No Gun Ri and Bagram

Adirondack Patriot sent us this link to an Albany Times-Union article about the opening of a new archives for documents related to the alleged atrocity at No Gun Ri, Korea in 1950. Adirondack Patriot writes;

There is so many things wrong about this. First, a non-historian professor is compiling history based driven by personal interest. A computer science professor with no military experience is going to dabble in amateur historical analysis and somehow it will be cast in stone as historical fact.

Second, the person has already framed this event as a “massacre” by American soldiers, disregarding the work by an American infantry major who researched the incident and disproved the AP story (which was based on the accounts of three proven liars).

Third, there is no new evidence to justify this “historical” project. Using taxpayer money to solicit historical accounts is a pretty crappy way of collecting reliable facts.

Forth, this research will involve free and open access to the North Korean archives of the event, right? Yeah, right.

In short, the campus liberals and the media are again portraying the United States military as murderers and using taxpayer money to do it.

Honestly, I stopped paying attention to the No Gun Ri discussion when it was determined that one of the main witnesses, Edward Daily, was proven to have been no where near the incident. One of the charges was that US soldiers set up machine guns at the opposite ends of a tunnel and fired on the refugees. I guess the bullets in those days were programmed to only hit Koreans and not to hit the machine gun team at the other entrance.

But there’s a similar story in the Washington Post this morning about two Afghan teenagers who claim they were held at a secret prison at Bagram Airbase and tortured. The Post is careful, in this case to mention that there’s no corroboration for the teens’ charges, but that doesn’t stop them from reporting ridiculous stories;

The two teenagers — Issa Mohammad, 17, and Abdul Rashid, who said he is younger than 16 — said in interviews this week that they were punched and slapped in the face by their captors during their time at Bagram air base, where they were held in individual cells. Rashid said his interrogator forced him to look at pornography alongside a photograph of his mother.

Um, why show them porn? What would it accomplish? It sounds like something the TSA would force me to do while my plane is pulling away from the gate, but to what end would an interrogator engage in that behavior? I mean, seriously. Their job is to get information not torture someone simply for the sake of torture – like I said, that’s TSA’s job.

At the beginning of his detention, he was forced to strip naked and undergo a medical checkup in front of about a half-dozen American soldiers. He said that his Muslim upbringing made such a display humiliating and that the soldiers made it worse.

“They touched me all over my body. They took pictures, and they were laughing and laughing,” he said. “They were doing everything.”

It sounds like that episode of Family Guy when Peter got a prostate exam;

I’ll never understand why the media is so eager to believe any story that makes the American fighting forces look like perverted, bloodthirsty monsters no matter how ridiculous the story sounds.

I’m sure Mathew Alexander will have some information on this even though his time as an interrogator was more than three years ago and in a different country.

Category: Military issues, Terror War