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04/13/07
AP IMPACT: 1950 'shoot refugees' letter was known to No Gun
Ri inquiry, but went undisclosed
By CHARLES J. HANLEY
and
MARTHA MENDOZA
Associated Press Writers
Six years after declaring the U.S. killing of Korean War refugees
at No Gun Ri was "not deliberate," the Army has
acknowledged it found but did not divulge that a high-level
document said 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 say hundreds, mostly women and children, were killed.
Exclusion of the embassy letter from the Army's 2001 investigative
report is the most significant among numerous omissions of
documents and testimony pointing to a policy of firing on
refugee groups -- undisclosed evidence uncovered by Associated
Press archival research and Freedom of Information Act requests.
South Korean petitioners say 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 via U.S. archives.
No Gun Ri survivors, who call the Army's 2001 investigation
a "whitewash," are demanding a reopened investigation,
compensation and a U.S. apology.
Harvard historian Sahr Conway-Lanz first disclosed the existence
of Ambassador John H. Muccio's 1950 letter in a scholarly
article and a 2006 book, "Collateral Damage." He
uncovered the declassified document at the U.S. National Archives.
When asked last year, the Pentagon didn't address the central
question of whether U.S. investigators had seen the document
before issuing their No Gun Ri report. Ex-Army Secretary Louis
Caldera suggested to The Associated Press that Army researchers
may have missed it.
After South Korea asked for more information, however, the
Pentagon acknowledged to the Seoul government that it examined
Muccio's letter in 2000 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.
Told of the Pentagon's rationale for excluding the Muccio
letter from its investigative report, No Gun Ri expert Yi
Mahn-yol, retired head of Seoul's National Institute of Korean
History, suggested the letter 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."
"The Muccio letter in plain English says, 'Decisions
were made,'" the historian noted.
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.
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.
Despite this, the Army's e-mail to the AP maintains, as did
the 2001 report, "No policy purporting to authorize soldiers
to shoot refugees was ever promulgated to soldiers in the
field."
The 2001 official report instead focused on a single document
issued the day the No Gun Ri shootings began, a Korea-wide
Army order saying refugees should be stopped from crossing
U.S. lines. That order did not say how they should be stopped,
but retired Army Col. Robert M. Carroll, a lieutenant at No
Gun Ri, said the meaning was clear.
"What do you do when you're told nobody comes through?"
Carroll said in an AP interview before his death in 2004.
If they didn't stop, he said, "we had to shoot them to
hold them back."
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.
-- The Army report said ex-GIs estimating large numbers of
dead were using "guesswork," that none got a close-up
look. But 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 addition, the 2001 report by the Army inspector-general
didn't disclose the existence of July 1950 mission reports
from the Air Force's 35th Fighter-Bomber Squadron that said
pilots attacked apparent refugee groups and struck at or near
No Gun Ri on the dates of the killings.
In describing another critical document, a July 25, 1950,
memo from the Air Force operations chief in Korea, the Army
report dropped its key passage: a paragraph saying pilots,
at the Army's request, were strafing refugee groups approaching
U.S. lines. The Army report portrayed the strafing as a proposal,
not a fact, as the Army now is doing with the Muccio letter.
The Pentagon has told the South Korean government the ambassador's
letter, evidence that senior Washington officials knew of
a policy to shoot South Korean refugees, does not warrant
a reopening of the No Gun Ri investigation.
Seoul accepts that U.S. position, said a South Korean Foreign
Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Informed of the Pentagon position, the No Gun Ri survivors
issued a statement. "We cannot accept the U.S. Defense
Department's false explanation and are indignant over the
repeated lies by the U.S. Defense Department," it said.
___
AP Writer Jae-soon Chang in Seoul and AP Investigative Researcher
Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.
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