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[Fwd: Fwd: book by Maj Bateman]

received this in the mail and sending this to list for information
purposes         paw


 


 Frank Rice
here is a news update

In the Fall of 1999 the world was shocked when the Associated Press
revealed what appeared to be an account of a mass killing of
defenseless civilians over a three-day period in the opening days of
the Korean War at a place called No Gun Ri, Korea.  According to the
sources in the AP story, as many as 400 innocent civilians were
wantonly gunned down for no reason by American soldiers who "played
with our lives like little boys playing with flies,"(as one of the
Korean claimants put it) during a three day slaughter lasting from 26-
29 July 1950. The unit accused of this crime was the 7th Cavalry
regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division.  In the AP version of this story
the American soldiers were witnesses and participants, and at least
three of these American witnesses say they took part in or witnesses to
what could only be called a case of mass murder.  Six months later the
AP team won the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting of this "massacre."
But immediately after that the problems with their "investigative"
reporting began to bubble to the surface. What made the story
especially compelling was the AP's assertions that no story like this
had ever been reported before, that historians were unaware of events
like those they portrayed took place, and that they had "dozens" of
American witnesses to the slaughter.

Unfortunately, for the reputation of the Associated Press and the
Pulitzer Prize, none of these statements upon which the 2000 award of
the Pulitzer was founded were quite as they were projected by the
Associated Press. Now a military historian has gone into the archives,
examined the records which the Associated Press claimed to have
examined so thoroughly, and conducted in-depth oral history interviews
with surviving veterans of the regiment, many of them the very same men
cited by the AP, but also many never quoted in the AP's Pulitzer Prize
winning story. His conclusions, about the events that took place at No
Gun Ri, Korea, in late July 1950, differ markedly from those of the AP,
and call into question the integrity of all of American Journalism, so
long as the Pulitzer remains with the AP for their story. After all,
journalism is supposed to be about facts.

Read the history to discover what really happened at No Gun Ri, as well
as the "Story of the Story" in the new book from Stackpole Books, No
Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident by military
historian Robert Bateman. (The forward to this book was written by the
Honorary Colonel of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, LTG (Ret) Harold G.
Moore.)

In their sensationalist 1999 reporting on the events at No Gun Ri, the
Associated Press reporters conveniently failed to mention the following
facts:

 There was a South Korean on South Korean civil war in the two years
leading up to the beginning of the "Korean War", this war pitted South
Korean communist guerillas against the government of South Korea from
1948-1950. And what was the epicenter for the guerilla fighting in the
South Central mountains of Korea? The area around No Gun Ri.

 Russian and Japanese weapons, the types used by South Korean
communist guerillas in the area around No Gun Ri were turned-in by
members of the unit accused of slaughtering innocent civilians, through
supply channels at the time of the alleged "massacre." These were the
very weapons that eyewitnesses among the soldiers said they had seen at
the time (soldiers who also said there had been firing from among the
Korean refugees) but whose accounts were denigrated by the AP in their
story, as being "unsupported" by documents. (Did the AP deliberately
conceal the fact that these records existed, or were they just so
ignorant of military records that they did not know that captured enemy
equipment gets turned in through the S4 channels?)

 There are no bodies. This is sort of a show-stopper, dontcha think?
After all, it is exceedingly difficult for 400 bodies to "disappear"
without a trace. Yet that is apparently what happened. Only a handful,
less than a dozen, graves of people that probably died at No Gun Ri
exist. (Air reconnaissance photos of the site, taken just days after
the alleged massacre of 400 people at No Gun Ri show no mass graves, no
bodies, and no large group of individual graves.)

 The South Korean "witnesses" and "survivors" of this massacre each
stood to become multi-millionaires if their version of events was
accepted at face value, since their initial claim was for $170 MILLION
dollars. (A claim that rocketed up to $400 Million in the wake of the
publicity given their accounts by the AP.)

 At the very instant that the 1999 AP account said a massacre was
taking place (26-29 July,1950) no less than SEVEN reporters from the
international press were present at NO GUN RI, yet not a one of them
said a word. These reporters represented not only such prestigious
papers as the Times of London, but there was also a reporter from the
AP there at No Gun Ri. Are we to believe that the AP was part of the
original "cover up" of a massacre at No Gun Ri? Should we believe that
somehow, despite the fact that there was no censorship of the press at
this point in the war, somehow reporters from the international press
and the AP itself took it upon themselves to hush up this story? Or
should we believe that seven veteran journalists with more than 100
years of experience between them, somehow missed a massacre of 400
people that was taking place less then 500 yards from their location?
This was a mighty big fact for the AP to skip, dontcha think?

 Of their witnesses, among the Americans, the AP variously referred
to
their first witness (who they found after some 36 interviews), as
either "a former machinegunner," or "a former officer" or "a former
sergeant." The only man that described himself as a former
machinegunner, who had gone on to become a sergeant, and then won a
battlefield commission, was a man named Edward Daily. Mr. Daily
recently plead guilty to Federal Charges stemming from his fraudulent
claims. You see, Mr. Daily had collected nearly $400,000 from the VA
over the years in benefits for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. His
uncovering was something even an amateur historian could uncover with
ease, and so it should be expected that the AP would have found out
about him as well. How? Why simply by reading the archival sources they
made so much hay about in their original story. In those records Daily
should have appeared no less than 16 times in 12 different types of
records...if he actually was who he had claimed to be. Why didn't the AP
believe the evidence before their eyes in the documents?

       After the AP published their story, their Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) request for the records of Ed Daily finally came in. That
was on 7 December 1999. Yet the AP never told anyone of this fact.
Instead, they let NBC air an episode of Dateline in which NBC had flown
Daily to Korea for a tearful "reunion" with the South Korean claimants.
After that show aired at the end of December 1999 they went ahead with
the filing of their original story for the Pulitzer Prize. They did
this despite the fact that they now had in their possession no fewer
than 18 different documents that demonstrated through omission or
commission that Daily was not who he said he was, and that all his
testimony was therefore suspect, as was the testimony of those that
Daily had influenced.

           It's a compelling tale. No Gun Ri: A Military History of the
Korean War Incident is both a history and a story. By combining the
scholarly rigor of academic history with the compelling nature of a
detective story, author Robert Bateman makes sense of the facts. At the
same time he demonstrates that while there may be a "bias" in American
journalism, that has nothing at all to do with this story. In this case
it was simply a situation of a lack of knowledge and rigor on the part
of the reporters who allowed themselves to be taken in by various
stories and at least one total fraud in their pursuit of what they were
convinced was the story of a lifetime. They wanted a story to be true,
and so apparently ignored or discarded all the mounds of evidence that
pointed in the other direction. Historian Bateman makes this clear, and
at the same time lays out a pretty good case about why journalists
should stick to writing the "first draft of history" and leave actual
history to qualified historians.

       Don't let the AP get away with foisting their version of history
off on the world. Forward this e-mail to other veterans, or servicemen,
or friends of history.  Recently we have seen examples of what happens
when self-serving or religious or racially motivated slanted accounts
become what passes for "history." Don't let that situation persist with
the story of No Gun Ri. Doing so would be akin to denying the facts of
the Holocaust. (Another situation where race and history and cultural
biases have combined to create an ugly "alternate history" among an ill-
informed minority that denies the fact that there was a holocaust and
there is material evidence and millions of witnesses to the fact.)
Right now most Americans think that No Gun Ri happened the way Edward
Daily told the AP it happened.  Call your local Newspaper. Ask THEM if
they know about the AP's omissions. Call your local NBC affiliated TV
station, ask them if they know that Tom Brokaw put a fraud on TV when
he took Daily to Korea and portrayed No Gun Ri as a fact in Dec 1999 on
the NBC show Dateline. (Brokaw has never retracted his story, or
acknowledged that Daily was a fraud and that he, Brokaw, unwittingly
through journalistic negligence assisted in a national level scam.)
Help set the record straight. History does matter.

          If you want to read the full story you can get the book at :

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0811717631/qid=1018112656/sr=1-
1/ref=sr_1_1/104-3141924-3539962

Or at:

http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?
userid=15RN7QAC9U&mscssid=VBAJG8LJTRQB9K9BPDDBPTHHNA7N5LED&salesurl=Rwww
.bn.com/&isbn=0811717631



>
>
>
>
> News update:
>
>
> Lt.Gen. Harold G Moore will attend and speak at the tribute to Rick
> Riscorla on Vietnam Veteran's Remembrance Day, Tuesday, May 7th at
> 11:00 AM, at the Vietnam Veteran's Education Center in Holmdel,
> New Jersey.
> The New York-New Jersey Chapter, First Cavalry Division
> Association and the
> New Jersey Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Foundation are happy with
> the way this
> event coming together.
> Other people to appear: Sam Fantino, Dan Hill, Larry Gwin (May not
> speak).Looking forward to seeing all of you there. Any questions
> please call (201)
> 883-0343      Spread the word.
> Thanks
>
> Bob Arbasetti, President
> NY-NJ Chapter
> First Cavalry Division Association
> 60 River Road - Apt. E 103
> Bogota, NJ 07603
> Tel:  (201) 883-0343
> E-mail:  rsetti@mindspring.com
>

-----Original Message-----
From: Coalminer51@aol.com [mailto:Coalminer51@aol.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2002 3:42 PM
To: rsetti@mindspring.com
Subject: book by Maj Bateman

Bob,
 sure wish that I could attend your spring meeting, I would like to hear Maj
Bateman speak, I read the story that he had in the Saber paper a couple of
months back about the fiasco at No Gun Ri. I look forward to reading his
book
on the subject when it comes out. I was not at No Gun Ri , and I`m starting
to doubt that anyone els was either, but I was in the 7th Cav from august of
50  Co "M" Machinegun Plt, so the story hits pretty close to home for me.
                                                          GarryOwen

 Frank Rice