Oh My News and Nogun-ri
Korea’s popular citizen news service, Oh My News, recently published their own version of what happened at Nogun-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 real 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 Nogun-ri at the time of the incident. Daily wasn’t the only one. Other veterans that made key claims about Nogun-ri were later found to have not even been there. Then according to Robert Bateman’s Book, Nogun-ri, the lead AP reporter Charles Hanley admitted to the discrepancies in the veterans stories but ran with the article anyway. There was a Pulitzer Prize to think about.
Some how Kim failed to mention all this in his article. Then the claim that this was covered up for decades is absolutely false. In Bateman’s book he provides articles from major US newspapers such as the New York Times that documents the killing of civilians by US soldiers during the Korean War. This is not new news but the story needs the air of a great government cover up to catch the readers attention. Then Kim goes on to try and use the Pentagon investigative report of the incident as evidence that the US soldiers blatantly killed the refugees. Here is the excerpt from the Pentagon report he used:
The Korean villagers stated that on July 25, 1950, U.S. soldiers evacuated approximately 500 to 600 villagers from their homes in Im Gae Ri and Joo Gok Ri. The villagers said the U.S. soldiers escorted them towards the south. Later that evening, the American soldiers led the villagers near a riverbank at Ha Ga Ri and ordered them to stay there that night. During the night, the villagers witnessed a long parade of U.S. troops and vehicles moving towards Pusan. On the morning of July 26, 1950, the villagers continued south along the Seoul-Pusan road. According to their statements, when the villagers reached the vicinity of No Gun Ri, U.S. soldiers stopped them at a roadblock and ordered the group onto the railroad tracks, where the soldiers searched them and their personal belongings. The Koreans state that, although the soldiers found no prohibited items (such as weapons or other military contraband), the soldiers ordered an air attack on the villagers by radio communications with U.S. aircraft. Shortly afterwords, planes flew over and dropped bombs and fired machine guns, killing about 100 villagers on the railroad tracks. Those villagers who survived sought protection in a small culvert underneath the railroad tracks. The U.S. soldiers drove the villagers out of the culvert and into the larger double tunnels nearby (this report subsequently refers to these tunnels as the “double railroad overpass”). The Koreans state the U.S. soldiers then fired into both ends of the tunnels over four days (July 26-29, 1950), resulting in approximately 300 additional deaths.
If you notice in this excerpt this is all the claims made by the refugees that Army logged in their report, not the findings of the actual report. If you notice he makes no references to the claims of what happened made by the soldiers that were there. If Kim was a real journalist he would of read more from the report especially the interviews with the soldiers. In Chapter 5, of Robert Bateman’s book, No Gun Ri he quotes interviews from soldiers who were at Nogun-ri. The US-ROK report doesn’t state that soldiers evacuate the villagers. It stated that it was possible but unlikely:
While the U.S. Review Team cannot rule out the possibility that the movement of the villagers occurred as described by the Korean witnesses, there was no sound military reason for soldiers to travel approximately three miles off their designated movement route to the village of Im Gae Ri during a hasty withdrawal for the purpose of encouraging an additional 400 refugees onto the already crowded roads and aggravating further the congested conditions. It is also unlikely that the soldiers would have performed this evacuation given the widespread knowledge and fear of North Korean infiltrators believed to be present in refugee concentrations.
The reason for wanting to keep refugees away from the front line was because North Korean soldiers had been infiltrating into the Americans rear areas by posing as civilians. Why would these US soldiers in a desperate retreat go so far out of there way to evacuate a Korean village to further fill the US frontlines with civilians? It makes no sense.
A lesser known fact was that the area around the villages of Yongdong and Nogun-ri were filled with South Korean communist sympathizers that were actively ambushing American soldiers in the area. In fact just weeks before the start of the Korean War an entire ROK Army division was in this area battling the communist insurgents. Then the accounts of the aircraft strike are easily proven to be inaccurate due to veteran testimony and aerial recon photographs.
I could go on and on dispelling Mr. Kim’s myths but please read my complete Focus On: No Gun Ri series for a complete factual analysis of what happened instead of Mr. Kim’s mythology. There was a tragedy at Nogun-ri, know doubt about it. Civilians were killed by US soldiers. I don’t dispute that. What I do dispute is the factors that caused it and the numbers of civilians killed. The anti-American crowd like Mr. Kim wants you to believe that these soldiers were cold heartless killers just waiting to kill helpless Korean refugees under orders from their uncaring commanding general, so the US Army wouldn’t have to deal with the refugee problem anymore.
This is the mythology Mr. Kim and his ilk are pushing and they are winning this information battle. I am willing to bet most Americans and Koreans believe Mr. Kim’s version of events. 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. They are actively wanting to smear the honor of aged veterans who sacrificed their youth to save Korea from communism.
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. Oh My News is an interesting outlet for citizen journalism but it is becoming citizen propaganda instead. Isn’t there editors that check what is being posted? How am I supposed to take an article from Oh My News seriously in the future when they let such propaganda as Mr. Kim’s article be reported? I exposed this guy in 15 minutes of typing. Shouldn’t journalists have some kind of responsibility to verify facts before reporting a story? If Oh My News doesn’t believe in checking the credibility of a story than they need to change their name to Oh My Tabloid News. At least then they are being intellectually honest.
For more about Mr. Young Kim you can check out his Kimsoft site and draw your own conclusions about if he has an anti-USFK agenda or not.
