Controversies of the Korean War: The Tragedy at No Gun-ri – Part #4

UPDATE: I highly recommend everyone read my prior postings on this subject:

• Responding to the Bridge at No Gun Ri
• The Forensics of No Gun Ri
• Revisiting No Gun Ri
• Transcript of Briefing to Seoul Rotary Club
• The No Gun Ri Document Shell Game

______________________________________

Original Posting:

The Media and No Gun-ri

Here is an article by Yonhap that chronicles a visit to Korea by a group of California college students who during their trip visited the site of the No Gun-ri Tragedy during the Korean War. Here is the background history provided in the article:

More than fifty years ago, the actions of a group of U.S. soldiers in this small village some 230 kilometers southeast of Seoul led to the deaths of hundreds of refugees, who were being escorted from their homes on the pretext of finding a safer hiding place. The troops later sprayed the refugees with bullets while they waited under the village’s cement bridge, with reports claiming hundreds died including scores more in subsequent air raids. The incident took place about a month after the outbreak of the Korean War when the country was in a state of extreme turmoil.

Yonhap of course is pushing the established mythology of the incident prevalent in not only the Korean media but also the US media. Yonhap provides no context in the report such as the fact that North Korean soldiers were often dressed as civilians and regularly ambushed US soldiers especially during the early phases of the war that this incident took place.

Read T.R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War and other prominent Korean War history books for multiple examples of soldiers being attacked by Korean “civilians.” Plus the situation at the time was extremely desperate. The small contingent of US forces on the peninsula were ill prepared for combat and in full retreat trying to delay the North Korean advance while reinforcements continued to arrive in Pusan. In fact the soldiers from H company 2-7 Cavalry Regiment involved in the shooting were in complete disarray at the point of the shooting. They were on the run in a total state of panic when they found themselves in No Gun-ri.

The time this incident took place was during one of the most critical points of the Korean War. If the US forces failed at this time this whole controversy would be null and void because North Korea would have conquered South Korea. A full context of the situation is appropriate before we just condemn these soldiers as heartless killers of civilians.

These soldiers at the time did kill civilians at No Gun-ri. Everyone seems to be agreement on this as the joint US-ROK report on the No Gun-ri incident concludes. The only difference between the US and Korean views is that the US officials believe that about 50+ civilians were killed while the Korean officials believe it to be upwards of 250 people. To determine the actual truth of what happened is extremely difficult as soldiers and civilians allegedly at the scene of the incident have been proven to be liars. The case of Edward Daily is the best example of this. He was the lead witness that started the entire controversy and he was proven rather easily to be a phony yet he was put on all the networks at the time to bash the US military over the incident:

Edward Daily, first mentioned as a principal source in a Pulitzer-Prize winning Associated Press story about the killings at No Gun Ri during the Korean War, has now told the AP he couldn’t have been there and probably learned details of the alleged incident from GIs who were present. In the original AP story Daily gave a chillingly graphic account of the incident at No Gun Ri – an incident in which he insisted he had participated, machine gunning hundreds of Korean civilians huddled under a railway underpass. The AP story, quoted him as saying: “On summer nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming.” He added: “The command looked at it as getting rid of the problem in the easiest way. That was to shoot them in a group. Today,” Daily concluded, “we all share a guilt feeling, something that remains with everyone.”

Nobody bothered checking this guy’s background. A simple background check through the military archives could of found him to be a phony. Yet he was all over the news bashing the army:

As reported in NewsMax two weeks ago, NBC’s Dateline flew Daily to Korea to visit the No Gun Ri site. Daily told Tom Brokaw about receiving the order to fire on the refugees under the railroad trestle. “Just shoot them all,” Daily quoted the order. Brokaw: “You heard that order?” Daily: “Yes, sir.” Brokaw: “Kill them all?” Daily: “Yes, sir.” In February, the Washington Post Magazine put Daily’s picture on the cover and said he “was in charge of the lone machine-gun post” on one side of the railroad culvert. The Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News all published stories citing Daily’s account of No Gun Ri.

How can a major network like NBC and Tom Brokaw along with major publishers make such a huge mistake as believing Daily and putting him on the air and on the cover of magazines like this? Simple background checks exposed this guy as a liar and Robert Bateman the author of the book No Gun Ri, actually informed Charles Hanley, the head AP reporter of the original AP article on No Gun-ri, about the unreliability of Daily and other veteran witnesses the AP quoted and Hanley even concurred that he had his doubts about them but made no attempts fix the article. Bateman was surprised at first but understood why the AP would not change their article when it won the Pulitzer Prize.

To NBC’s credit at least they later retracted their report on Daily, but the damage had already been done. Who knows how many people saw the original report and have taken it to be the truth about what happened at No Gun-ri, sliming not only the soldiers of the 7th Cav but all Korean War veterans. Why did the US media jump all over this story like this without doing extensive background checking? It is very similar to the CNN Tailwind scandal that the media jumped on and then CNN had to later retract. The story fit what many in the media wanted to believe, the military is evil.

If I ever had a chance to meet Mr. Hanley the first question I would ask him is why did it take a US Army major sitting behind a desk at West Point, in a matter of days, to uncover a number of inaccuracies and falsehoods in the original AP article? How can people who’s full time job is professional journalism with a multi-million dollar budget with the backing of the world’s largest news organization miss such obvious discrepancies in the article? Could it be because they were more interested in publishing a story line that was more gripping to readers thus the claims of breaking this story and fighting through this great US governmental cover up run by the low level USFK lawyer in Seoul? Could it be they had Pulitzer Prize in mind when they first began writing the article and thus discounted anything that countered their views on this story if it conflicted with winning the prize? Could it be that the remained blinded to all the information out there disputing their article because they so wanted to believe what they did publish due to their own personal aversion and suspicions of the US military?

This instant aversion to the military comes in part to the natural checks and balance of the media of the government and the military. However, many people currently in the US media are from the Vietnam generation and remain suspicious and unsupportive of the draft time military they once knew. They still equate the military with what they remember from Vietnam not realizing how different the all volunteer military of today is. That is why when the military is portrayed in popular culture cliches and stereotypes from Vietnam are used. Many in the US media never miss an opportunity to criticize the military and No Gun-ri was just another example of this.

The No Gun-ri issue was manipulated to fit many reporters’ personal views about the US military while also making the story more sexy to the general public by giving it the air of a government cover up and playing up the emotional story lines of the families affected by this great cover up. It worked because the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to them for investigative journalism even though much of their great investigation could be found in Chapter 12 of the official US Army history of the Korean War.

The Korean media on the other hand is a whole different beast. The objective for many people in the Korean media is pure and simple anti-Americanism. Feel free to comment if you disagree with me but how else do explain the misinformation about No Gun-ri, every little USFK incident turning into front page news, and the constant misinformation about GI crimes and the SOFA agreement. If you disagree with me about the disinformation about GI crimes and the SOFA Agreement you need to check out the USinKorea site that chronicles this issue in great detail.

A perfect example of this is Korea’s popular citizen news service, Oh My News, which published their own version of what happened at No Gun-ri. It is safe to say that this article of “journalism” or should I say docu-fiction tends to focus more on fantasy then the actual facts.

Take this passage here as the first example:

Once the story broke and grabbed headline attention, the victims began to step forward. The Seoul government was placed between a rock and a hard place. Continuing to muzzle the victims would strengthen the notion that the Seoul government was a mere puppet of Uncle Sam. After all, its main reason for suppressing the story was to please him.

What evidence does the author, a Mr. Young Kim offer that the Korean government was trying to suppress the story because of pressure from the US? He has no evidence. Also how is this considered journalism?

Sounds like propaganda to me, but wait there is more:

The massacre of innocent civilians by American troops was, of course, well-known among the victims and their relatives, but the Seoul government had for years labeled anyone mentioning the massacre “communists,” and brutally prosecuted them. Ironically, it took a fair-minded American journalist to disclose the massacre.

Once again he provides no evidence of his claims and then calls the AP reporters “fair minded” when the principle source of their reporting Edward Daily was uncovered as a liar by US News and World Report and the Stars and Stripes newspaper through simple background checks of Daily’s past these journalists uncovered that Daily wasn’t even a combat arms soldier, did not earn the awards he claimed to have won, and wasn’t even anywhere near No Gun-ri at the time of the incident. Daily wasn’t the only one. Other veterans that made key claims about No Gun-ri were later found to have not even been there.

Some how Kim failed to mention all this in his article. Then the claim that this was covered up for decades is absolutely false. As I have shown in my No Gun-ri series, articles from major US newspapers such as the New York Times documents the killing of civilians by US soldiers during the Korean War along with accounts of civilian killings in well known history books about the Korean War and even in the US Army’s official history of the war. This is not new news, but the story needs the air of a great government cover up to catch the readers attention.

I’m all open to fair criticism about the US, but the Korean media seems to rely more on mythology and stereotypes than facts. What bothers me so much about the No Gun-ri criticism in particular, by the Korean media, is that it is an effort to down play the significance of the US military in the Korean War because some people feel the US did not have noble intentions in defending Korea during the war and Koreans should not feel a debt of gratitude to the US for saving the country. Creating a stereotype of these veterans as war criminals is just another way to slowly degrade the Korean public’s image of America and the GIs who fought and died in Korea over 50 years ago.

What is further troubling is that many of these veterans from the war are passing away and cannot defend themselves as this new revisionist history is being created about them. It is a shame and no one seems to be speaking out against it. That is why I found it so important to educate and debate people about what happened at No Gun-ri and hopefully restore some honor to the Korean War veterans that have been tarnished by this tragedy by both the US and Korean media.

The main person trying to set the record straight about No Gun-ri has been Major Robert Bateman. However, these same journalists who cherish their freedom of speech have attempted to silence him. Mr. Hanley contacted Bateman’s boss at West Point and attempted to intimidate his boss into giving him a bad evaluation report. Then after that didn’t work, he then tried to intimidate the publishing company that decided to publish Bateman’s book into not publishing it. That didn’t work either.

The big question is, why is the world’s largest news organization so scared of Bateman that they are willing to go to these extremes to silence him? Could it be because Bateman’s criticisms clearly show that the AP’s Pulitzer Prize was undeserved? The AP makes money on their creditbility, any hint that they are not creditible is going to be jumped on with everything the AP has no matter if they are right or wrong. However, all their attempts to silence Bateman hasn’t worked because Bateman has been relying on facts to present his case. The AP can’t dispute the facts thus they try smear campaigns such as claiming anyone disputing the article is a No Gun-ri denier which isn’t the case. Nobody disputes whether their was a tragic loss of life at No Gun-ri. What is in dispute is the numbers of casualties and motivations behind what happened.

Another curious issue is that the AP relies on witness testimony to back their claims, that they refuse to release to the public. Bateman has been requesting for years for the AP to release the names and the complete transcripts of the witness testimony, but the AP has refused. Could it be that they fear if the testimony is released Bateman and others could find more holes in their testimony like they did with the GI witnesses? Until these questions are answered the AP’s Pulitzer Prize is always going to be viewed as the Barry Bonds homerun record of journalism; with a great, big asterick.

Sadly I believe the mythology of the Korean War preached by people from the AP and Oh My News’ Mr. Kim is what many Americans and Koreans now believe. That is the continuing tragedy of this incident. The advocacy journalism these reporters are using to push their anti-military or in the case of Mr. Kim, anti-USFK agendas is truly disturbing. I call this advocacy journalism because that is what Amazon.com has said the AP’s book is. These reporters are actively working to smear the honor of aged veterans who sacrificed their youth to save Korea from communism. If you don’t believe me that Mr. Kim is behind a anti-USFK propaganda campaign than I highly recommend that you read through his dubious Kimsoft site that I have debunked on a number of occasions.

Shouldn’t journalists have some kind of responsibility to verify facts before reporting a story? How can journalists be allowed to accuse people of war crimes when their claims couldn’t even stand up during a quick review by a US Army major sitting behind a desk at West Point, much less in a court of law? It is bad enough the Korean War is considered the Forgotten War in America, but now it is becoming the Revised War in an effort to smear the veterans and in turn Americans themselves.

Prior Posting: The Aftermath of No Gun-riÂ