http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_RiThe AP editor of the story, J. Robert Port said he was demoted after championing the story for more than a year with AP higher-ups. The AP special assignment division, which Port headed, was dissolved. Port resigned in June 1999. In September 1999, seventeen months after the story was first found, the AP published the story. It is the AP's only Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.<7>
Media controversy
An article in U.S. News & World Report, by military reporter Joseph L. Galloway, questioned the credibility of a key witness in the AP report.<3> Using the same Army records as those utilized by the AP, Galloway demonstrated fraudulent claims by Edward Daily. Edward Daily had said he saw both the killings at Nogeun-ri and an order to carry them out. The US News story found, based on army reports, that he was not a machine gunner, and he was not part of any unit at Nogeun-ri, nor anywhere near the village during the period in question. The AP initially stuck by Daily, who had reaffirmed his statements to numerous media outlets, including an appearance on a Dateline NBC interview with NBC anchor Tom Brokaw:
Tom Brokaw: You heard that order?
Edward Daily: Yes, sir.
Brokaw: "Kill them all?"
Edward Daily: Yes, sir.
However, after the expose by other journalism outlets, the AP reinterviewed Daily who, when confronted with army records which conflicted with his statements, admitted that he could not have been at the scene of the incident, and instead had heard of it second hand. Daily was a mechanic during the war and did not join the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry until 1951. In January 2002 he pled guilty to defrauding the government for collecting over $400,000 in benefits for combat-related trauma from combat he never saw, over nearly fifteen years. The AP's major American witness then served a 21 month sentence in Federal prison for his fraudulent accounts.<8>
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New York Times Reporter Felicity Barringer reported that Herman Patterson, a rifleman in the 2nd Battalion, said: "Unfortunately, the incident took place. Numbers are not known exactly." She also reviewed the conflicting news accounts of the events that transpired at Nogeun-ri, concluding that at that point (spring, 2000) "in the end, the crucial centerpiece of The A.P. report, the American soldiers killed at least 100 Korean civilians — possibly under direct orders — has been chipped but hardly shattered by the latest revelations."<9>
MORE:
American historian Sahr Conway-Lanz published an article in the January 2005 issue of Diplomatic History entitled "Beyond No Gun Ri," in which he argues that the position taken by the Pentagon after its 1999-2001 investigation--that the U.S. military did not order the refugees shot--is "untenable." In April 2006 he gave his own account of events in Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II, in which he published a letter by the United States ambassador to South Korea, John J. Muccio, which informed the State Department that U.S. troops had been authorized to shoot at refugees, referring to policy set down on July 25, 1950.
The Associated Press reporters who, in 1999, were the first to reveal the scope of the killings at Nogeun-ri, wrote, in an article May 29, 2006 in The Washington Post that the letter, which had not previously been known, "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."<12>
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