[KS] Korean War atrocities

[Richardson]

While I don't doubt this particular story is accurate, I believe Mr. 
Haney's story on Nogun-ri had some serious problems with primary sources 
and other issues. This critique is one example;

http://rokdrop.com/2007/07/26/responding-to-the-bridge-at-no-gun-ri/


Bruce Cumings wrote:
> Below is a very good report by Charles Hanley of Associate Press, who 
> was one of the AP reporters who brought the Nogun-ri massacre to 
> American attentions in 1999. In addition to his discussion of American 
> suppression of information about the Taejon massacre, note that in his 
> official history of the war, /South to the Naktong, North to the 
> Yalu/, with full access to secret documentation, Roy Appleman blamed 
> the Taejon massacre entirely on the North Koreans. 
>
> Fear, secrecy kept 1950 Korea mass killings hidden
> By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent 
> May 18, 2008
>  _http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080518/ap_on_re_as/korea_mass_executions_covered_up_
>
>  
>
>
> SEOUL, South Korea - One journalist's bid to report mass murder in 
> South Korea in 1950 was blocked by his British publisher. Another 
> correspondent was denounced as a possibly treasonous fabricator when 
> he did report it. In South Korea, down the generations, fear silenced 
> those who knew.
>
>  
>
> Fifty-eight years ago, at the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korean 
> authorities secretively executed, usually without legal process, tens 
> of thousands of southern leftists and others rightly or wrongly 
> identified as sympathizers. Today a government Truth and 
> Reconciliation Commission is working to dig up the facts, and the 
> remains of victims.
>
>  
>
> How could such a bloodbath have been hidden from history?
>
>  
>
> Among the Koreans who witnessed, took part in or lost family members 
> to the mass killings, the events were hardly hidden, but they became a 
> "public secret," barely whispered about through four decades of 
> right-wing dictatorship here.
>
>  
>
> "The family couldn't talk about it, or we'd be stigmatized as 
> leftists," said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, leader of an organization of 
> families seeking redress for their loved ones' deaths in 1950.
>
>  
>
> Kim, whose father was shot and buried in a mass grave outside the 
> central city of Daejeon, noted that in 1960-61, a one-year democratic 
> interlude in South Korea, family groups began investigating wartime 
> atrocities. But a military coup closed that window, and "the leaders 
> of those organizations were arrested and punished."
>
>  
>
> Then, "from 1961 to 1988, nobody could challenge the regime, to try 
> again to reveal these hidden truths," said Park Myung-lim of Seoul's 
> Yonsei University, a leading Korean War historian. As a doctoral 
> student in the late 1980s, when South Korea was moving toward 
> democracy, Park was among the few scholars to begin researching the 
> mass killings. He was regularly harassed by the police.
>
>  
>
> Scattered reports of the killings did emerge in 1950 — and some did not.
>
>  
>
> British journalist James Cameron wrote about mass prisoner shootings 
> in the South Korean port city of Busan — then spelled Pusan — for 
> London's Picture Post magazine in the fall of 1950, but publisher 
> Edward Hulton ordered the story removed at the last minute.
>
>  
>
> Earlier, correspondent Alan Winnington reported on the shooting of 
> thousands of prisoners at Daejeon in the British communist newspaper 
> The Daily Worker, only to have his reporting denounced by the U.S. 
> Embassy in London as an "atrocity fabrication." The British Cabinet 
> then briefly considered laying treason charges against Winnington, 
> historian Jon Halliday has written.
>
>  
>
> Associated Press correspondent O.H.P. King reported on the shooting of 
> 60 political prisoners in Suwon, south of Seoul, and wrote in a later 
> memoir he was "shocked that American officers were unconcerned" by 
> questions he raised about due process for the detainees.
>
>  
>
> Some U.S. officers — and U.S. diplomats — were among others who 
> reported on the killings. But their classified reports were kept 
> secret for decades.
>
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