U.S. policy was to shoot Korean refugees

More than a half-century after hostilities ended in Korea, a document from the war’s chaotic early days has come to light — a letter from the U.S. ambassador to Seoul, informing the State Department that American soldiers would shoot refugees approaching their lines.

The letter — dated the day of the Army’s mass killing of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri in 1950 — is the strongest indication yet that such a policy existed for all U.S. forces in Korea, and the first evidence that that policy was known to upper ranks of the U.S. government.

Thus, the policy was to shoot unarmed civilians, which makes it a war crime.

Link via DJ Mitchell, who says:

I don’t know which is worse– that it was policy in Korea for the U.S. Army to shoot refugees, or that the Pentagon (in a 2001 report) covered it up.
I seem to have lost my country.  Has anyone seen it?

Well, if it wasn’t here in 1950, then it’s been lost for a long time, hasn’t it?

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The shootings last November at Haditha, a city in the Anbar province of western Iraq that has been plagued by insurgents, were covered up, said Rep. John Murtha.

“Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?” Murtha said on “This Week” on ABC. “We don’t know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command.”

A powerful Republican concurs

Sen. John Warner, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would hold hearings on the killings but cautioned against reaching conclusions until the military concluded its investigation.

“There is this serious question, however, of what happened and when it happened and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it,” Warner said.

Death penalty could be sought

US Marines could face the death penalty after one of their number took horrific photographs of a massacre in Iraq on his mobile phone, The Independent on Sunday has learned.

As in Abu Ghraib, what brought them down was the ubiquitous cell phone camera. Here’s a tip for deranged young murderers. Don’t take photos of your victims as this makes you much easier to catch.

The photographs, seized by the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), show many victims shot at close range in the head and chest, execution-style, according to sources who have seen them. One image shows a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer. Both have been shot dead.

So the alleged humans responsible for this atrocity then took photos of it…

The coverup

It’s crucial to understand that the Penatgon lied and deceived about this from Day One and only opened the investigation after an Iraqi Human Rights group got the videos and forced the issue. Until then, it was the usual making-shit-up.

The Independent article continues, and details clearly and precisely how the Pentagon twisted and distorted the truth, lying continually and steadily.

The official account of what happened in Haditha on 19 November has gradually unravelled since the initial claim that one Marine, 20-year-old Lance-Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed when a roadside bomb went off next to a convoy of Humvees passing through the town.

Gunmen “attacked the convoy with small-arms fire”, a statement added, and the Marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding one. It appears that the wounded man later died, bringing the number of Iraqis killed to 24. The Marines did not begin to change their story until an Iraqi human rights group obtained the journalism student’s video, which showed that no Iraqis were killed in the bomb explosion. The houses where they died were bullet-riddled inside, but had no external marks, casting doubts on the soldiers’ claims that there had been a firefight.

After Time magazine took up the story, an infantry colonel was sent to Haditha for an inquiry which concluded that the 15 civilians, including several women and six children, died as a result of the Marines’ actions rather than the bombing. But at this stage the deaths were called “collateral damage”.

As the IoS reported on 26 March, the Marines were still claiming then that the nine young men who died - five in a taxi close to the scene of the bombing, plus four brothers in a nearby house - were armed fighters. One military spokeswoman blamed them for the deaths of the other 15 Iraqis, because they “placed non-combatants in the line of fire as the Marines responded to defend themselves”.

Details emerging from the official investigation since then have confirmed the IoS report that all the Iraqis killed were civilians, and that all the shooting that day was by the Marines. According to local people, the rampage lasted three to five hours, and one man shot by the Marines was allowed to bleed to death for hours while his pleas for help were ignored.

Andrew Murray, chair of the Stop the War Coalition, said: “It’s clear that what happened in Haditha is a war crime. It would be idle to think this is the first war crime that has been committed in the last three years. It must be assumed that more of this is going on.”

Precisely.

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Senate Republicans were divided Thursday voting on the immigration bill — 23 voted for and 32 voted against it.

Until now, the GOP has been united between the corporate wing and the social conservatives, said Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers University political scientist. Now, Republicans are divided between the group that wants the cheap labor and those overwhelmed by the rising tide of immigrants, he said.

Lefties: Let’s turn this new Republican divide into the Grand Canyon.

Here’s another stress fracture to exploit -

Constitutional clash could lead to resignations

As Congress and the Bush administration argued publicly last week over the extraordinary raid of a congressman’s office, a high-stakes dispute simmered behind the scenes — top Justice Department officials indicated they’d resign if ordered to turn over documents seized in the search.

The wheels are falling off the once well-organized and disciplined Republican machine. Let’s help the process along. Not that Democrats are much better, hey, they’ve enthusiastically backed the wars and destruction of constitutional rights too. However the more body blows the crumbling neocon machine receives, the better. Their inevitable and soon-to-come collapse will be a victory for the people.

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From the Rock & Rap Confidential listserv quoting their May issue. They said, feel free to forward or re-post, so I am.

Rock the Vote is in shambles. According to a February 7 LA Times article by Charles Duhigg, the organization is $700,000 in debt and has cut its staff from twenty people in 2004 to two today. Rock the Vote hasn’t had a chief operating officer since the last Presidential election.
Duhigg attributes the crisis to overspending in non-election years and to the opportunism of the music industry executives who dominate the group’s board and use Rock the Vote primarily to promote their own artists.

Rock the Vote has a more fundamental problem: It has hitched its star to politicians who are completely hostile to the needs and desires of the American people. For example, check out the political hacks it has chosen to bestow its Rock the Nation Award upon.

There’s Bill Clinton, who presided over the 1996 Democratic Party convention which removed universal health care from the party platform even though more than 70 per cent of Americans are in favor of it.

There’s Hilary Rosen, who was head of the RIAA at the time she was honored. Rosen rocked the nation by launching the war against file-sharing. Sharing music on-line is, to say the least, wildly popular.

There’s Hilary Clinton, who, despite the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, has called for sending 80,000 more of our sons and daughters to the slaughter.

In June 2005, the Rock the Nation Award went to John McCain, one month after the Arizona Senator was part of the 100-0 Senate vote to approve Bush’s war funding bill. In his acceptance speech, McCain introduced himself as “Funk Master McCain.” Since then, Funk Master McCain has kept busy campaigning for California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose November ballot initiatives to cripple unions and give himself unsupervised power to gut social programs were soundly defeated by California voters.

In 2004, Rock the Vote, under the leadership of Jehmu Greene (who came to the organization directly from serving as Southern Political Director of the Democratic National Committee), registered 1.4 million voters in an effort to elect John Kerry. On March 2 of this year Kerry was one of 89 Senators who voted to make the Patriot Act permanent, even though more than 250 U.S. cities have passed resolutions calling for it to be abolished.

One of Rock the Vote’s few high points came in the early 1990s when the organization aired over 175 public service announcements in which artists gave their frank views on democracy. Our favorite was Ice-T’s. “I’m as anti ‘the system’ as you could possibly be,” he said. “We’ve got two options–the vote or hostile takeover. I’m down with either one.”

In other words, voter registration as a tactic can be useful when it’s part of an effort to transform the system. When voter registration is used as a strategy, what you get is Rock the Vote. It won’t be missed.

Like MoveOn.org and net roots, Rock the Vote is essentially a fund-raising/recruiting arm of the Democratic Party and not interested in actual change, just in boosting the Democratic Party who, as RockRap points out, is just as complicit in the wars and dismantling of the social net as the Republicans.

While a Democratic take-over of one or both houses of Congress would be a satisfying kick in the teeth to the neocons, don’t expect Democrats to do anything different on the war(s.) Heck, most of them supported the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions. Ditto for supporting CIA torture prisons and the erosion of civil liberties. The real change will come when people in the street demand it, and not through thinly-disguised fund-raising and recruitment schemes.

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