Seoul Probes Civilian `Massacres’ by US

[babylonsister]

Seoul Probes Civilian `Massacres’ by US
by Charles J. Hanley / Jae-Soon Chang


SEOUL, South Korea - South Korean investigators, matching once-secret documents to eyewitness accounts, are concluding that the U.S. military indiscriminately killed large groups of refugees and other civilians early in the Korean War.


A half-century later, the Seoul government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has more than 200 such alleged wartime cases on its docket, based on hundreds of citizens’ petitions recounting bombing and strafing runs on South Korean refugee gatherings and unsuspecting villages in 1950-51.

Concluding its first investigations, the 2 1/2-year-old commission is urging the government to seek U.S. compensation for victims.

“Of course the U.S. government should pay compensation. It’s the U.S. military’s fault,” said survivor Cho Kook-won, 78, who says he lost four family members among hundreds of refugees suffocated, burned and shot to death in a U.S. Air Force napalm attack on their cave shelter south of Seoul in 1951.

Commission researchers have unearthed evidence of indiscriminate killings in the declassified U.S. archive, including a report by U.S. inspectors-general that pilots couldn’t distinguish their South Korean civilian allies from North Korean enemy soldiers.

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/04/10779/

[carp]

1. Payback for US Journalists posting South Korean atrocities? NT

[babylonsister]

2. I don't know, but I read about this months ago. nt