http://www.suntimes.com/news/world/1089174,CST-NWS-korea04.articleKOREAN WAR | Pilots couldn't tell civilians from enemy
August 4, 2008
BY CHARLES J. HANLEY AND 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.