehow organized and trying to push a specific political viewpoint is simply a world away from the reality of how newsrooms operate (except Fox TV, of course, which explicitly pushes a political viewpoint).
GI Korea gets annoyed when people who clearly do not know the military blindly and wrongly criticise the institution. Which is how I feel about a lot of these kind of attacks on "the media".
Oh, I hope I didd not come across too bitchy. As I have said before, I think you and Bateman are closer to the truth on No Gun Ri than the AP story. I just do not agree your criticisms about how and why journalists screw up.
This might make you the greatest mythbuster since Gerry Bevers.
Are the Koreans aware of the holes in the AP story? While browsing the selection at Hanbooks online yesterday, I noticed a Korean translation of Hanley's book for sale.
Haisan,
As I noted on my blog concerning some US press coverage, I don't think the press is involved in some "vast left-wing conspiracy" trying to push an agenda secretively.
I tend to agree with what Bernard Goldberg has written in his two books on media bias — that one big cause of it is "group think." They end up recruiting certain types of people. They don't do so consciously, but they do it. They end up hiring people who think like themselves, and it gets to the point that they start to believe their view of the facts is the only common sense view.
When you end up having newsrooms filled with people who generally think and feel much the same on issues, you will get bias and blindspots. And in the US at least, research into voter registration and other areas has shown that the US media is heavily Democrat – and the profs in the university humanities departments (like the top journalism schools) are also onesidedly in favor of the left-of-center.
As Goldberg says, the major problem in the press today (at least in the US) is not a lack of diversity along ethnicity but a lack of diversity of social opinion.
And this connects to the Nogunri story, because at least in American society, there is a tendancy in the intellectual community since the Vietnam War to Vietnam-war-ize things connected to the military. The big name news anchors and editors of today in many cases cut their teeth as young journalists during the Vietnam War error. Those were heady times in America with war protests and massive social upheaval with the Civil Rights Movement, women's liberation, the sexual revolution, and so on.
It was a great time to be a journalist…
and it seems to me those in the media who came later are nostalgic for it.
So, any hint of a good massacre gets their juices flowing.
They want their Pulitzers too.
Look at the Nogunri story. Why was that "news"? Is this normal habit for the AP? Do its editors and other decision makers frequently decide the best way to cover today's events —– is to spend a heck of lot of time looking at something that happened 50 years ago?
That is where the Nogunri saga takes a turn toward being "a conspiracy".
That story was not just something that happened and everybody covered it and some just go the story wrong in part.
To "cover" Nogunri, the AP had to make a conscious decision to spend a lot of time and energy and money into digging up information about something that was not going on in front of them but something that happened decades ago. To make the Nogunri story "news" required a significant conscious effort, and the fact they got it so wrong —- despite all the "layers of fact checking" —— the reason why they missed some EASY TO FIND information that proved some of their sources were misrepresenting their military careers (telling lies) — is that they were so hungry to tell a massacre story and gain some Vietnam War-type glory…
….which they got……
Another reason they botched the Nogunri story has to do with what the media believes is the best kind of source: a witness whose powerful quotes they can use to tell a first-hand type story that grabs the readers attention.
To most people, the news is boring, and the news people know this, and they want to be read, and they know that they can generate more interest in what they write if they can "humanize" it with great quotes from "the man in the street" —– the only problem is, how representative is this or that man in the street's point of view? or, in the case of Nogunri, how credible the person is.
What happened with the AP story was that the AP fell in love with what a few of their sources were saying to the point they didn't want to find out the true facts that blew up those sources' credibility.
It is similar to how Dan Rather and crew botched the story on that document on Bush's service record during Vietnam. It was a Vietnam story. It was about Bush. It involved old documents. And Rather and crew wanted so badly to believe the story was true, they let fact checking slide.
I guess what I am trying to say in relation to your comment is: the AP Nogunri debacle was more than just "an honest mistake."
[…] Please remind me to learn from the pile of cinders that was once Charles Hanley and never mess with GI Korea. On the other hand, Hanley’s own comment on GI Korea’s blog may be the most damning condemnation of his objectivity and professionalism. I responded directly to Hanley there. […]
USA,
Could GI Korea ever be susceptible to military groupthink?
This is where I think it is important to understand how various news organizations work. Hanley is not a typical AP journalist. From 1992, he was a "special correspondent", given a lot of autonomy to travel and write about what he wanted to.
It has been a while since I talked to Choe Sang-hun, but what I believe happened (iirc) is that Choe had been working on this (following up on local reports), when the story got some traction in the AP newsroom. Which is when Hanley and the others came aboard and started to make the story into something bigger.
Once again, I find the parallels between how some people treat AP and how Hanley treats No Gun Ri and the Pentagon quite interesting. AP is not more a monolith than the Pentagon is. Especially someone like Hanley has a lot of freedom to go where he wants and dig into what he wants.
So, Choe finds a story with some potential, about civilian killings during the Korean War. Then Hanley hears about it, sees something potentially bigger, and jumps aboard (hijacks the story?). Together, they interview people and do research, but came across no reason to doubt Daily outright (after all, other people remember him being there and say similar things). Sure, if would have been easy to check, but why would the reporters have suspected outright fraud? (It was a pre-Hwang Woo-suk era). Sloppy, but not malicious.
Where this story goes especially bad, in my opinion, is how Hanley and the AP reacted to Bateman, Galloway and other challenges. If they had said "Interesting, let's reassess this," it would have been a much more honest position. Instead, Hanley acted like a prick and a prima donna (Hanley does seem to be the one front-and-center in all this).
Regarding the Vietnam stuff in your (USAinKorea) post… Hanley did cut his teeth in Vietnam, where he was a US Army journalist, and did come of age in the 1960s (see the bio I linked to last post), so your comment about Vietnam-era journalists could be true for him. I've never met him and cannot say.
Anyhow, imho, if you have spent much time in any newsroom, you may not find a lot of rapid Republicans, but will not find a lot of mass agreement about much of anything, either. Reporters tend to be quite opinionated and egotistical, and about as "group think" as a horde of cats.
Haisan, I appreciate your view points on the media but my views about the media are more than just No Gun ri. No Gun ri is just a great example of journalists instead of just simply reporting news but to create it by sensationalizing an already tragic event. When I was in Iraq there were some media imbeds that senior leaders had to start planning operations around because they didn't want that reporters knowing about an op and twisting it to create news. There was some good reporters as well in Iraq but from my admitedly small foxhole, for every good one there was one bad one.
GIK – I know what you are talking about and I sympathize. But for all the problems with the media, I really like having those problems. As Churchill said about democracy, it is the worst form of government except for every other form of government. I feel the same way about free markets (they are the worst kind of economics, except for every other kind) and Western-style journalism. Yeah, they make a lot of mistakes and screw up. But I would far rather have them than not.
[…] hear it; most of them admit Nanjin massacre did happen but the number of the victims is in dispute.AP Reporter Charles Hanley Responds to GI Korea CriticismControversies of the Korean War: The Tragedy at No Gun-ri – Part […]
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I am so glad to find this site. My father, now deceased, was present at No Gun Ri as an officer, and was a decorated World War II vet. He was interviewed by the DOD when they conducted their investigation and communicated with Hanley. . I also confronted Charles Hanley via email when his story was getting repeated by parrots like Al Martinez of the LA Times and others.
When the liars like Daily were exposed, and no bodies were exhumed at the site, I kept waiting for Hanley to return his Pulitzer and apologize for calling our soldiers murderers.
My father provided supporting evidence contesting Hanley’s assertions but the reporter didn’t like the info because it contradicted what the LIARS were saying and would undermine his professional shot at a Pulitzer.
At least I see Hanley is still scratching out a meager subsistence as a yellow journalist and not running the Post or NY Times. It is sad that he still needs sensationalism to sell one of his stories. I am surprised that CNN or the LA Times haven’t taken him on considering their issues with doctored photos and completely fictional nonfiction articles. Or am I thinking of The Boston Globe?
Why is Hanley so eager to malign our men who were placed in a chaotic evacuation situation? Why so insistent that massacres were military POLICY? Why the lack of understanding of combat?
Oh that’s right: Hanley has no combat experience and has never run for his life in front of mobs of people being used and sacrificed by the real killers and true causation of any mistaken deaths.
Why didn’t Hanley help the survivors petition North Korea and CHINA for reparations?
@17- If you haven’t already I recommend going over to this page I setup that has an archive of postings I have done on the No Gun Ri issue that I think you will find of interest:
http://rokdrop.com/2012/07/30/gi-flashbacks-the-tragedy-at-no-gun-ri/