Korea Truth Commission Statement on Pentragon Policy of Shooting Civilians During War

Korea Truth Commission - Joint Office and U.S. Chapter

June 13, 2006

Korean War Era Letter from Ambassador Reveals Pentagon Policy of Shooting and Killing Unarmed Korean Civilians

A letter written fifty-six years ago was recently unearthed by a Harvard historian and is getting a lot of attention. U.S. Ambassador to Seoul during the Korean War, John J Muccio wrote the letter to U.S. Undersecretary of State, Dean Rusk. It clearly spells out the secret policy the U.S. military had of shooting Korean refugees. It isn't the only evidence, but it is unambiguous and from the highest level, and because of that, very important.

On July 26th , 1950, the same day that Muccio wrote the letter, U. S. troops and airplanes began a four-day massacre at the village of No gun-ri. Some four hundred Korean peasants were machine gunned to death and strafed from airplanes as they desperately tried to protect themselves. Babies and old people included among its tragic victims, this was only one of many massacres of Korean civilians by U.S. troops. Some three and one half million Korean civilians died in three years. There are survivors, witnesses and evidence of more than 135 massacres by U.S. troops similar to No gun-ri.

An international delegation organized by the Korea Truth Commission visited South Korea in August of 2000 as part of their ongoing investigation of U.S. war crimes during the war. The Chair of the U.S. Chapter of KTC, HwaYoung Lee was one of the investigators. Lee was told by No gun-ri survivors that a U.S. military orientation that had been disseminated to refugees included instructions to wear white clothing and to make their way to railroads, where they would be led to safety by soldiers. In Korea at that time, it was traditional for peasants to wear white clothing. A large group of them had followed the instructions very carefully on that day and made their way to a railroad track at No gun-ri. They saw a U.S. military plane circle overhead and then leave the area. When it returned the attack began. Airplanes strafed them and ground troops opened fire repeatedly as women and children sought safety under a railroad viaduct. Many were shot to death in the numerous attacks that followed. Some of the young men tried to flee into the surrounding mountains and were chased down and killed by ground troops.

Activist Brian Willson was also part of the KTC delegation. Based on his experience on the trip, Willson writes about the Korean War in an article "When Will the United States Apologize for its War Crimes" on his website www.brianwillson.com  https://mail.wwpublish.com/Redirect/www.brianwillson.com/ . In the article, a chilling reference stands out; "The New York Times (Dec. 29, 1999) reported from declassified U.S. Air Force documents the "deliberate" strafings and bombings of Korean "civilians" and "people in white." Apparently, the U.S. military assured civilians that wearing white would help get them to safety, and then used it as a way to identify them and attack them as enemies.

The story of No gun-ri is only known so well because the persistence of its survivors resulted in a Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press series. Until then, the South Korean government persecuted, threatened, red baited, and even jailed people who tried to tell what the U.S. military had done to them. When the AP series caused a stir, the Pentagon was finally forced to 'investigate.' Predictably, in 2001 their investigative commission concluded that hundreds were in fact killed at No gun-ri, but denied any orders from above. There was no official apology. No mention of any other U.S. attacks on civilians. They blamed jittery troops - the same thing they said about the massacre of hundreds at My Lai, Vietnam, and the same thing they are saying now in response to the growing anger over Haditha.

They omitted the information from all of the declassified documents that are now available to anyone through a quick browser search. Letters between U.S. officers, operations reports, and military logs, spell it all out. "All Koreans moving south to be treated as enemy" says one military communiqué generated in the early days of the war. Another from April 1951, incredibly, expresses concern that the policy of shooting southward bound civilians has gone on so long that troops are growing "hesitant" to carry it out. All of that information was left out of the Pentagon's 2001 report.

The Muccio letter shows that the massacres of civilians were ordered by the Pentagon, not the result of troops cracking under the pressure of war. Targeting civilians is a war crime. But shooting refugees was secretly Pentagon policy during the war Korean War. They concealed it in the decades since, and continued attacking and killing civilians in Vietnam, in Grenada, Panama, and Yugoslavia and are doing so today in Iraq and Afghanistan, because an imperialist army of occupation inevitably tries to defeat the resistance by attacking the population. The lies and cover-up are already in motion in relation to the massacre at Haditha.

The goal of the anti-war movement has to be unequivocal. End the war and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq! At the same time, the movement has to support the cause of justice for victims of U.S. troop attacks on Korean people.

The KTC demands a comprehensive investigation of the numerous massacres of Korean civilians, a formal admission and apology from the U.S. government to the Korean people, and full reparations to the victims and their family members!

US troops and weapons out of Korea! End Occupation Now!