Left I on the News

In South Korea:

Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.

With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.

The mass executions — intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners — were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were "the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War," said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.

Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million.

That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is "very conservative," said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press.

Needless to say, the U.S. knew all about this (the picture above is from U.S. Army archives), and has been keeping it secret for 60 years. The U.S., which is always issuing dire warnings about impending "bloodbaths" should their troops leave Vietnam, Iraq, or wherever else they happen to be, which has played a key role in two of the biggest bloodbaths in history - the slaughter of Korean leftists (and, no doubt, many, many who weren't leftists at all) described above, and the massacre of an estimated half million Indonesian Communists (and, again, many, many who just lived in "communist villages") in 1965. Not to mention the bloodbath of civilians that took place in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Fallujah, and so many other places the mind reels.

Update: By the way, this story was buried well inside the pages of the San Jose Mercury News today. On the New York Times online right now, the front page carries a story from South Korea...about two soap opera stars engaged in an extramarital affair. I could find the AP story by searching, but not just by browsing. The situation is the same at the Washington Post, minus the soap opera stars. CNN? Nothing either online or, as far as I can tell from sporadic viewing during the day, on air either.