Report on No Gun Ri

We dispute your Dec. 27 editorial, “Forever Cloaked in Smoke of War,” regarding the Associated Press reports on Korean War refugee killings at No Gun Ri. It isn’t true that Army records show that “several” ex-GIs said to have been at the site were not there. What is true is that out of more than 40 Americans and Koreans cited as eyewitnesses by the AP, one now appears not to have been there and to have passed on secondhand, not firsthand, information.

We believe that it is also wrong to assume that “allegations” were not substantiated that commanders issued orders to shoot refugees. Several such standing orders, from declassified documents, are posted on the AP Web site. Almost two dozen ex-soldiers told the AP and Pentagon investigators of specific verbal orders at or near No Gun Ri to kill refugees. Former Rep. Pete McCloskey, who served on an oversight panel for the Pentagon investigation, concluded that “the preponderance of evidence--based on what the enlisted men told us--indicates that these orders were given to the troops.”

The AP’s accomplishment, for which it won a Pulitzer Prize, was to establish the truth of a large-scale killing the Pentagon long sought to deny, a truth the Army has now confirmed, but a truth whose clarity can only be obscured by misinformation and vague talk of the “smoke of war.” As the journalists responsible for the reports, we are concerned that the truth of powerful eyewitness and documentary evidence about a pattern of such U.S. military actions in the Korean War not be obscured.

SANG-HUN CHOE

MARTHA MENDOZA

CHARLES J. HANLEY

Associated Press, New York