The Long Trail of Blood from No Gun Ri to Haditha

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

by Dennis Rahkonen
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 3, 2006

The Pentagon and politicians who continue to back George Bush’s disastrously failed Iraq policy are falling all over themselves in their frantic attempt to portray the Haditha massacre as an “anomaly” perpetrated either by “a few bad apples” or otherwise exemplary Marines who “snapped” under extreme, battle-related stress.

What’s clear, they piously contend, is that such atrocious behavior is never sanctioned or condoned by the U.S. military.

But there are countless ghosts of 19th Century native Americans -- and up to 600,000 Filipinos who perished in a genocidal anti-insurrection conducted by our imperialist troops after Spain’s Pacific defeat -- who would beg to differ.

The dead from Hiroshima and Nagasaki wish to object, too.

It wasn’t individual soldiers, in abstract isolation, who murdered them. It was this nation’s racist propensity for genocide.

Ironically, as the Haditha story percolated to the top of our news, an atrocity account from more than fifty years ago was finally verified, pointing a bloody finger at the very military establishment that sanctimoniously professes its purity and innocence today.

What happened in Korea, back then, is absolutely chilling.

On July 26, 1950, the 7th U.S. Cavalry mowed down what survivors say were about 400 civilian refugees, mostly women and children, at No Gun Ri, a rural village southeast of Seoul. Hundreds more were shot in similar killings elsewhere, according to those who escaped the murderous volleys.

Much more here: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/June06/Rahkonen03.htm

[beam me up scottie]

1. Christ

Veterans for Peace member S. Brian Willson, who served in Vietnam, compiled a list of gruesome abuses in Korea:

General Douglas MacArthur ordered the U.S. Air Force to "destroy every means of communication, every installation, factory, city, and village" south of the Yalu River boundary with China. Massive saturation bombings alone, especially with napalm and other incendiaries, murdered perhaps 2.5 million civilians. Major General William B. Kean of the 25th Infantry Division ordered "civilians in the combat zone" to be considered enemies.

A July 25, 1950 Fifth Air Force memorandum to General Timberlake declared that adherence to Army orders to "strafe all civilian refugees (have been) complied with."

USA Today (Oct. 1, 1999) and the New York Times (Dec. 29, 1999) reported from declassified U.S. Air Force documents the "deliberate" strafings and bombings of Korean "civilians" and "people in white." In the August 21, 1950 issue of Life, John Osborne reported that U.S. officers ordered troops to fire into clusters of civilians.

From horse-borne saber charges into peaceful encampments of "Indians" to devastating B-52 raids ranging from the population centers of North Vietnam to the Afghan countryside, America has a terrible record of mass-murdering civilians.
In places like Laos, the killing continues decades after it began, as unexploded anti-personnel weapons strewn indiscriminately by the tens of thousands are regularly detonated by hapless farmers' plows.

Or by laughing children playing in the fields.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

2. We just aren't as "lilly white" as many would have us believe. eom

[beam me up scottie]

4. My mother was a refugee

in WWII.

I've known that for a long time.

[Major Hogwash]

3. The 7th Cavalry!? Custer's old unit?

Man, that is terrible.

It took a long time for the story of No Gun Ri to come out.