Talk:No Gun Ri massacre

No Gun Ri Massacre according to Hanley and the AP

This article reads like one extended AP/Hanley piece. Not to say the AP's reporting on the subject is entirely bad, but numerous issues with it have been documented. Large volumes of conflicting material seems to have not made the cut as well, most notable Lt. Col Bateman. I am going to place a tag on the article until I get some time to rework it. WeldNeck (talk) 13:22, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

This article for years was an incomprehensible mess, in the hands of uninformed denialists interested only in obscuring the basic officially and journalistically established facts of No Gun Ri, when they even knew them, and too often incapable of putting together coherent sentences. For the past two years, it has been a simple, clear and straightforward presentation of what is known and not known about the U.S. military's killing of refugees at No Gun Ri. The only legitimate "issue" is already addressed in the article, the fact that one ex-soldier witness turned out to have secondhand, not firsthand information. If anyone has any further "documented" issues to raise (to use WeldNeck's term) -- that is, specific, sensible questions, not the wild fantasies and fabrications of Robert Bateman, a former officer of the very regiment responsible for the killings -- it is appropriate first to do so here on the Talk page, to start a reasoned discussion and take advantage of what knowledgable people know, and not to take us back to the days of nonsensical inserts and overwrites that served no one except those who would like No Gun Ri to simply go away. Even before that, one should review the previous Talk discussions of body count and other matters. Meanwhile, I am undoing the inappropriate "POV" tag. If basic journalistic reporting is "POV," then half of Wikipedia falls apart. Thank you. Charles J. Hanley 16:07, 8 August 2013 (UTC) . Cjhanley

Not sure who these "uninformed denialists" you speak of were, but judging by the article's history the late Lt Col Bateman was among a number of individuals who edited this article.

• Since Bateman did write a rather comprehensive account of No Gun Ri, I find it rather odd that it is only cited once. More So considering how completely he devastate your (I am assuming you are Hanley of the AP) and your team's reports on the incident.
• Very little is given in the way of documented infiltration among refugees in general which is what drove the caution that refugee groups were met with. I will fix this shortly.
• The article's lead describes the "7th Cavalry veterans" interviewed by the AP and corroborating the AP's story. Minus Daily (who the AP team knew was lying well before it became public knowledge), there is only one individual present who confirms the AP's report: Tinkler. According to the US Army's investigation and the work of the late Lt Col Bateman, all other 2/7 Cav interviewed stated that the AP team misquoted them. For example, Herman Patterson was quoted in an AP article describing No Gun Ri as “wholesale slaughter”. He testified to the US Army that he was actually referring an engagement at the Naktong River and not No Gun Ri. Another, (then) Lt Robert Carroll who was in command of the platoon, specifically stated no massacre occurred and that he never gave or received an order to fire on refugees unless they were under attack. According to bothe Bateman and the Army's investigation, there are many more examples of this.
• None of the eyewitness accounts from the US Army's report are included in the article.
• Why are allegations that the aerial footage is a fake even in the article? I realize fakery charges are needed because it is by far the most convincing piece of physical evidence (which explains why most of the section dedicated to it consists of attempts to show it a s a fake), but doesn't it seem a bit much? Why no photo on the article's page of the aerial stills?
• This bit of atrociousness :After the Army issued its report, it was learned it also had not disclosed its researchers' discovery of at least 14 additional declassified documents showing high-ranking commanders ordering or authorizing the killing of refugees in the Korean War's early months. They included communications from 1st Cavalry Division commander Gay and a top division officer to consider refugees "fair game". A log entry is not an order. No way to spin that.
• Why a lengthy excerpt from the ROK's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and not a similar treatment of the US Army's investigation? Why favor one over the other?

This is just a small sample of whats wrong with the article and why the POV flag needs to stay in place. You seem to treat this article like its your own personal domain. You should be aware of wiki's WP:COI policy and I believe you are violating it. WeldNeck (talk) 18:48, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

I don't know who WeldNeck is. But I want people to know that I'm one of the team of professional journalists who have dealt with No Gun Ri for more than 15 years. It is too late in the day to address the above, an unfortunate, time-wasting regurgitation of tired stuff dealt with long ago, knocked down long ago, but I'll address it as necessary, since I did ask that he present his "issues" on Talk. Meantime, if he has again put a "tag" on this article, it will be taken off. And I am doing my best to undo whatever damage he has done to the article itself, with his apparently half-cocked "knowledge" about No Gun Ri. I would ask simply, WeldNeck, that we discuss your "issues" before you screw up the article any further. As I said, I'll address the "points" above anon. Thanks. Charles J. Hanley 20:30, 8 August 2013 (UTC). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

I think you need to review WP:OWN and WP:COI before continuing. I would appreciate you explaining why the issues I brought up are "tired stuff dealt with long ago" and I would appreciate it even more if you were to do so in a less confrontational tone. Thanks. WeldNeck (talk) 20:47, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Apologies for any confrontational nature to the tone, but I would ask you to understand that you are dealing with people (myself and fellow journalists) steeped in the facts of No Gun Ri who for years have had to deal with people who are not steeped in those facts, who have not spent years studying the documents, interviewing the principals, visiting the sites, people who almost invariabbly have a bias or POV about the U.S. military, about Korean or Asian or non-American people, about war crimes or whatever. Now, and I cannot deal with these problems at any length until later, to give you an example of the problems of poorly informed people inserting material into an article, I find that WeldNeck has inserted this: "One 7th Cav commander was killed and seven US soldiers were wounded in in another incident where Chinese and North Koreans infiltrators disguised as refugees attacked them with grenades." But the Chinese did not intervene in the Korean War until months after No Gun Ri. What on earth is this doing in an article about a refugee killing months earlier? Please, whoever you are, WeldNeck, cease and desist with this uninformed material. If you want, raise it in Talk. Don't create this mess in the article that then has to be undone. There may be Wikipedia articles that are playthings, but things like No Gun Ri should be taken more seriously. Charles J. Hanley 21:07, 8 August 2013 (UTC). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

I am not really concerned what your credentials are, it adds nothing to this debate and due to your WP:COI only makes matters worse. The material I added is not "uniformed", its cited to a reliable source. You might have a point about the Chinese infiltrators material (it was added to provide additional contextual material on refugee infiltration tactics) but what was you reason for removing the attack on the 3-8th which took place days before? WeldNeck (talk) 21:21, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Let's try to take this point by point. But first, your reference to "the late" Bateman baffles me. Do you know something we don't know? Now, to your points:

• A page-by-page analysis of the Bateman book found more than 100 appalling omissions, fabrications, distortions, self-contradictions, misreadings of military documents, and other serious errors and untruths. Remember, this is a former 7th Cavalry officer seeking to deflect negative attention from a major event in the background of what he calls “my regiment.” It’s a polemic, not history. Bateman did not go to Korea, did not interview the most reliable witnesses, the Korean survivors, interviewed scarcely any ex-soldier witnesses, and covered up key information, including the orders flying around the warfront at the time to shoot civilians, and the fact that the 7th Cav log of July 1950, which would have held communications relating to No Gun Ri, is missing from the National Archives. Perhaps most egregiously among a mountain of egregious deceits, he claims in his book that a particular regimental logistics document “proves” the presence of guerrillas among the NGR refugees, when that document shows no relationship whatever to No Gun Ri and does nothing of the sort – which is why he did not share this hijacked “evidence” with his readers. Bateman is simply a grossly unreliable source for anything. For further, view the C-SPAN video “What Really Happened at No Gun Ri?” among the references in this article, or send me an email at cjhanley@att.net for the full analysis of Bateman’s shameful book.
• There was no “documented infiltration” among the refugees to be found in the records of front-line units in the time leading up to No Gun Ri. The infiltration scenario is dealt with more than adequately in the article, where it’s noted U.S. units were being attacked from the rear, General Gay said he believed half the people on the roads were infiltrators, but a 24-hour-long search turned up no infiltrators.. For more, see the infiltration discussion under “The Naktong River Bridges” in Talk. As for your inserted infiltration event, it has been explained that this occurred months after No Gun Ri and is extraneous to the discussion.
• As for the interviews with 7th Cavalry veterans, please be aware that the AP team, by 2001, had interviewed 26 ex-GI witnesses (men who were there; your suggestion that only a couple of men were there is off base, to say the least), and three dozen Korean witnesses. The Pentagon’s investigators found at least nine additional GI witnesses. Nobody was misquoted by AP at any time. Patterson is on videotape discussing the mass killing of refugees. (He seems to have been induced later by others to claim falsely that he had been misquoted.) Carroll is quoted precisely in the original journalism as saying he left the scene early on and did not witness a massacre, not that “no massacre occurred,” as you suggest.
• You suggest that “none of the eyewitness accounts from the US Army's report are included in the article.” On the contrary, testimony to the Army is included. There are at least five passages in the article that are drawn from Army interrogations, including one veteran’s statement, similar to statements by others, that at the time "The word I heard was 'Kill everybody from 6 to 60.'" Such statements were not found in the Army’s report, but via lengthy Freedom of Information Act work that obtained the transcripts. Their absence from the Army report is another powerful indication of how the Army worked to quash testimony and documents.
• As for the section on the alleged “fakery” of the aerial photos: Please reread it. The No Gun Ri frames were spliced into the film roll, the South Korean aerial reconnaissance specialists themselves said they believed the photos had been doctored, and the anonymous U.S. photo analyst ended his frustrating work on the project by insisting on a certification process in the future to guarantee the integrity of any photos his agency would analyze. Obviously, suspicions about the photos belong in the article.
• There’s no “spinning” involved with the 14 orders or authorizations. A division commander’s call to a subordinate unit to consider refugees “fair game” is certainly an authorization to indiscriminately kill civilians. The Army’s historical researchers themselves would dismiss any effort to minimize the importance of these documents, since it was they who found them in the archives and marked the salient passages with asterisks, arrows, underlines and other indicators of significance. It was the Army lawyers who then deep-sixed the documents when issuing the final sanitized report. Please review all of these documents at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:No_Gun_Ri_Massacre. And, again, I recommend your reviewing the Talk discussions of many of these points.
• On your final point: The article cites the Army report 12 times, including in the intro, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission three times.

Finally, regarding your later post and its question, “What was you reason for removing the attack on the 3-8th which took place days before?”: I’m not familiar with what was ever removed about attacks on the 8th Cavalry. What I do know is the 8th Cav was under attack at Yongdong by the NKPA’s 3rd Division. Those particulars (beyond the fact the 1st Cav Division was pulling back) are not relevant to No Gun Ri. I also know that Bateman writes that an 8th Cav unit was attacked by “guerillas” (sic). But this is one of many examples of Bateman making stuff up, out of whole cloth. There’s nothing whatsoever in the documents referring to anything but regular NKPA units. But Bateman wanted to establish the presence of guerrillas in the area, so he first – with no basis – says it was “likely” guerrillas attacked these Americans; then refers later to the “apparent” guerrillas; and finally refers to them as “the’’ guerrillas, i.e., as an established “fact.” This is how Bateman did his shameful work. I urge you to email me (cjhanley@att.net) to obtain the Bateman analysis.

Not having time at the moment, I’ll have to look later at correcting errors and problems recently inserted in the article. Somewhere, for instance, didn’t WeldNeck object that Tom Hacha, a 1st Battalion eyewitness who was dug in across from the NGR tunnels, shouldn’t be quoted because he “was not a participant”? The illogic of this totally befuddles me. A non-shooter eyewitness is among the most credible American witnesses.

WeldNeck says he's not interested in my credentials. I think the vast majority of the Wikipedia community would find that astounding, since the goal of WP is to establish an authoritative encyclopedia of record, relying on the most knowledgable contributors. My retirement from news reporting enabled me to devote time to helping restore truthfulness and authority to this article. I'll continue to do so. Charles J. Hanley 12:19, 9 August 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley

My responses.

• I don't know why I implied that Bateman had passed, chalk it up to a brain fart.
• Your assessment of Bateman's book is subjective and biased (considering he spent an entire chapter shredding the AP's story) and cannot be referenced to any reliable source. As has been explained to me, those are the rules here and we have to live by them.
• There are many anecdotal and documented reports of infiltration both before and after this event. Days before the incident at No Gun Ri, a company from the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment was attacked by North Korean irregulars who infiltrated a crowd of refugees west of Yongdong ... this took place before No Gun Ri and I found it in one of the sources you cited.
• You statement that "Nobody was misquoted by AP at any time" is repudiated by the fact that several of the individuals you quoted are on record stating that you misquoted them. Herman Patterson is on record saying you misquoted him. Harold Steward is on record saying you misquoted him. George Preece is on record stating you misquoted him. It is what it is.
• Eyewitnesses from the US army report that do not support your more sensationalized version of events are not included in this article.
• There is a lengthy framed clip from the Korean report but not one from the US report. This unbalances the article.
• Suspicions about the photos do belong in the article, but in proportion to their weight. I suspect the Koreans reacted the way they did to the recon photos because it undermined much of the civilian recollections.
• There's more behind Gay's order than you are admitting. Discretion was advised, but given the infiltration issue attacks from refugees were a real problem.
• the attacks on the 3/8th are relevant because a reliable source has cited them as being relevant and they are a documented example of Nork infiltration units using civilian cover BEFORE the events at No Gun Ri. The source was Kuehl not Bateman on this.

You really are coming across as unreasonable. You dont own this article and if you continue to behave like this I will get an administrator involved. WeldNeck (talk) 14:01, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I'll address specifics above in due course. I am not in a good position to ping-pong on this throughout the day. But I will make one observation: The Korean survivors would point out that it's extremely difficult to "sensationalize" the coldblooded killing of large numbers of innocent women, children and old men. If anything, many people have pointed out, the media reporting and this Wikipedia article have been understated on No Gun Ri. Charles J. Hanley 14:33, 9 August 2013 (UTC). Cjhanley

The other POV

The reason I initially put the NPOV tag in the article (and which I will do again) is because a significant POV is missing from the article. We have Hanley and AP's POV firmly established and it is the POV that pervades the entire article: This was an intentional, deliberate and most importantly "coldblooded killing" of innocent civilians with no justification.

The other POV, shared by a number of historians and writers is best summed up by an excerpt in Armchair General from LtCol Robert Bateman:

What took place at No Gun Ri was definitely not the under-orders, cold-blooded “execution” of up to 400 unarmed Korean civilians as claimed in the AP report. It certainly was no Korean War version of Vietnam’s My Lai massacre. Instead, the few minutes of undisciplined, panicked smallarms fire that killed or wounded up to 35 civilians was the nearly predictable result of hastily throwing mostly inexperienced, poorly led and inadequately trained U.S. troops into a confused, chaotic situation for which they were completely unprepared.

Its the exclusion of this POV that warrants the tag. WeldNeck (talk) 15:44, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Bateman is not a good source, and should be used with extreme caution (and possibly not at all, I am unsure) - he having a strong close connection to the subject and due to a distinct lack of journalistic skill and outright fabrication. --Errant ^(chat!) 15:47, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Thats a pretty bold statement. Do you have something to back that? What is Bateman alleged to have fabricated? Can we say the same about Hanley and the AP as they sat on news that their star witness was a fraud until after the Pulitzer Committee made its award? WeldNeck (talk) 16:25, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

We'll again address Bateman's gross unreliability. But first of all, WeldNeck, your own bold statement above is categorically false. You continue to be duped by Bateman's made-up drivel, rather than any independent (at least non-7th Cavalry) sources, which would inform you that Daily (hardly a "star witness," since he was quoted only briefly in the 56th paragraph long after other GI witnesses were quoted in the original journalism; please do your homework on such things) was determined by the AP to have only secondhand information weeks after the Pulitzers were announced. In a story with some 60 eyewitnesses, Daily was barely a minor sideshow and has been irrelevant to No Gun Ri for years. That's what's not being grasped here: The article is about the No Gun Ri Massacre, not about the AP, or any of the dozen or more journalists who worked on No Gun Ri, or extraneous matters like Daily, or anything other than what is known and not known about No Gun Ri here in 2013.

As for Bateman, if you're interested in learning about his fabrications and distortions, I would have expected you to accept my invitation to review the lengthy analysis exposing it all page by page. Send me your email address, read the damning analysis, and ask any questions or raise any objections you like. If you choose not to, you're only suggesting that you're operating with a closed mind. Meanwhile, view the C-SPAN video, as I previously advised. There you'll find the respected moderator, John Callaway, of the Pritzer Military Library, taking the unprecedented step of berating an author, Bateman, for producing such an execrable piece of work. From the transcript: CALLAWAY, ``Why do the project if you can't do it right? ...You talk about lack of resources. Once you do that -- say I want to write a book about what's really going on inside Russia today, but I don't have the money to go to Russia. Wouldn't a good editor or publisher say to me, Mr. Callaway perhaps you shouldn't do that book? ... Why would you do a critical book on this subject if you didn't have the resources to go into the field to do that half of the story (the Korean half)? ... Whose account should we pay more attention to, the person who has the resources to go to South Korea and conduct the interviews, or the person who doesn't go to South Korea?"

I gave you here in Talk the example of Bateman's hijacking an irrelevant document, claiming it said something it didn't say, hiding it from his readers, and then having the gall to point to it as his central finding. How is that critique a show of "bias" on my part? I'll send you the document. Or would you rather to continue to blindly accept Bateman as a reliable source?

Meantime, I was ready to post in Talk saying that your pointing out the NYTimes report on infiltration (via Kuehl) is a helpful addition. But now I see there are other changes -- I hope not too many -- that are damaging to the article, such as what I believe is your removal of the 1950 North Korean journalistic report on the massacre. I don't understand: Isn't it clear who was lying and covering up No Gun Ri, and which sources actually had it right, to be begrudgingly acknowledged by the U.S. Army a half-century later? The same thing happened with My Lai in Vietnam (Please, please, read the Talk discussions on such matters; we're going over old ground here.) I believe you also removed eyewitness Tom Hacha. This sort of illogical thing totally baffles me. It'll be dealt with.

Finally, there are not "two sides" or "another POV" on No Gun Ri. There is simply the historical event, affirmed and accepted by two sovereign governments, with elaboration from eyewitnesses and documents, with gaps in our knowledge (such as the precise death toll, and the missing 7th Cav log that would have held any orders relating to NGR), and with repercussions in contemporary Korea. We scoured Bateman's book for anything useful and came up with less than zero. Any legitimate info advancing Wikipedia's knowledge of NGR is obviously welcome. Attacks on contributors' integrity are not.

Meantime, please come ahead with your email address, so you'll better understand Bateman's machinations. Charles J. Hanley 12:48, 10 August 2013 (UTC). Charles J. Hanley — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

I would like to add my two cents to this discussion, having just discovered the back-and-forth between WeldNeck and Charles Hanley. It seems that certain motivations (biases?) are clouding some salient points: Isn’t this WP article entitled the “No Gun Ri Massacre”? Shouldn’t the facts drive the narrative? Are not those in the media -- as well as official sources within the two governments -- the best providers of the truth, vis-à-vis others who attempt to minimize this historic war crime? It would seem that the meticulous research undertaken by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press journalists and others (I find CBS, BBC, German television, Korean MBC, Sahr Conway-Lanz, et al. in the references) has time and again withstood the scrutiny of naysayers, regardless of their motivations. Don't WP readers come to this article to learn about the massacre, not about one person’s petty battle a decade ago with the AP? Reader0234 (talk) 14:32, 12 August 2013 (UTC)(Reader0234)

Reader. all relevant material and any notable POV's should be included in the article. Hanley's insistence on the exclusion of Bateman and anyone else whose perspective on the nature of the events differs from his is intolerable and unjustifiable. No one, especially me is arguing that (CBS, BBC, German television, Korean MBC, Sahr Conway-Lanz, etcetera) should be excluded, only that other notable voice be included. WeldNeck (talk) 18:15, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

WeldNeck: "notable voice" has a nice ring to it. But, it seems to ring hollow when referring to Robert Bateman and his speculations on the massacre. From what I read above, Bateman is a highly untrustworthy source. His key finding hinges on a made-up No Gun Ri link to an unrelated document, and you think he's reliable? He didn't even interview the survivors or go to Korea, and you think that's fine? And, don't forget, he got censured on national television for shoddy work. I think all this adds up to one "hugely problematic" voice, not a "notable" one.

He's obviously a biased 7th Cavalry guy trying to downplay what the 7th Cavalry did in Korea. And I see he is included in the article, questioning the death toll -- in the face of all kinds of evidence and an official finding that it was substantial. Anybody can question anything they like about anything, but that doesn't make them a reliable Wikipedia source.Reader0234 —Preceding undated comment added 16:01, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

BAteman has a great deal of other material from witness accounts (that not surprisingly differ dramatically form the AP account) to documentation. None of this is mentioned in the article. WeldNeck (talk) 12:52, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

What I'd suggest with Bateman is that we let other sources identify if any of the information is useable. So if e.g. other books draw on Bateman (although I don't believe any do) or other sources identify material as accurate. This is a fairly typical approach for biased sources. --Errant ^(chat!) 13:16, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Do we also use this approach with Hanley and the AP? WeldNeck (talk) 14:37, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

No, because they are an independent source. --Errant ^(chat!) 14:48, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

What makes Bateman a non independent source, hsi affiliation with the US Army? WeldNeck (talk) 15:16, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Well... yes. He's an active-duty Army officer and the Army was the perpetrator in this case. More than that, he's a longtime 7th Cavalry booster (a former 7th Cav officer), and it was specifically the 7th Cav that did the killing. In 2000 he openly declared his intent to "get" the AP, the first media organization to pin No Gun Ri on what he refers to as "my regiment." This bias ought to be enough to disqualify him prima facie. But meantime the felonies he has committed against the truth have been pointed out to you here in Talk, and you've chosen to ignore them. That bespeaks a closed mind, and an unhelpful contributor. Charles J. Hanley 16:49, 14 August 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

You opinion is not enough, sorry, but thats the way things appear to be run around here. I tell you what, I will take this to the reliable source forum and see what a few outside opinons say. WeldNeck (talk) 18:01, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Speaking as a PHD candidate researching the NGR Incident and other similar episodes (committed by ROK or KPA forces), who has read English and Korean documents on this, and visited and spoken to survivors and their families, I can shed some light on this. Contrary to WeldNeck's observations that critcisms of Bateman are based solely on Hanley's personal animosity, there are a number of obvious flaws in the book which render it suspicious. Furthermore, the Bateman/Hanley debate is well known to scholars of Korean War massacres, and Bateman's book is seldom used for a number of reasons, a few of which are as follows:

1. He did not visit or contact any of the victims from the massacre, nor does he consult any Korean government sources. Basic standards of objectivity suggests that this is a rather dubious approach to scholarship. Most scholars who cannot access a foreign language at least have the foresight to use an Research Assistant. In the debate that Hanley describes, Bateman excuses this on the grounds that he has a family, not a lot of money, etc. As a grad-student who is in a similar situation, I can tell you that this excuse would not be accepted by my PHD defence committee.

2. He claims that it is certain that guerrillas were among the refugees. This is a minority viewpoint within the veterans' testimony (in the US ARMY NGR report for example), and non-existent in the victims' version. While it is certainly plausible that fear of guerrilla infiltration was a major motivating factor in the massacre (as it is in the case of most civilian killings), the evidence for the actual existence of guerrillas is weak.

3. He claims without any evidence that the survivors all suffer from group think. Again, since he did not interview any of them, one is left to wonder how he arrived at this judgment.

4. He ignores (or didn't bother to do enough research) evidence of a number of memos, documents, and vet testimonials suggesting that a tacit, if not official, policy was in place by the last week of July to shoot refugees deemed suspicious. Most glaring is the absence of the "Muccio letter" (uncovered by Sahr Conway-Lanz). I would encourage readers to read Sarh-Conway Lanz's treatment of this issue published in the Journal of Diplomatic History. After reading this piece, it is difficult to take Bateman's work seriously. The reviews that WeldNeck refers to were all published prior to Lanz's work. He also does not mention that the 7th Cavalry journal was missing from the US archives, yet he claims that there is no evidence that kill orders existed. This is either remarkably careless scholarship or a deliberate distortion, given that other journals from similar locales were uncovered by the AP team (and verified by countless other independent scholars) indicating an understood policy to fire on refugees.

5. His low and inconsistent estimate of those killed (35 at times, 18-70 at others) does not appear to be based on any actual findings. While it is inevitable there is debate and ambiguity concerning the actual number of those killed, Bateman in his debate with Hanley comments that he arrived at this number through a "Ballpark" estimation. This is rather careless. In 2005, the "No Gun Ri Incident Review Report" was commissioned and determined the total number of victims to be 218 (150 killed, 13 missing, 55 disabled). This number was arrived at by searching censuses, family registers, visiting graves of families, victim testimonials, and a detailed, multi-step verification process. It has also uncovered the specific identity of many of those who died, and they have been officially registered with the South Korean government. While no methodology is perfect, this is clearly more useful than "ballpark" estimate. One of the above flaws alone ought to render any work of research seriously compromised. When taken as a whole, however, it is impossible for an impartial observer to claim that Bateman's work constitutes a legitimate work of scholarship, suitable as resource for an institution as integral to public understanding as Wikipedia.

One of the above flaws alone ought to render any work of research seriously compromised. When taken as a whole, however, it is impossible for an impartial observer to claim that Bateman's work constitutes a legitimate work of scholarship, suitable as resource for an institution as integral to public understanding as Wikipedia. Finally as Weldneck appears to be raising the need for an alternative point of view defense, it should be noted that the article cites the US Army report multiple times and provides a link to it. In this report, one can find a flawed (in my view), but similar similar sentiment (that the killings were accidental, "tragic" etc). As it is mentioned not only in the notes, but also the text, it is a little confusing to read Weldneck's complaints that alternative viewpoints are not accounted for. The predominant issue with Bateman is unfortunately one of reliability, not interpretation.

BW5530 (talk) 14:31, 26 August 2013 (UTC)BW5530

Thanks for the review of Bateman, that is quite useful.--Kmhkmh (talk) 03:50, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

As soon as you are published your opinion might become notable enough to include in the article. WeldNeck (talk) 13:53, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

For some reason I get the sense that when I do publish you won't be bothered to read it. In the same way that you likely have not bothered to actually read Bateman's account (since you claim below to not actually have a copy). In the same way that Bateman did not bother to read or consult any Korean sources (or a number of US ones for that matter). Seems to be a pattern here, no?

BW5530 — Preceding unsigned comment added by BW5530 (talk • contribs) 14:11, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

The aerial photo taken 11 days after No Gun Ri shows no indication of bodies, or of recent burial. This cannot be squared with the claim that hundreds were killed in the incident. The people who testified in 2005 were children at the time. They were not doing body counts. A lot of bad stuff happened to refugees during the war. Over the course of 55 years, memory can conflate incidents that occurred separately. The refugees at No Gun Ri charged toward a U.S. military position. So even with U.S. guns pointed at them, they were more afraid of the North Koreans behind them. A lovely bunch of coconuts (talk) 21:38, 22 October 2013 (UTC) User:Kauffner sockpuppet

I'm sorry, lovely bunch, but you don't know whereof you speak. Perhaps journalists who spent months and, eventually, years reporting professionally on the events can straighten you out: No one "charged" the U.S. Army. (Where did you get that one from?) The refugees were sitting on the railroad tracks when they were attacked from the air, and then by mortar or artillery fire. They weren't fleeing the North Koreans; they were trying to stay in their nearby village when they were forced out by U.S. troops, who then set the village ablaze. The many, many who testified (not in "2005" -- where'd that come from? -- but in 1960, the 1980s, the 1990s and, finally, in the 1999-2000 Korean investigation, with consistent accounts throughout) included people who were young adults in 1950, such as the young mother who watched her two small children die, the 17-year-old who lost most of his family, the ex-policeman who collected survivors' stories from the earliest years. This notion of conflated stories is an obnoxious invention we've heard before from people who, in their ignorance or inhumanity, suppose that people who watched their mothers, their children or other loved ones die before their eyes would forget where it happened -- when it happened under a concrete railroad bridge they saw down the road every day of their lives, and they all held annual memorial services in the village every year of their lives. This business of the aerial photos -- the spliced, questionable film -- has gotten mighty tiresome. The Army contends the photos cast doubt on hundreds of casualties; the Koreans cast doubt on the photos and say, anyway, remaining bodies were out of sight under the bridge (where ex-GIs also say they were). That's all in the article. Survivors estimate 400 dead; Command Sergeant-Major Garza saw 200-300 bodies in one tunnel, and most may have been dead; the Korean commission finally certified 163 dead and missing, and 55 wounded, some who died, and said "many" more names were not reported.

Much of the above may not suit your views, or what you'd like to believe. But those are the facts, professionally delivered. And my impression was that facts are what Wikipedia's all about. Charles J. Hanley 22:57, 22 October 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

• I count three Korean witnesses in the original AP story: Chun Choon-ja (12), Park Hee-sook (16), and Chung Koo-ho (61-49=12). None of them said anything nearly as dramatic as what is being asserted above. I'm sure there were more who testified, but what kind of journalist holds back his best material? I don't see Garza in the AP report, the army report, or even the news archives. He's mentioned in exactly one place on Google Books (Truth and Reconciliation in South Korea), and the actual reference isn't even online. So I guess he's another secret source, or at least an extremely obscure one. To put this kind of material in the article goes against WP:DUE.
• No, the much quoted figure of 400 dead is not a "survivors' estimate," at least not in the sense that some survivors' group came up with this number. It comes from a 1950 news report that appeared in a North Korean newspaper. This information is actually in the article already. But why should a journalist who spend years on this story bother to read it? A lovely bunch of coconuts (talk) 02:29, 23 October 2013 (UTC) User:Kauffner sock

Good point Mr Hanley, the idea that eyewitness memories could become confused after 50 years is impossible:

When confronted with the fact that Daily could not have been at No Gun Ri, one of the AP’s other notable witnesses, Eugene Hesselman, repeated over and over again, “I know that Daily was there. I know that. I know that.”

As for the aerial imagery, a picture's worth 1000 words, unless it doesnt tell us what we want it to, then its fake. WeldNeck (talk) 02:18, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Warfront?

I quote from the second paragraph in the article "The AP also uncovered warfront orders to fire on refugees..." But I do not know what a "warfront" is. Not a word, as far as I can tell. I find it odd enough that I cannot tell for sure what exactly it is supposed to mean, or I'd clean it up to be more sensible and readable. Shoobe01 (talk) 02:30, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Cleaning up

More than a dozen changes to this article made Aug. 8-9 by a single editor introduced numerous errors, pieces of misinformation and disinformation, deletions of important elements and other problems. One of his edits was potentially helpful, or at least harmless:

• That potentially helpful edit, under "Background," nonetheless introduced a nonsentence, which will be easily fixed. Also, his sourcing is indirect and would be improved with a cite to the direct source, a New York Times article about a reported incident of infiltration in July 1950 (once I can review the Times article). This incident, by the way, is not reported as such in the Army unit's own documents. WeldNeck's change also entailed the unjustified removal of a brief paragraph citing an important point: The day Gen. Gay said he believed half the refugees were infiltrators was the day his division began killing the refugees at No Gun Ri.
• Under "Events of 25-29 July 1950," two important quotations from ex-soldier eyewitnesses were deleted, inexplicably. In one, the ex-GI offered a rationale for the shootings ("It was believed there was enemy among these people"), and in the other an onlooker from an adjacent Army unit described the scene. WeldNeck protested that the second man was not involved and therefore shouldn't be quoted. That makes no sense. A nonshooter eyewitness is more credible than one who was "involved."

They were removed because at least one of them later said you quoted him out of context. Cant remember why I removed the other one, but will look into it. WeldNeck (talk) 13:53, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

• Under "Casualties," the contemporary North Korean newspaper report of the massacre was removed. "Are we really quoting a North Korean journalist?" WeldNeck asks. This betrays a narrow grasp of the realities of No Gun Ri: Events have proven that this 1950 North Korean report was essentially truthful, a very early firsthand account (while the U.S. Army was ignoring and rejecting the No Gun Ri allegations for decades, and finally begrudgingly dealing with it in a report that suppressed critical documents and testimony).

Nork sources are all highly suspect and should not be used. WeldNeck (talk) 13:53, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

• Under "Associated Press story," WeldNeck introduced an outright falsehood regarding the timing of AP's knowledge of Daily's (misspelled by WeldNeck) deception. He cites a demonstrably biased, untruthful source. He also added wasted wordage (Silver Star etc.) that is immaterial to the No Gun Ri Massacre, the article's subject. In fact, Daily, the man who turned out to have only secondhand information, has been irrelevant to No Gun Ri for 13 years. Back then he was an insignificant sideshow seized on by No Gun Ri deniers as a flimsy smokescreen; today he's even less, and by rights doesn't even belong in the article. His brief mention serves only to educate misled readers to that fact.

When did Bateman make you aware of the issues with Daily? Bateman reproduced the emails he sent to your team. WeldNeck (talk) 13:53, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

• WeldNeck so altered the "Aerial imagery, victims' remains" section that it will require more time to analyze what's right and wrong. Off the bat, one can see errors introduced: It was the U.S. analyst, not the South Koreans, who questioned the Army's handling of the aerial imagery and called for such imagery in the future to undergo a process to certify its authenticity. That U.S. analyst did not say, as WeldNeck would have it, that the 2-7's fighting holes were intact; rather, he said "the majority" were intact, indicating some had been filled in (as graves, said survivors). The analyst also did not say, as WeldNeck would have it, that there were no indications of mass graves at No Gun Ri; that "conclusion" appears only in the Army's rendering of what the analyst found, and in that case the analyst felt compelled to add his own disclaimer in a footnote, explaining the difficulties of spotting a mass grave in such a situation. His own internal report contains no such conclusion.

All will be dealt with in due course. 13:33, 17 August 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk)

All in due course indeed. I have a copy of Bateman's book on order and will fill out additional details from his interviews and documentation. WeldNeck (talk) 13:53, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Reverting

Umm, I've no idea why I reverted all those changes last night :( I was on my phone and reading through what had been changed, but it was late so I left it till today. I guess I must have mashed a button!! --Errant ^(chat!) 07:44, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

No problem. WeldNeck (talk) 13:50, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Bateman's 'technique'

Since a contributor resurrected the argument that Robert Bateman is a “reliable” source on the subject of No Gun Ri, a simple example of the way Bateman worked should make clear once and for all that none of it can be trusted. (BW5530, above, provides a more comprehensive demolition of that work.) What follows is an important example, but only one of dozens from Bateman’s book, of the distortions, misrepresentations, misreadings of military documents and (as in this case) outright fictions that he fashioned on the way to propounding baseless “theories” about the massacre. Here, from page 120 of his book, is how he purported to show there were enemy infiltrators among the refugees slain at No Gun Ri:

``There were guns, and these guns were collected, turned in to the company supply sergeant, and then passed through him to the battalion supply sergeant, finally working their way up to regiment. Soldiers from one of the nearby platoons collected a Japanese rifle and the Russian submachine gun during a subsequent sweep through the refugees and sent the weapons up through the supply channels, thereby giving some of the only documentary evidence that South Korean communist guerillas were among the South Korean refugees."

The footnote for the above paragraph cites ``S-4 (supply) Journal, 7th Cavalry Regiment, entry for July 28, 1950." But Bateman didn’t replicate the document for readers, or even quote from it, and he twice refused to share the “source document” when asked for it by the AP journalists who first confirmed the killings. The AP team subsequently obtained that S-4 log on their own. It’s [| here]. Anyone reviewing it with an honest, logical mind will instantly see the flimflam.

The 28 July 1950 entry – in the last sentence of the second paragraph – reads, with no surrounding context: ``Captured enemy equipment -- 1 Jap rifle; 1 Russian sub-machine 7.62mm." There's nothing saying who found these weapons, where, when or how. There's nothing at all to link them to the refugees or to guerrillas or to July 26 or to the No Gun Ri area or to the 2nd Battalion.

What ``nearby platoon"? What ``company"? What ``subsequent sweep"? This is all fiction. An irrelevant document was hijacked, and random weapons were arbitrarily attributed to imagined “guerrillas" at No Gun Ri, in apparent desperation to produce a central “finding” for a worthless book. There are many, many possible explanations for two weapons turning up in the Korean war zone in the last week of July 1950. One of them: The 7th Cavalry war diary shows ``two prisoners" captured 3 miles southeast of No Gun Ri, in another valley, on July 27. (In a final affront to the truth, Bateman’s use of ``some" implies there is other documentary ``evidence," but he offers none, because there is none.)

Does anyone want to defend this kind of claptrap as “reliable”? This example is blatant and easily comprehended. Many others are just as outrageous. Charles J. Hanley 22:46, 4 September 2013 (UTC). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

We have gone over this several times. While you apparently have criticism of Bateman, they are not shared by those reliable sources who reviewed his book. Also, your criticism of his methodologies is the pot calling the kettle black. WeldNeck (talk) 13:44, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

And what of the example above, a stunningly flagrant deceit at the core of his book? We’ve tried to engage you on a rational basis with such specifics, there for you to study and comment on. Instead you fall back on “so’s your mother” retorts, sorely testing WP’s assumption of good faith. Charles J. Hanley 18:56, 6 September 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

WeldNeck, I find it outrageous that, in the face of a litany of evidence cutting it down, you continue to defend the value of Robert Bateman’s opinions. (I don’t call it “scholarship” because it isn’t.) No less a military mind than George Washington once said, “It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.” I wholeheartedly concur. Reader0234 (talk) 20:17, 6 September 2013 (UTC) Reader0234 (talk • contribs)

Aerial imagery; errors

Weldneck has now restored his earlier error-filled paragraphs on aerial imagery, completely ignoring the errors as pointed out above, under "Cleaning up." His "explanation" is that "the images are what they are." What they are, of course, are 1) at best inconclusive, according to the analyst himself, and 2) most likely fraudulent. The section as it stood already noted that the U.S. Army contended the images did not show mass graves (although the analyst himself said he could not judge), that witnesses said bodies were stacked out of sight under the bridge, and that South Korean investigators questioned the authenticity of the photos and the Pentagon analyst questioned the integrity of the chain-of-custody process involving the film. That's all that's needed. Now we have bloated sentences (Bosnia?) filled with errors.

This is getting tiresome and ridiculous. Weldneck: You seem uninterested in rational discussion and contributing in good faith, and interested only in finding some way to sugarcoat what happened at No Gun Ri. The section will be purged, again, of its errors. Charles J. Hanley 18:12, 7 October 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

You accuse me of being uninterested in having a rational discussion? Are you really going off the rails and claiming that the Aerial footage was faked? I know it blows a major hole in the narrative that hundreds of civilians were killed, but get a grip man! There is no way 100's of dead bodies could be stacked under a railway bridge that small, no way. And have you ever dug a DFP by hand like the kind used by the 2/7 at No Gun Ri? Trust me, they arent roomy, there's barely enough room in them for one man. The idea that hundreds of civilians were buried

A couple of relevant clips from the report:

An aerial reconnaissance photograph of the No Gun Ri area taken on August 6, 1950, shows no indication of human remains or mass graves in the vicinity of the No Gun Ri double railroad overpass.

10. - No corpse or other objects on the railroad -- NIMA IA found no indications of human remains on the imagery. Of particular interest was the area of the railroad bridge; the obliquity of frames 32, 33, and 35 allowed the IA to look approximately 3 meters into the openings of the bridge arches on the upstream side and the area was found to be clear of debris or human remains (Figure 8).

Thats why the aerial footage is so devastating to your hyperbolic claims and you need to do everything in your power to minimize them. Every uninvolved editor, and granted that has been few, has been clear that Bateman's work is a reliable source for the purpose of this discussion. WeldNeck (talk) 20:45, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Additional issues with the AP’s story

According to the AP[1]:

But old soldiers in their late 60s or 70s identified the No Gun Ri bridge from photographs, remembered the approximate dates, and corroborated the core of the Koreans' account: that American troops kept the refugees pinned under the bridge in late July 1950, and killed almost all of them. "It was just wholesale slaughter," Patterson told the AP in an interview at his Greer, S.C., home.

But then according to the US Army’s report:

Other veterans also present in the vicinity of No Gun Ri say they were misquoted in the original AP account. Mr. Herman Patterson was quoted in the AP report as saying that: "It was just a wholesale slaughter." In his statement to the U.S. Team, he said the AP misquoted him and that this quotation referred to his unit at the Naktong when they were overrun.35 He said he told the AP (September 29, 1999) that: "It was a damn near massacre of us." Mr. James Kerns is quoted as saying that "he, Preece and another GI found at least seven dead North Korean soldiers in the underpasses, wearing uniforms under peasant white." In his statement to the U.S. Team, Mr. Kerns said he never said such a thing.36 He told the U.S. Review Team that he saw between four and nine bodies laying down in the culverts but was not sure if they were dead.37 Mr. Kerns said he only told the AP that he saw some grenades and a burp gun in the tunnel. The AP article stated "[that] others recalled only heavy barrages of American firepower, not hostile fire." This comment was followed by a quotation from Mr. Louis Allen, who said, "I don't remember shooting coming out." The implication here is that veterans remembered Americans firing into the (No Gun Ri) tunnel but not refugees firing from the tunnel. However, when the U.S. Review Team interviewed Mr. Allen, he stated that he was on re-enlistment leave when the 7th Cavalry Regiment deployed to Korea and that he did not link up with his unit, F Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, until August 1950 in the vicinity of Taegu.38

If the AP’s representative now commenting on this article is going to continue making such a fuss over the inclusion of LtCol Robert Bateman’s scholarship on this subject, is the AP fair game as well? WeldNeck (talk) 21:23, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

No time to deal with this now. It will be dealt with later. Meantime, Weldneck, you are again urged to read in on past Talk entries. For example, the "No deaths?" section in Archive 2, which details at length the overwhelming evidence of a large number of dead at No Gun Ri. Put that up against the highly questionable -- and highly questioned -- half-century-old aerial photo and ponder how all those people and documents from all sides could be wrong. High casualties are not someone's theory or speculation; it's well established. The South Korean government has certified 163 dead and missing and 55 wounded, some of whom died of their wounds, and said "many" more names were not reported. The aerial imagery was given its due in the article. Your error-filled paragraphs will have to be fixed. Charles J. Hanley 22:55, 7 October 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

WeldNeck, I remain frustrated by your continuing capricious editing of the No Gun Ri Massacre article. As you should know, one of the rules for WP contributors is to “assume good faith.” So, why is it that when erroneous information which you have posted is pointed out and excised, you simply ignore the issue and stick it back in the article? Also, something may have been lost on you during this unending back-and-forth: The article is about the No Gun Ri Massacre, not about the Associated Press and irrelevant decade-old arguments. The article makes clear the AP first confirmed the killings, but they were later reconfirmed by other news organizations and by two government investigations. Your obsessions have no place in a good WP article. Reader0234 (talk) 17:37, 9 October 2013 (UTC) Reader0234 (talk • contribs)

The information I put in is all from reliable second hand sources. Take it up with the brass if you dont like it. WeldNeck (talk) 18:02, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

Battle of Taejon

If you read the second paragraph of the Muccio letter to Rusk, Muccio specifically mentions the fate of the 24th ID at Taejon as a reason for the proposed refugee policy. Given the amount of information currently in the article not specifically about the incident, this inclusion doesn't seem out of the ordinary and provides much needed context (sorely missing) for the background section. Taejon took place only a few days before No Gun Ri.

I also added two sentences for the "controversial" adjective in the second paragraph. WeldNeck (talk) 13:52, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Weldneck, you are simply wildly throwing untruths into this article because they suit your ideological -- to give it a kind word -- point of view, and your effort to minimize what happened at No Gun Ri. One hardly knows where to begin (loads of errors on aerial imagery, a totally wrong statement on the shoot-civilians orders, Internet nonsense defaming AP journalists, removing a leading Korea scholar because he doesn't suit your chauvinism, God knows what else. Now I see this crazy baseless stuff about $400 million demanded in compensation. Where did you get that lie from, Bateman?) One can't even keep up with your two dozen attacks on the article this week. Weldneck, simply because someone as irresponsible as Bateman says something, it doesn't belong in a WP article. Out of simple decency and respect for the No Gun Ri victims, and for the WP process, I appeal to you to stop and deal with fellow contributors rationally. Are you willing? I see that admin ErrantX is trying manfully to keep up with this regrettable stuff, but you will have to cooperate. You could start by removing the $400 million b.s., unless you can point to such a legal claim. Then we could try to work something out on aerial imagery. Charles J. Hanley 18:52, 10 October 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

Please respond to the specifics:

1. In the the Muccio letter to Rusk, did he or did he not mention enemy infiltrators at the Battle of Taejon as a large contributing factor to the outcome of the battle?

2. Does this warrant a single sentence on the use of infiltrators disguised as refugees in the background section?

3. No touching on the validity of the criticism, was there, or wasn't there criticism from several different sources on you and your team's No Gun Ri series?

4. I have several sources for the $400 million claim. Would you like me to name them?

In general, the POV you are trying have dsip;ayed in the article to the exclusion of others: on July 26th there was a theater wide policy in place to kill all refugees encountered regardless of the particular circumstances of the encounters between Korean refugees and US/ROK forces. You want the article structured to eliminate the rationale for use of force procedures against Korean refugees, discounting the well established suspicion that the Norks were disguising their forces as refugees and intermingling them in refugee columns as seen in Taejon and Yongdon. Your presentation of events at the bridge is designed to leave the reader with the impression that trigger happy troops with the 2/7 open fire repeatedly for long durations of time on huddling masses of nonthreating civilians out of sheer murderous intent. You imply that these individuals were given orders to do so by their direct or acting CO’s. You then go to great lengths to eliminate or question any evidence that might tend to blunt your POV, like the lack of bodies and graves in the aerial imagery. To top it all off, you repeatedly slam those who criticize the AP’s reports even when those criticism are more than warranted like with the misrepresentation of your interviewees statements.

Even with all these issues though, your POV deserves its space and recognition here. No one is denying that. What I am asking for is that other significant POV’s be represented along with their conclusions and own narratives. The US Army’s report, for one, is used as a source repeatedly in this article but only in circumstances that tend to support your main POV. In the rare instance where the US Army’s report is used and its not to support your POV, it is immediately flowed with a contradictory statement. Batemans work has been positively received and is a reliable source. I’m sorry of you feel otherwise, but that’s how things work around here.

Wikipedia's core sourcing policy, Wikipedia:Verifiability, used to define the threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia as "verifiability, not truth". "Verifiability" was used in this context to mean that material added to Wikipedia must have been published previously by a reliable source. Editors may not add their own views to articles simply because they believe them to be correct, and may not remove sources' views from articles simply because they disagree with them.

Now, if we need a mediator or God forbid an arbitrator involved, I am more than willing to go down that road, but I will not sit by idly while you and the individuals you have apparently been in contact with off line continue to enforce a vary narrow and controversial POV onto this article. WeldNeck (talk) 21:51, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Once more, there is so much wrong in what you write that one doesn’t know where to begin. And I haven’t the time now to begin anyway, except to say that you persist in ignoring an overarching point: The article is not about the AP and its uninformed critics (sure, there were death threats and heaps of lies from militarists and wing nuts and Sergeant Rock wannabes, and that qualifies as “criticism,” wouldn’t you say?); it’s about the No Gun Ri Massacre and the facts established and unknowns underlined by myriad news organizations and several government investigations. Unlike some who are unfortunately allowed to diminish Wikipedia with their POVs, the AP has none. Your latest in Talk will be addressed in due course, perhaps tomorrow. Meanwhile, yes, of course, you were asked to cite a legal claim for $400 million in compensation; not fantasies from some 7th Cav apologist, but the actual claim. Charles J. Hanley 22:44, 10 October 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

So,, no one criticized the AP's articles for lack of due diligence with respect to vetting your sources or for misattributing your sources statements, not US News and World Report, not Salon, not Bateman, not Stars & Stripes, not the 7th Cav association ... just militarists ans wingnuts? On the $400 million ... Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth. WeldNeck (talk) 23:14, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

WeldNeck; can I make two requests. Firstly this article, no matter if you disagree with its content, is well written. So please do take the time to make sure what you add/change makes grammatical sense. Secondly; can you break down your changes into more edits and provide greater description of your changes. There was one very large edit in particular the other day which is taking me some time to go through and the edit summary doesn't properly highlight the problems you are trying to address. --Errant ^(chat!) 09:05, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Noted, I will be more careful in the future. WeldNeck (talk) 13:49, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Weldneck, to deal with your 1,2,3,4 specifics above:

1-2 Yes, of course, anyone reading Muccio's letter can see that he mentions the infiltration threat. That threat was already extensively cited in the article, beginning with paragraph 2, as well as in the existing description of the Muccio letter, and with the reported example (NY Times) that you inserted and I updated, among other places. Is there yet another sentence needed on this? This is where simple editing sense must enter in. The article can be bloated endlessly with contributors' particular hobby horses, and in other ways (see below), or it can be coherent and readable.

Regarding the insert about supposed phony refugees at Taejon, there are problems: First, you misquote the source; check Sloan page 72 again; he does not speak of hundreds of disguised men. Secondly, what is Sloan's source? The official U.S. Army history (Appleman) speaks not once, in the 58 pages devoted to the Kum River-Taejon action, of infiltrators disguised as refugees. The official history, drawn from battlefield documents and extensive historian interviews, does speak repeatedly of "infiltration," but in the technical military sense, of movement of uniformed NK troops as an "enemy flanking force," in a "double envelopment of the flanks," through miles-wide gaps in the U.S. line, and on and on, as in page 135's, "But the North Koreans now had a covered route around the east end of the 1st Battalion position. They exploited it in the next few hours by extensive infiltration to the rear," and page 147's "This North Korean maneuver (flanking and infiltration) had been standard in every major action."

I'm traveling, away from my home library, and cannot check Sloan other than finding page 72 at Google Books. Appleman's utter lack of reference to any refugee infiltration at Taejon makes me suspect that Sloan, a half-century later, was simply parroting the general 1950 warfront scuttlebutt about armed refugees. Unless you tell me he's got a specific documentary cite for this.

Finally, let's remember that the two most important things about the Muccio letter were that it reported on the policy to shoot refugees, and that it was suppressed by the Army's No Gun Ri investigators. You wouldn't be reading it but for assiduous research work by others.

3 - The "criticism" of the AP reporting came from 7th Cav'er Bateman via the magazine article by 7th Cav booster Galloway, an honorary member of the unit vets' association. The Air Force officer writing at Salon was simply duped by Bateman's writing, assuming it was done in good faith by someone who knew what he was talking about. These attacks were at best baseless and often reckless, as in the Bateman/Galloway attack on two vets wounded at No Gun Ri, accusing them of lying, something their medical records readily disproved. The various bits of nonsense from Bateman were refuted point by point, in print, by AP. The only flaw in the AP report (not a "series," by the way, but a single story) was the Daily sideshow, which was pinned down by AP, not by Bateman: Daily knew No Gun Ri had happened, and told reporters so, but his information was secondhand, not firsthand as he purported. At that point Daily lost all relevance to the No Gun Ri story, particularly to a WP article in 2013 after years of further investigations, both journalistic and official.

Again, one could fatten the article endlessly with such hobby horses, raising points, knocking them down. But please recognize that the article, too long as it is, should stick to the facts and unknowns of the No Gun Ri Massacre. It's not about the AP and its long-ago ambush by the grossly irresponsible Bateman.

4 - At least twice, a source was requested for the "$400 million" demand for compensation. One hasn't materialized. Instead I find in the article you cite a source that says nothing about $400 million in compensation (an AP article no less).

What you have said seems to imply you believe that the principle of "verifiability" in WP means you can insert anything you want in an article as long as you find it somewhere you consider "reliable," even if it's patently untrue. For anyone interested in the quality of WP, rather than his own agenda, that's a pretty low bar. Of course, in this case you haven't cited any source at all, even a wildly unreliable one like Bateman (other than the source, AP, that doesn't mention $400 million).

In any event, let me explain the origin of $400 million: Early on, one of the NGR survivors, not a group leader, but a woman who'd been isolated from the others, suggested to an AP reporter that $1 million might be fair compensation for a loved one killed at No Gun Ri. From that Bateman extrapolated a survivors' "claim" for $400 million, since they estimated 400 dead. How ludicrous, not just because there wasn't any $400 million claim, but because Bateman, in so doing, was accepting that there were 400 dead, while he at the same time was spouting off his own nonsensical numbers -- "several civilians killed," "eight to 35 killed," "somewhere between eighteen and seventy civilians" killed." Take your pick. They're all just made up.

I hope you don't think we should be explaining all that in the Wikipedia article as well. The biggest example of this "bloat" problem, by the way, is the U.S. Army investigative report, which you think is underreported. The problem is that with virtually any important statement made in that report, one would have to demonstrate its falsity. Hence, the article cites unavoidable statements, like its conclusion of "not deliberate" and its avoidance of a casualty estimate. The article also cites its key contention about aerial imagery, but then must cite the serious questions about the imagery and the much more sensible explanation from those who saw the bodies with their own eyes, including ex-soldiers. But to go beyond that, and drag in more of the Army report, would turn the article into a point-by-point deconstruction of that report, rather than one about what's established re No Gun Ri.

Since I'm traveling, I cannot attend to all the problems introduced in recent days. The misquoting, lack of source etc. noted above only scratch the surface of the problems reintroduced recently. I'll deal with them in the coming days, probably starting with the aerial imagery section, where problems were earlier eliminated, only to be reintroduced. Meantime, I would ask you to stand down, while we try to work this out. Charles J. Hanley 13:57, 12 October 2013 (UTC) ((User:Cjhanley|Cjhanley)) (((User talk:Cjhanley|talk)) • ((Special:Contributions/Cjhanley|contribs))) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

South Korean Report

Is there a copy of this anywhere on the interwebs? WeldNeck (talk) 19:53, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Unsure which you mean, but neither the 2001 ROK Defense Ministry investigative report (Korean-language only) nor the later government commission report (in Korean and a 2009 English translation) is available online. Speaking of which, the Pentagon removed the 2001 U.S. Army report from its websites after the appearance of a 2010 article detailing page by page the gross irregularities. Last I looked, the ROK commission report was available at Amazon, I belive, and major university libraries. Charles J. Hanley 14:15, 12 October 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

How can we make an evaluation of your interpretation of the source if it isn't available? — Preceding unsigned comment added by WeldNeck (talk • contribs) 14:19, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Aerial imagery, errors

Errors were recently reintroduced in the "Aerial imagery" section, despite having been pointed out and eliminated earlier. The section also took on an illogical flow of thoughts and unnecessary wordiness.

The major errors:

• The Army report did not say all foxholes remained open. It said the majority were open. (Survivors said some were used as graves.)

I never wrote that "all foxholes remained open". From the US Army investigation:

The area around the No Gun-Ri, ROK railroad bridge and the nearby fighting positions was carefully examined for indications of human remains. There were NO indications of human remains found on the imagery examined for this project.

Stereoscopic examination of the fighting positions revealed that the majority were still open (meaning not filled in or covered over) (Figure 22). Most of the positions were showing the effects of weathering, having begun to collapse over time.

Fighting holes are not large, they are dug only to be as big as needed. Even if every man in the company dug their own fighting hole its ridiculous to think that 400+ bodies could be burred in only a few of them. WeldNeck (talk) 15:01, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

• It was the U.S. analyst, not the South Korean specialists, who called for a new process to guarantee the integrity of imagery to be analyzed in the future.

Nowhere does the US analyst call into question the integrity of the aerial imagery. There is a lengthy discussion in the back of the report discussing this. Your text, as written, leads the reader to believe that the US analyst is in agreement with his Korean counterpart(s).

The previously discussed cuts and splices notwithstanding, a comparison of the DUPNEG with the ON, particularly frames 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, and 35, indicates that the DUPNEG that DIA was using to make copies was accurate and complete. All frames matched up -- in order and in content -- between the ON and the DUPNEG.

Because the imagery was of sufficient quality and resolution to discern individual railroad ties along the railbed, it should also be sufficient to detect human remains had they been present at imaging. There were no indications of human remains along the roads, railroad, bridges or streambeds in the No Gun-Ri area on the 06 August 1950 imagery.

• The reader infers that the U.S. imagery analyst concluded there were no mass graves. Actually, the Army report writers listed that as a conclusion, but the four conclusions listed in the analyst's own internal report made no mention of mass graves. In fact, the analyst felt compelled to add a disclaimer in a footnote to the report writers' statement, saying, "Typically mass graves have been located on imagery after the grave has been filled and covered and when some other indicators have pointed the analyst in the right direction to look." This analyst, who stated he was kept uninformed about the circumstances of No Gun Ri, had no such indicators.

The conclusions that no mass graves were found is repeated several times in the report. A notation on analytically methodology not withstanding. WeldNeck (talk) 15:01, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

In any event, the salient points about the aerial imagery are 1) the No Gun Ri frames may have been inauthentic, from another time period, since they were spliced into an August 6, 1950, roll of film, and their features, such as a low-running stream and the recon plane's flight line, differ from those features on the rest of the roll, according to the South Korean specialists, and 2) even if the photos were authentic, No Gun Ri villagers, uninvolved in the killings, consistently said the bulk of bodies were stacked beneath the bridge, out of sight of aerial recon, and were buried in mass graves later.

These problems will be addressed in an upcoming edit that will stick to the essentials, without larding in word-wasting detail about the divergence between the report writers and the analyst, or the Pentagon's experience in Bosnia or wherever. Charles J. Hanley 20:01, 13 October 2013 (UTC) ((User:Cjhanley|Cjhanley)) (((User talk:Cjhanley|talk)) • ((Special:Contributions/Cjhanley|contribs))) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

Response: Only the south Koreans even raise the allegation that the images are inauthentic. The image splicing is explained in great detail within the report. It seems implausible that the bulk of 400+ bodies were stacked under the bridge. The aerial footage was sufficient for the analyst to see 3 meters into the bridge opening and he still saw nothing. WeldNeck (talk) 15:01, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

The AP story, errors

As I find time to study what Weldneck has done to this article, I find in several places he has taken it upon himself -- in a way thoroughly disrespectful to Wikipedia and to other contributors to this article -- to add qualifiers and his own wishful thinking to orders and other military documents that are black-and-white in their meaning and that had no such qualifiers. For example, in this "AP story" section, where it noted that Navy pilots reported the Army told them to attack any groups of more than eight people in South Korea, he added the clause, "unless a determination could be made" that they were not hostile. There's no such sugarcoated wording in the document. Frankly, this is outrageous fabrication, and was done in at least two other places, along with his deletion of important elements, without explanation, apparently because he doesn't like the implication of the facts.

Weldneck, this kind of thing violates some of the most basic rules and protocols of Wikipedia. Cut it out.

Beyond that, I'll fix the hash made of the paragraph about the U.S. News challenge of the AP story, to note, among other things, that U.S. News' accusations were refuted in detail and in print by the AP, and that Pentagon officials were quoted at the time as saying their investigators had confirmed the central element of the AP story, and that "hundreds" of refugees had been killed.

We will take on other sections one by one to purge them of these unfortunate insertions and deletions. Charles J. Hanley 23:18, 14 October 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

There are no fabrications here. You consistently take the most damning clips from documents and present them without any context. The sentence immediately after the one cited in the article states quite clearly (not really considering the quality of the image you uploaded) that all groups of civilians were investigated with a low altitude flyby and they were only fired on by the pilots if they showed signs of aggression towards them. This seems pretty important, and there isnt a good reason you excluded it from your original reporting or from here.

So because the AP wrote a response to US news and world reports it must be all good, nothing to see here, right?

I found an interesting H-Net thread on what some historians saw as major flaws in your reporting that I would like to reproduce here.

Jeffrey Grey, professor of history UNSW

On 13 May 2007, Janet Valentine wrote: "Among the myriad points of dissonance in the discussion of No Gun Ri are the different standards by which journalists and historians work."

It's perhaps worth just reminding ourselves as well of a point that Bob Bateman makes in the introduction to his account of No Gun Ri:

'It now appeared that the AP won the Pulitzer Prize for a story in which fully one quarter of its mentioned sources on this side of the Pacific had not been at No Gun Ri or were not members of the 7th Cavalry at the time, but who were nonetheless feeding the AP and other reporters what they wanted to hear. Even more damning . . . was the fact that several of the veterans they represented as having witnessed or taken part in what the journalists all but called a massacre said they were misquoted or that their words were taken out of context.' (p. xii)

My question is a simple one: given this, why should we be expected to have any more confidence in Mr Hanley's interpretation of events when he throws a few documents and bits of documents at us, than we can have from the sort of 'evidence' on which he and his colleagues placed so much weight originally, and which has been exposed as false?

(Dr) Jeffrey Grey Professor

H&SS/ADFA

Historian Paul Westermeyer

I am not an expert on No Gun Ri, but this comment bring a larger historiography question to the point.

Whatever happened at No Gun Ri, it is no longer the province of journalists, but of _historians_. Journalism allows a margin of error that history cannot tolerate, the justification for that is that Journalism is immediate, there may not be time to gather all the facts on unfolding events. Moreover, Journalism is driven by sensationalism and scandal. The journalist looks for the 'scoop' and jealously hoards his sources against his fellow journalists. Journalism, constrained by time, tends to accept sources at face value, especially witnesses. And Journalists. Constrained by time and writing for an impatient audience, spend little time or effort on understanding the context of their story. They do not place it within the framework of larger events.

Historians, in contrast, are _not_ driven by immediate concerns. They can, and should take as long as needed to ferret the truth of an event. They are not deadline driven. Historians should not be driven by sensation or scandal, but by historical importance and relevance. Many 'sensational' stories are interesting, but they are not historically relevant. Historians do not hunt for the 'scoop', nor do they hoard sources (or should not). On the contrary, the more historians who examine a given issue, the better. Historians spend a great deal of time carefully examining their sources, _especially_ witnesses, and especially witness speaking long after the fact. And every historian must answer the question of context fully.

Anyone who has worked with veterans and oral history understands the ways in which war stories shift and then solidify into myth. Last year I interviewed some Medal of Honor recipients, these were all men who had been formally interviewed about these specific events many times. It was clear that they were reciting the 'Story', something honed, unintentionally, over the years through subconscious readings of what the listener found interesting or shocking. Our job would be easier if everyone possessed total, objective recall, but we do not. That is why history is difficult, and why journalism cuts that corner to save time.

Finally, as I mentioned I am no expert on No Gun Ri, but I attended graduate school with Bob Bateman. He is an extremely ethical, skilled historian and he would never attempt to white wash any crimes or scandals he discovered in the Army, or his regiment. Bob is not an 'apologist' for this event but he is a historian who demands, as we all should, careful attention to the sources.

Paul Westermeyer Historian, History Division

Marine Corps University

It wold seem that, based on these statements, Bateman's book might be a better source than yours for the article. WeldNeck (talk) 15:28, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Since this seems to be an appropriate place to weigh the reliability of the AP, I though I would add this as well.

The AP relied heavily on two alleged participants: Edward Daily and Eugene Hesselman. Daily, who claimed to have been a machine-gunner at No Gun Ri, provided the most evocative quotes, including this: "On summer nights, when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming." In a follow-up piece on NBC's Dateline, Daily added that he had received a direct order to kill the refugees.

Hesselman told the AP that Captain Melbourne Chandler, after speaking with his superiors by radio, ordered his men to fire. "Chandler said, `The hell with all those people. Let's get rid of them,' " Hesselman told the AP.

The AP's use of Daily and Hesselman may turn out to have been ill-advised. In similar pieces, U.S. News and the Web site of the Stars and Stripes (www.stripes.com) offered considerable documentary evidence suggesting that neither Daily nor Hesselman was anywhere near No Gun Ri. Daily is portrayed as boastful and disturbed, a man long eyed with suspicion by fellow veterans. "I take three strong pills for mental illness," Daily told U.S. News. Hesselman, U.S. News says, was almost certainly evacuated with an injury before the incident took place. Other veterans interviewed by U.S. News complained that the AP distorted their quotes and took them out of context. And another veteran, Norman Tinkler, told U.S. News that he did shoot civilians, killing a number of innocent people in one short burst of machine-gun fire. But in a comment that speaks to the horror and confusion of war, Tinkler insisted that no one ordered him to fire: "Refugees came through our positions the day before and pulled pins and threw three hand grenades at our guys. I wasn't going to let them get near me. . . . And yes, I fired at them. Nobody gave me orders. Nobody was there to give me orders."

WeldNeck (talk) 19:20, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Regarding the 2 quoted historians above. Yes, (peer/positively reviewed) scholarly sources by historians are certainly to be preferred over journalists and AP reporting. However do we have them? Bateman doesn't seem to qualify as such and certainly no army reports. If we do have them the article should primarily rely on them by all means, but if we do not have them (or not in sufficient amout/detail) the article needs to rely on good journalistic sources for the time being.--Kmhkmh (talk) 04:43, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Bateman has been very well received by scholarly historical sources.

• Journal of Cold War Studies

When Bateman began his inquiry, he was a serving officer. As the mass experience of military service fades into the background of American life, fewer and fewer of those who write on military matters will do so on the basis of first-hand experience. That experience by itself, of course, is no guarantee of accuracy, let alone impartiality, but in this case it does give the author insights into military procedures and records that might well escape the civilian writer. Bateman's forensic explanation of what can be gleaned from various records, and his almost obsessive interrogation of those records—and, by implication, of those who failed to understand what the records could tell—is one of the most interesting parts of his book.

• Professor David Sneed

Despite these few minor problems, Bateman has written a book that should be a valuable resource for scholars, the media, and the general public. He reveals the pitfalls of drawing conclusions from incomplete investigations and shows how true historical research should be conducted.

• James Irving Matray, The Journal of Military History

Bateman skillfully uses photos, forensics, and numbers to make his case.

We do have them (Bateman being one of them) so no need to rely controversial journalistic sources for now. WeldNeck (talk) 13:40, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Well so where are they (aside from Bateman)? If the 2 reviews are representative for the reception of his book in general, then Bateman is ok as a source. However they do not really address the criticism raised, so at the moment I'm a bit skeptical regarding their represetative nature.--Kmhkmh (talk) 17:13, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Thats three reviews, not two, and they are representative. The criticisms raised were not cited to a wp:RS and were made by two anonymous Wikipedia editors (is that all it takes to discredit the reliability of a source? ). WeldNeck (talk) 17:56, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

You misunderstood me here. I wasn't asking for reviews but other research article into the subject. That is another academic publication that has assessed the various sources in detail, those reviews don't do that. As far as the criticism of the other editors is concerned, there isn't necessarily a need for citing anything, this the discussion page not the article. And while an editor can of course use citations on the discussion page as well to show, that the criticism is not just his personal assessment or to bolster his argument in general, he doesn't have to. His personal assessment can nevertheless point out valid issues. The neglect of Korean sources in Bateman's work is a concern independent of any citation.--Kmhkmh (talk) 01:48, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Alleged

Per policies like WP:ALLEGED; such things need a source, otherwise we should use neutral language. --Errant ^(chat!) 18:43, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Are you referring to the introduction? WeldNeck (talk) 18:53, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

A couple of the words you introduced, "alleged" being one of them. --Errant ^(chat!) 19:23, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

I'll have a look and sort it out. WeldNeck (talk) 19:33, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

I just looked over all my additions (those still remaining) and do not see were alleged was added by me. Could you please be more specific? WeldNeck (talk) 19:36, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

This one --Errant ^(chat!) 08:21, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Given the conclusions of the US Army's report into the matter, I think that "alleged" is appropriate. WeldNeck (talk) 13:19, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Weldneck, what on Earth do you think you're doing?

You're engaging in an outrageous edit war, despite good-faith efforts to incorporate the very few useful, truthful items from your interventions. You're treating this article as though it's your plaything, to be reshaped with U.S. chauvinist wishful thinking about a war crime.

Over and over and over, your errors, your POV insertions and deletions, your ungrammatical constructions, your unreliable or nonexistent sourcing have been pointed out to you and corrected, and you simply reinsert the same false, baseless and sometimes incoherent material. On aerial imagery: Don't you understand that some foxholes were filled in (and we don't need foxholes in the section anyway)? Don't you understand that the U.S. analyst (not the South Koreans, as you keep writing) called for a process to ensure the integrity of aerial film for analysis, signaling his concern about the authenticity of the NGR images? Don't you see that Bosnia etc. just adds needless words to a long article? Don't you see your writing doesn't even flow logically? Don't you understand that the aerial imagery section can be kept simple: Despite eyewitness testimony (and, later, a commission's findings on casualties), the U.S. Army cited half-century-old aerial imagery to question whether there were many bodies at NGR, and the South Koreans rebutted that bodies were stacked out of sight and some were removed, and that the aerial imagery may be unreliable. That's all that's needed -- done factually and coherently. My last edit incorporated from yours more of the Army report's supposed evidence (no scavenger activity etc.). That's enough. Now you've restored all the errors and nonsense verbatim.

The same applies to your reverting the "Associated Press story" section to its previous mess of untruths. Bateman is a serial fabricator, and his gross unreliability has been explained in clear detail in Talk, but you simply refuse to engage, to even bother defending the substance of his worthless and mendacious material, or acknowledge the obvious regarding him, but instead simply ignore the discussion and the facts.

Worst of all, worse than your blatant edit war, is your deliberate falsification of at least three military documents, adding exculpatory clauses to "shoot refugees" orders that weren't there. In that regard, on top of everything, are we dealing with a reading comprehension problem? The document shows that the ARMY said all groups of eight or more should be strafed, and in the next passage (referred to by you) it's the NAVY pilots who decide otherwise in the instant case. The article is talking about ARMY instructions to kill civilians. That's what matters with No Gun Ri.

For one last time, please cease and desist. And engage. Otherwise, you'll force a turn to alternative approaches. I see you've already been warned about edit wars elsewhere, and have been looked into as a possible sock puppet of "Kauffner," a No Gun Ri denialist who got himself banned from WP. It would seem wise to calm down and let us work things out. 173.14.82.77 (talk) 22:28, 15 October 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

If you can substantiate your allegation that analyst who reviewed the aerial footage thought there were authenticity issues with it instead of (my belief) his explanation of the splicing and a proposed methodology to prevent it in the future (to deflect the South Korean criticism) I'd be interested in hearing it. Otherwise its your speculation and not really all that noteworthy. One sentence explaining who/what AFIP and NIMA are/do doesnt detract form the article. I am sure the casual reader would really like to know who did the investigative work on the footage and why they were qualified to do so. If you still want believe that one could hide several hundred bodies in a dozen DFP's (I've dug lots of them, that aint gonna happen), that too is your choice but the photographic evidence, the only truly objective material not tainted by 50 year old memories and journalistic teams contaminating sources, is pretty convincing: there just werent that many bodies and what is seen doesnt match the eyewitness recollections.

You have complained about Bateman for a while now. Once again, whatever beliefs you have about him are not supported by any other reliable source.

The document you are referring (the Navy action summary) to is VERY DIFFICULT TO READ. Too bad for your POV that the linchpin, that key piece of testimony about the 2/7 being ordered to open fire on the refugees at No Gun Ri, turned out to have not been there when he said he overheard the CO telling them "The hell with all those people. Let's get rid of them". Guess the AP team should have done a bit more due diligence on that one.

I would encourage you to seek "alternative approaches". Maybe they could convince you that your conflict of interest and your personal grudge against Bateman shouldnt be pursued here on Wikipedia.

You dont own this article and your version of events is not the only one that should be included here. WeldNeck (talk) 01:20, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Thought I'd throw this in the mix too. It illustrates how even when confronted with documented evidence, some people just cannot let go of long held opinions and erroneous beliefs:

Ms. MENDOZA: One soldier who was at No Gun Ri, who was there, said that he - an officer told him, the hell with all those people, let's get rid of them all. And he said they had been in Korea for only a couple of days. He said he and his fellow soldiers didn't know them from a load of coal.

HANSEN: What happened to the soldiers? What was the outcome?

Ms. MENDOZA: Well, in No Gun Ri - this didn't come to light for 50 years and that was when we reported on it - they were interviewed by the Pentagon and the Pentagon did in fact confirm that this incident had occurred. They were not punished in any way. But these men who told us these stories, in my mind, are men of great conscience who were going to come forward and tell these stories.

Perhaps Ms Mendoza can explain to the readers how Hesselman (the source of the quote) is a man "of great conscience" when it was documented that he was medically evacuated before the events took place and could not have overheard the CO's directive? This inteview was in 2006, six years after it was confirmed that Hesselman was at the 15th Medical Clearing Battalion on the morning he said he was witness to a massacre. WeldNeck (talk) 01:36, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Weldneck (whoever you are), you are so wrong on every point that one scarcely knows where to begin, as usual with you. Above all, you are 13 years out of date on the NGR story, and even then you are relying on a dishonest, discredited source. You want to ignore the fact that many news organizations -- from the Washington Post and the BBC to Korean TV -- replicated, reconfirmed and expanded on the original AP reporting, and that two sovereign governments then established and accepted that the U.S. military killed the refugees at No Gun Ri, and that one government, that of the crime scene, certified 218 casualties and said "many" more went unreported.

I have never denied that noncoms were killed but now that we have a great deal more information other than a sensationalist piece of yellow journalism, we can properly describe the preceding events and context that contributed to it, like the good LtCol Bateman did. You know, somthing with a little more depth than 'wicked US imperialists mowed down children for the hell of it'. WeldNeck (talk) 03:06, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

On your wrongheaded points:

• At Appendix C, Tab 2, page 13 of the Army's 2001 investigative report, the aerial reconnaissance analyst concludes his internal report by recommending that "a certification process/procedure should be developed that can be used to certify that the resulting copies are exact duplicates of the ON" (original negative). This after objections by the Korean experts that the aerial film appeared to have been doctored.

Never once did the US analyst question the authenticity of the aerial photographs as you continue to suggest, in fact, he called the copies were "exact duplicates" of the originals. I know it might come as a shock to you, but archival film may become damaged after 50 years. WeldNeck (talk) 03:06, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

• No, discussing the background of the aerial recon experts ("Bosnia" etc.) is a waste of words. The reader assumes that in a high-level government investigation, expertise is involved in all fields (archival researchers, interrogators, legal experts etc. in this case). Then, why don't we discuss the background qualifications of the South Koreans who worked on the same film?

Do we know the expertise of the Koreans? If we do, that might be relevant. WeldNeck (talk) 03:06, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Mr Hanley, you raise an interesting point here. Its my understanding that the South Korean analysts were well briefed on all the details of the incident whereas the US team was given no background on the event. Dont you think the potential existed to bias the results of the Korean analysts, kind of like poisoning a jury? WeldNeck (talk) 14:45, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

• Your reference to "hiding several hundred bodies in a dozen DFP's" totally befuddles me. Have you suddenly forgotten that uninvolved No Gun Ri villagers said the bodies were stacked under the bridge and were eventually put in mass graves? Who knows how many bodies went into foxholes. And, as I said, who needs foxholes in the article anyway? Then your pretense of knowing the size of 7th Cav foxholes, and heavy weapons trenches etc., in 1950 Korea, and how many bodies can fit under that bridge, when you haven't been within a million miles or a half-century of that place and time is the kind of thing you expect to hear from know-it-all blowhards in Internet comments columns, not in a serious discussion. As it happens, the ROK army, as part of the ROK investigation, sent troops into one tunnel to lie down and found that 700 bodies could fit, even without the stacking that occurred.

The condition of the foxholes was mentioned by the report, no reason not to include it. I know the size of the DFP's the 2/7 dug that day because I have dug many of my own. Its ridiculous to suggest 700 bodies could fit under that bridge and not be seen in the aerial photography. And for the record, I have probably spent more time in South Korea than you have. WeldNeck (talk) 03:06, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

• Now we learn that you couldn't read the Navy document and so you just described it the way you wanted it to read (i.e., to minimize U.S. culpability). As I wrote above, "Weldneck, what on Earth do you think you're doing?"

Minimize culpability? Read the document again. Did the USN report say or didnt it say that the pilots too measures to verify the validity of the targets they were attacking? WeldNeck (talk) 03:06, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

• Bateman's reckless nonsense about 7th Cav witness Hesselman was debunked 13 years ago. There was no "document" showing a medical evacuation. Bateman made all this up. He later told a third party he had "heard" from someone at the 7th Cav Association that Hesselman had shot himself in the foot. Hesselman had a Purple Heart dated July 26, 1950, and told the AP early on it was a graze wound from some incoming shrapnel and he refused evacuaton. But Bateman was so eager to blow smoke that he got Galloway to write that Hesselman was evacuated that day, before the No Gun Ri killings (and their cockamamie explanation of that was one of the most ludicrous things ever seen in print). A highly pissed-off Hesselman released his medical records to AP. They backed him up completely. There was no evacuation.

Provide a reliable source for that or its worthless. But speaking of sources we have this:

Further complicating things are Hesselman's medical records. Though he said he was wounded in the hand, officials who have reviewed Hesselman's medical file said he received a "friendly fire" wound to the foot--in other words, either he shot himself or was wounded by a fellow soldier inadvertently. Hesselman has declined to respond to repeated messages seeking clarification of his service and medical records and the accounts he provided to the AP about No Gun Ri and the incident on the Naktong River. Army investigators, ordered to examine the No Gun Ri affair after the AP account was published, are trying to determine whether veterans besides Daily may have fabricated their accounts, or whether their memories of events from half a century ago may have been influenced by Daily.

"I know that Daily was there," insisted Eugene Hesselman, another key witness in the original Associated Press account. "I know that. I know that."Millard Gray, 75, of Fort Cobb, Okla., said he believed for years that Mr. Daily rescued him on the battlefield -- until a buddy pointed out that he would not have been able to recall anything immediately after being pummeled by a concussion grenade. Mr. Gray, who was not quoted in the Associated Press account, said he now realizes that his memory of Mr. Daily pulling him out of a foxhole to safety came from Mr. Daily. "I didn't know the difference," Mr. Gray said.

To say the AP team's credibility on vetting witnesses is bad would be an understatement. WeldNeck (talk) 03:06, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Let's make this clear one last time: The Associated Press, a bedrock news organization of the global media, was neither perpetrator nor victim at No Gun Ri. The journalists who confirmed No Gun Ri, along with those who followed with further reporting, had and have no conflict of interest. They're journalists. The conflict of interest, as has been clearly established, is Bateman's, as a member of the organization (the U.S. Army) that was responsible for NGR, and even, years later, of the specific unit responsible.

Sorry but the logical fallacy you are attempting to use wont work. Neither does the guilt by association. WeldNeck (talk) 03:06, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree, the Bateman attack on the AP (which you call an AP grudge or feud) has no place in this WP article. So let's get rid of it. Let it go. The article is not about that, but about the NGR Massacre.

The Bateman correction to the AP story is quote notable having been reported by too many sources to name and belongs here. Your repeated attempts to remove it is a conflict of interest

Meantime, are you going to be making fixes to what you've done, or not? You can begin by undoing the egregious stunt of making the wording of "kill" documents conform to what you want them to say. Charles J. Hanley 22:54, 16 October 2013 (UTC) ((User:Cjhanley|Cjhanley)) (((User talk:Cjhanley|talk)) • ((Special:Contributions/Cjhanley|contribs))) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

I dont think I'll be doing that any time soon. WeldNeck (talk) 03:06, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Source needed

But three days later Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay, 1st Cavalry Division commander, told rear-echelon reporters he suspected half the white-clad people streaming down the roads were infiltrators.[8]

I was looking for the source of this statement, but cannot find it. Does anyone have anything more specific than "The Associated Press, July 26, 1950"? WeldNeck (talk) 16:41, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Full Stop

I haven't followed the article too closely for a while, but apparently there seems to be latent edit war since August now, with changes all over the map. I suggest in doubt to reset the article to the pre edit war version and then Weldeck can explain what exactly he wants to change and why. Then after editors agree the changes might be executed. In other words please argue here in concise manner rather than changing things back and forth in the article.--Kmhkmh (talk) 02:56, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

There really isnt much of an edit war, not that many reverts. Many changes, yes, but little edit warring. Feel free to join the discussion. Naturally, I would disagree to any "reset" of the article. Many important and useful additions have been made. WeldNeck (talk) 03:12, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

The problem is that other editors seems to disagree with many/most with importance or usefulness of those changes. Now if everybody starts correcting in parallel it will trurn into a real edit war rather than latent one, moreover it has the potential to become increasingly chaotic.--Kmhkmh (talk) 03:29, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

What other editors? Cjhanley has an obvious conflict of interest and probably shouldn't be editing here at all. I've never edited this page, but I have been following it for a while, and Weldneck's contributions seem well-sourced and in good faith to me. The idea of preemptively blanking all of his contributions because you feel things could become chaotic is ridiculous.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 03:45, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

What other editors? Aside from cjhanley according to the discussions above Reader0234, ErrantX, BW5530 and now myself. Whether Weldneck's edit are really well sourced seems partially a question of dispute above. That cjhanley is in a potential conflict of interest situation is certainly true, however he is editing openly under his name and probably (by far) the best informed on the topic among all currently active editors here. As long as he isn't going to push personal POV or some obviously one sided description and keeps professional distance being aware of the potential conflict of interest, I don't see a problem with him editing here on the contrary I see him as welcome expert. As far as preemptive resetting is concerned, that's a matter of personal assessment, but I can see that it might appear as unnecessary or over the top measure to others. In any case my point that in cases of increasing dispute editors should clarify and agree upon things on the discussion page first, before editing the article.--Kmhkmh (talk)

Finally someone else sees the obvious COI. Kmhkmh, there arent other editors, there is exactly one who has voiced concerns with the additions. ErrantX has popped in from time to time, but I am not entirely sure what his take is. WeldNeck (talk) 04:06, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Including cjhanley and myself there 5 editors that raised concerns/objections with regard to your arguments/edits (see also my posting one further up)--Kmhkmh (talk) 04:31, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Two of those editors have made only 2 or 3 talk space edits and their timing here is a bit suspicious. WeldNeck (talk) 13:32, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

I'd like to revise some of my earlier assessments a bit after browsing some more background material, in particular on the AP versus Bateman debate, the scope of which I wasn't really aware of before.

• CJHanley has indeed a very strong conflict of interest and should not edit the article. The problem here is not so much an that CJHanley has written a lot on the subject (that would only make him a welcome expert), but that is he is involved in feud of sorts with Batemann with the reputation of each being at stake. So he is not simply a well versed expert on the subject, but he has personal stake in certain representation of it, which poses a strong conflict of interest.
• Though I still have personal reservations regarding Bateman (in particular the neglect of Korean sources is a big issue and Pentagon material that became accessible only after the publication of his book) he seems to be ok as a source. The book is published with publisher that seems reputable enough and has been reviewed somewhat positively by 2 historians and a superficial search did not produce any negative reviews. Hence my personal reservations aside I see know reason not to use him as a source.
• Considering that both Bateman and CJHanley's books/publications do have issues and that there is a lot of of conflicting information independent of Bateman and CJHanley, we are in dire need of scholarly assessments of (neutral) third parties (and as such ideally without close ties to the US military as well). Currently I'm not aware whether further detailed scholarly publications on the subject exist, without them (or a consensus among them) the WP article should refrain from attempt to describe a "true" version of events, but simply describing both versions.
• As far as the academics versus journalism argument is concerned. There is no doubt that as a general rule academic publications should be preferred journalistic publications and that historians are to be preferred over journalists. However quality and known issues of sources are to be considered as well, crudely speaking in concrete case a piece of good journalism is preferable to a shoddy academic publication. Another issue is the domain question whereas early modern history and before clearly falls (somewhat exclusively) in the domain of the historians recent/contemporary history is more if a shared domain with political scientists, journalists and others. Taking that into consideration and given the current contentious I don't see really see how we can simply favour Bateman and ignore CJHanley, instead we should (as stated before) simply describe both accounts.

--Kmhkmh (talk) 01:34, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, that's all I have been asking for: a balanced presentation that presents all perspectives and excludes none.

I know we arent going to use him for a source, but Kuehl make a very good observation on this point:

The motivation for soldiers to shoot into the refugees would have been as varied as the number of soldiers in the area. Once the firing started, other soldiers quickly join in. Scared, untrained, lacking cohesion, missing leaders, and disorganized from the debacle the night before, soldiers panic and the line opens up as it often does with green troops in combat. Some soldiers recognize that the refugees are not a threat and do not fire. While some soldiers fire their weapons, others wanted to herd the refugees under the bridge and fire over their heads with warning shots to get them to and keep them under the trestle. Some soldiers panic thinking they are under attack. Some probably believe that they are under orders to shoot civilians and did so. Finally, some soldiers, such as machine gunner Norman Tinkler, do it because he was scared and did not trust Korean civilians.

To Kuehl's point, I think focusing on one particular perspective, like the article did before I began editing it, we leave many others, completely valid as a part but completely erroneous if used as a whole, out of the discussion. I would encourage you to read the entire paper, its quite good and very comprehensive. WeldNeck (talk) 02:03, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Sourcing/References

Currently the articles quotes various books and reports without providing page numbers, that is not an acceptable form of sourcing, in fact almost as bad as giving no source. You can expect people reading a book or report of several hundred pages just to verify a single line. While it might be ok to skip page numbers for smaller sources like news paper or journal articles consisting only of a few page, larger sources nevertheless usually need exact page numbers. Similarly when quoting from longer documentaries (audio or video), there should be a time parameter telling at which position they need to check the audio or video source.

Keeping the above in mind the following sources need to be fixed in some or all their occurrences in references section:

• Office of the Inspector General, Department of the Army. No Gun Ri Review
• Appleman, Roy E. (1961). South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu (June–November 1950).
• Bill Sloan. "The Darkest Summer: Pusan and Inchon 1950: The Battles That Saved South Korea--and the Marines--from Extinction". Simon and Schuster, Nov 10, 2009
• Hanley, Charles J.; Choe, Sang-Hun; Mendoza, Martha (2001). The Bridge at No Gun Ri. New York, New York: Henry Holt and Company.
• ARD Television, Germany. "The Massacre of No Gun Ri," March 19, 2007. Retrieved January 28, 2012. (occurs once without time positions)
• Robert Bateman (2002). No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident. Stackpole Books.
• Committee for the Review and Restoration of Honor for the No Gun Ri Victims (2009). No Gun Ri Incident Victim Review Report. Seoul: Government of the Republic of Korea.
• Phillips, Jayne Anne (2009). Lark & Termite. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Tirman, John (2011). The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars. New York: Oxford University Press
• "Comprehensive Report, Volume 1, Part I". Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the Republic of Korea. December 2010.

--Kmhkmh (talk) 03:25, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Thats a good observation. I will prioritize that. WeldNeck (talk) 04:03, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Dale Kuehl

Dale Kuehl's paper What Happened at No Gun Ri?: The Challenge of Civilians on the Battlefield (available online, just Google it) has a very concise and reasonable account of the events leading up to and during the killings. This begins at page 80 and continues on for some time. He goes into some detail about the issues with the AP's work (and to be fair, he has some criticisms of Bateman as well.

While focusing on the Korean point of view, the AP does not clearly address the complexity of the battlefield. They downplayed reports of guerrillas intermingling with refugees as exaggerations by soldiers. They do not mention North Korean attacks that used the refugees to mask their movement as recorded by army records and press accounts on 24 July, 26 July, and 28 July. The AP does not mention guerrilla attacks in rear areas of the division during this period. On midnight 25 July, just an hour before 2-7 CAV’s panicked withdrawal, thirty guerrillas fired on the division headquarters at Kwan-ni. At 1415 hours on the 26th in the same area guerrillas wounded two American soldiers.3 Other documents report enemy snipers in rear areas and attacks on artillery units.4 The Division Artillery reported that the enemy was even using children as young as ten years olds to observe and report on positions.5 Finally, the AP also does not address measures taken by the 1st CAV Division to deal with the refugee problem. They do not mention the evacuation of refugees from Yongdong by train on 23 July, or the 30,000 refugees that passed through Yongdong that day.6 Measures taken by the 191st Counter-Intelligence Corps and the division’s 545th MPs also receive no mention.7 These omissions combined with emphasis placed on orders by Gay to the 8th CAV gives one the impression that the 1st CAV indiscriminately killed civilians in their area of operations.

Kuehl particular emphasis that the area around No Gun Ri, forward of the 2/7, 2/8 , 2/5 etcetera, was a fluid and active combat zone during the killings in late July of 1950 with the KPA massing for an offensive and this detail is almost completely absent from the article (and the AP's account as well). If there is agreement, I would like to incorporate a great deal of his reconstruction of the events in to the article under the Events of 25–29 July 1950 section. WeldNeck (talk) 18:28, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Isn't that a thesis? I don't think it would be a RS unless you could demonstrate it was widely cited.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 18:34, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

I have to plead my ignorance on this ... I don't know, is it only a thesis? Hers is the citation from Google scholar. Its actually all ready cited in the article Kuehl, Dale C. "What happened at No Gun Ri? The challenge of civilians on the battlefield". U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. June 6, 2003. Retrieved February 10, 2012. Biblioscholar (2012). ISBN 1249440270. WeldNeck (talk) 18:37, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Well, the "descriptive note" in your link says "Master's thesis". Look at WP:RS: "Masters dissertations and theses are only considered reliable if they can be shown to have had significant scholarly influence". Has Keuhl's thesis had such influence? I wouldn't know, but look into it.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 18:49, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

will do thanks for the tip. WeldNeck (talk) 18:55, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Any opinions on using Kuehl's notations to construct the events of late July? WeldNeck (talk) 19:04, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

A Master thesis, that has not been published otherwise (in journal articles, as a book with an academic publisher), is not suited as a source for WP, in particular not with contentious content as in this article.--Kmhkmh (talk) 00:29, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Did you read his reconstruction of events ... very thorough. I wonder if his reconstruction can be cited to other RS's like the US Army report or other histories of the early days of the Korean War? WeldNeck (talk) 01:07, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Well army reports are source that is not without problems either. Nevertheless they tend to be compiled/reviewed/read by a larger number of people and are in doubt treated as a primary source. And no I didn't look at the this master thesis yet, I just stated WP's general attitude towards a master thesis as a source.--Kmhkmh (talk) 02:00, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Events of 25–29 July 1950

I would like to rework this entire section to resemble something more similar to a narrative of events, not just fragmentary quotes of 1st hand accounts. An brief assessment of the fighting around Yongdong would be useful too, providing perspective of the larger events taking place outside of the No Gun Ri bubble. I'm not sure how to do this so as not to turn the section into a narrative of wider events in the theater although I do think they deserve mention. WeldNeck (talk) 21:45, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Full Stop, Part II

I (Charles J. Hanley 14:38, 21 October 2013 (UTC)) will be referring WeldNeck to the edit war noticeboard as soon as possible, to seek some action against his massive reverts, falsification of material etc., all without good-faith engagement. (See below.)

Meanwhile, I must disagree in the strongest terms possible that there is any conflict of interest when the journalists who helped establish the facts of the No Gun Ri Massacre in the first place also help to make the Wikipedia article on the subject as accurate, fair, coherent and complete as possible. (Compare the chaotic article of 2011 with the solid article of early 2013, pre-WeldNeck.) If such journalists are biased and their contributions don’t belong in the article, then what is their work doing as a footnoted source for key facts in the article? These are journalists, not polemical partisans, like WeldNeck and others, usually U.S. military-linked, who repeatedly seek to blow smokescreens, distort and falsify elements of the article, and bury the facts of No Gun Ri.

There’s a huge misunderstanding at work if one doesn’t recognize that the article is about the No Gun Ri Massacre, not about Robert Bateman’s long-ago, falsehood-packed attack on the journalists who confirmed that “my regiment,” as he called it, was responsible for those killings, a fact then reaffirmed by two sovereign governments. The outdated, debunked Bateman nonsense of 13 years ago – from a member of the institution (U.S. Army) and even the unit (7th Cavalry) responsible for the killings -- doesn’t belong in an article that’s supposed to convey in 2013 essential, objective, sound information about a historic event, information that has been doublechecked, expanded upon and updated by many journalists, academics and official investigations over those 13 years.

Contributor kmhkmh asks for scholarly assessment. One can look at contributor BW5530’s assessment of Bateman above (under “Other POV”), a devastating critique from a Ph.D. candidate who clearly is well familiar with No Gun Ri. He lists several egregious assaults on the truth by Bateman and says any one of them disqualifies him from serious consideration, and all combined put Bateman way beyond the pale of anything reliable. (Also note WeldNeck’s nasty dismissal of that contributor, typical of WeldNeck.) One can look at the Pritzker Military Library’s John Callaway’s berating of Bateman on U.S. national TV (C-SPAN) for the shoddiness of his work (``Why do the project if you can't do it right?”)(see Callaway above in Talk, and at http://www.pritzkermilitarylibrary.org/Home/Front-Center-with-John-Callaway-46.aspx). But one need do no more than read the "Bateman’s technique" section above in Talk, to see easily with one’s own eyes a blatant example of his disgracefully deceptive work, with a link to the smoking-gun document that shows it. I asked WeldNeck to absorb and respond to this example and to Bateman’s bizarre fabrication of casualty tolls ("between 8 and 35 wounded or killed"; "somewhere between eighteen and seventy civilians died"; "around 25 dead"; "perhaps as few as a dozen were killed"; a dozen to "slightly more" than two dozen killed), but WeldNeck simply ignores such requests for reasonable discourse and pushes on belligerently, with his “get lost” retorts, in an effort to turn the article into an apologia for the U.S. Army.

There are no “two versions” of No Gun Ri, any more than there are two versions of the My Lai Massacre or The Holocaust. There are the facts and the unknowns as have best been determined by dispassionate journalists and scholars, and as clearly sourced in the pre-WeldNeck article. And when the actors who matter – the Korean survivors, the ROK government, the U.S. Army – disagree on one key element or another, the article should note those discrepancies. But the article, already too long, shouldn’t descend into a morass of tertiary elements, baseless allegations, that then require more words to knock down.

WeldNeck has gotten totally out of hand. A bill of particulars will be filed to the noticeboard, but to note just some of the sabotage he has committed against this article:

• In at least three places, he falsified the description of important military documents, the “shoot refugees” orders, by adding sugarcoating qualifiers (“when they were suspected to be North Korean forces,” “if warranted,” etc.) that don’t exist in the documents. Asked to correct those, he replied, “I don't think I'll be doing that any time soon.”

There is additional context to the guidelines given on dealing with refugee movements. Some of that context is given in the documents you cite. WeldNeck (talk) 14:46, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

• Twice he deleted, without explanation, as always, the crucially important fact that the U.S. Army deliberately omitted the Muccio letter, No Gun Ri’s key smoking-gun document, from its investigative report. He also deleted the link to that vital letter in a caption.

It still in the article and I have no plans to remove it. WeldNeck (talk) 14:46, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

• He falsified a descriptive paragraph on the shootings by changing it to make it appear as though only South Korean investigators found the 7th Cavalry responsible, when in fact the U.S. report did the same.

The conclusion of the US and ROK are similar only in one aspect: they both agree that US forces fired on a group of refugees. Nearly every other detail and conclusion differs. To say that the two reports “agree” on anything is a terrible misrepresentation. WeldNeck (talk) 14:46, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

• He deleted, with nary a notice, an ex-soldier’s testimony to the Army that they were told to “kill everybody from 6 to 60.”

There is simply no reliable source for that statement. WeldNeck (talk) 14:46, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

• He eliminated a significant sentence noting that the Army failed to investigate No Gun Ri in 1950 although it knew about the killings then.

I didn’t think it was that significant. WeldNeck (talk) 14:46, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

• He deleted a sentence noting that the official Army history backed up the survivors’ contention that it was the 1st Cavalry Division at No Gun Ri.

Is that even in doubt? WeldNeck (talk) 14:46, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

• He repeatedly reverts “Aerial imagery” to repeat the error of attributing to Korean analysts the U.S. analyst’s call for an authentication process of aerial imagery (while also jumbling the logical flow of that section).

Fixed. This was a really minor point and had you been more clear I would have corrected it some time ago. WeldNeck (talk) 14:46, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

• Despite a clear warning on Talk that “infiltrators” in the U.S. Army history meant uniformed enemy troops skirting the Americans’ flanks, he is in the midst of dumping “examples” of “infiltrators" into the article to build a phony case that refugees were behind the U.S. defeats.

You have gone to great lengths to rewrite the history of the early days of the Korean war to exclude any mention that Nork troops were disguising themselves and infiltrating into refugee columns. Muccio’s letter to Dean specifically mentions the role this tactic played in the defeat of the 24th at Taejon. Inclusion of this information is a must. A large number of sources, both hostorical and journalistic confirm this. You resistance to this is quite baffling. WeldNeck (talk) 14:46, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

• He even stooped to eliminating Bruce Cumings, a leading scholar of this period of the Korean War, from the Further Reading list because, as WeldNeck said somewhere, he considers him a “NORK-phile,” that is, WeldNeck doesn’t like his political outlook.

Bruce Cummings is a widely viewed as both a reliable authoritative source on pre WW2 history of Korea and a DPKR fanboy. WeldNeck (talk) 14:46, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

• When such problems were corrected, he simply reverted to his original untruths, without discussion, even when the correction -- in good faith -- sought to preserve any unoffending wording of his.

There are many other examples. This has been a terrible, sad waste of time. And WeldNeck’s belligerence shows he won’t stop. Let’s hope the WP community sees what must be done. Charles J. Hanley 13:01, 21 October 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

Where to begin.

First, it would help if you stop referring to me as a Holocaust denier.

You do have a COI, that plain to see from any outside observer.

BW5530’ opinions are just that, his opinions. Its nice that they parrot yours almost word for word (strange) but irrelevant to this discussion. When he is published, we might take them more seriously but until that time we have to stick with the reliable sources that affirm Bateman’s us as a source here.

There are as many versions of the events of July 26-29 as witnesses who saw it. Some of those perspectives conform to documentary evidence and some do not. All of it provides a piece of what happened and none of it should be excluded or tampered with (as the AP’s reports were shown to have done).

As to your specific bullet points I have addressed them above: WeldNeck (talk) 14:46, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

I think I understand what this discussion is about. As a military historian, this problem comes up a lot. This is how it looks to me. Mr. Hanley and AP have done a serious job of historical investigation of a subject. In doing so, they have uncovered very strong evidence of a massacre of civilians by US troops in Korea, and a coverup of said massacre at various points by the US military. This is neither unusual nor earth shaking news. Official history nearly always carefully overlooks the transgressions of one's own side, and this is as true of the US military as it is of any other military. One can cite examples from as long ago as the Indian wars up through yesterday's reports from the War on Terror. In every nation's military, there is a similar view - letting the home population in on all the ugly things that happen in war undermines popular support for the war effort, thus it is seen as the duty of the military to hide actions that will upset the folks at home, and to deny them if they are alleged, and to conduct "investigations" whose purpose is to reassure one's population of the moral uprightness of one's actions. These secrets, mind you, are not concealed from the "enemy", or even our "friends" whose country we may be fighting in. They already know about it. So it is not a shattering revelation to suggest that the evidence points to a cover up of the No Gun Ri massacre.

The next question cuts closer to the bone. When such an incident comes to light, the immediate effort is to limit the damage, to suggest this was the action of one or two bad apples, troops who cracked for one reason or other, to insist that the casualties inflicted were smaller than charged, and that it was an aberration. There is not infrequently an effort to suggest that the deceased brought it on themselves; didn't follow instructions, were actually enemy combatants, were shielding enemy combatants, etc. Again, standard responses. They are to be expected, and have been seen over and over again. The motivation is to separate the incident from the mission. This is where the "final defensive fires" of rhetoric and argumentation is usually the densest. If it is suggested that the fault lies not with the lieutenants and captains down at platoon and company level, but is actually the logical outcome of policies coming from division, corps, army or theater command, then a very different picture emerges. It suggests not just that a few of our brave boys acted badly, it suggests that our country is engaged in a conflict where our top commanders do not care at all for the lives of the country we are allegedly there to protect. That goes right to the heart.

In this case, we are expected to believe that while a few troops may have acted out of fear, ignorance, misunderstanding, or "appropriate" fear that the civilians could have been Inmun Gun (DPRK soldiers), but that such fear, ignorance and disregard for the lives of Koreans could not possibly have infected the commanders of divisions, corps, armies, and the sainted Douglas MacArthur himself. In other words, some folks believe it is vital that the US must be the "good guys", and so it is impossible to accept that we could have, by policy, been willing to murder civilians.

I would suggest from reading the above correspondence, and articles regarding the incident, and this discussion, that Mr. Neck is simply attempting to prevent the article from appearing as written because it contradicts the clean black and white picture he cherishes, that the US military are the Good Guys, and so anything that suggests otherwise must be beaten down. I do hope the editors of Wikipedia will prevent him from sabotaging this important contribution to real US history. My friends who are field grade officers in the US military have shared with me their disgust at coverups of actual crimes we have committed, and believe that such are detrimental to their mission of defending our country. If we are lied to by the likes of Mr. Neck, and assured that we always "do the right thing", we as a public are unable to grasp why we seem to have so many dedicated enemies.Jack Radey (talk) 21:41, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

The above comment is pure original research and WP:SOAPBOX material, that also fails to assume good faith.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 23:24, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

• How can anyone defend the North Korean/AP version of what happened with a straight face at this point? Looking over the original AP story, I found this quote from Flint priceless: “Some of us [shot at the refugees] and some of us didn’t....I wouldn’t fire at anybody in the tunnel like that.” The conscious of No Gun Ri? Not quite. It turns out Flint was wounded and sent to the rear the night before the incident.[2] It wasn’t just Flint either. There were three other “witnesses” quoted by the AP who weren’t actually there: Daily, Hesselman and Allen. There are no personnel records for the refugees, so we cannot verify who was there and who was not. Judging from the accounts they later gave the army investigators, four soldiers who were at NGR (Patterson, Kerns, Steward, and Peece) were misquoted. Tinkler refused to talk to the army, and gave widely varying accounts to each of the several reporters who interviewed him. Carroll and Lippincott insisted there was no massacre. “We were not using our machine guns except when we were under attack because we were short on ammunition,” Carroll told CNN.[3] Carroll was the senior officer present. Wenzel said his unit was fired on by someone who was crossing the bridge with the refugees. He and others briefly fired back. Needless to say, Wenzel got left out of the AP story. So how many died? Wenzel said there were 15-20 refugees on the bridge when he opened fire. So number killed was presumably something less than this. Kerns said he saw between four and nine bodies lying around after the incident. George Henry Thomas (talk) 09:38, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

I’m sorry, but no matter how desperately you believe in the above, it is all hogwash, all going back to one terrible fabricator in the year 2000 and clung to by people who apparently find the truth hard to swallow, who don’t want to accept that in 2001 the U.S. and South Korean governments found that the U.S. Army and U.S. airpower killed the refugees at No Gun Ri “by the effects of small-arms fire, artillery and mortar fire, and strafing,” that a South Korean investigative commission subsequently verified the names of 163 dead and missing and 55 wounded, some fatally, and said “many” more were killed whose names were not reported, that witnesses from every angle –- South Korean, American, North Korean – attested to hundreds of dead, and that orders were flying around the war zone to shoot civilians, no questions asked. Indeed, investigators for South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported in 2008 they were investigating more than 200 "other No Gun Ri's."

A simple exercise above (under "Bateman's technique"), linking to a document, will show anyone with a clear, open mind how deeply untrustworthy Bateman is – how much hogwash the hogwash is. WeldNeck was asked to assess Bateman’s technique there and defend it. He has been silent.

WeldNeck has done damage to the integrity of this article, and by extension, to Wikipedia. The falsehoods have been pointed out to him, plainly and indisputably, and he has refused to correct them. The efforts will continue. Meanwhile, Mr. Thomas, give "Bateman’s technique" a go, and let everyone know whether this is what you consider truthfulness. Charles J. Hanley 16:16, 25 October 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

My Hanley, your strawmen are getting little bit too difficult to bear. No one and I repeat no one is denying that between July 26 and July 29 1950 a number of South Korean civilians were killed by US aircraft, indirect fire from artillery and mortars and small arms fire from the 2/7. No matter how many times you accuse others of denying this, it just doesn’t stand up: everyone agrees that this happened.

You continue to assert that the AP’s verison of event is the only one notable enough to be included in the article but there are many well documented flaws with the AP reporting:

This article doesn't present a "version" of events. It draws from countless media sources, academic works, official reports. The only "version" is the one WeldNeck is trying to impose on it. WeldNeck, what is needed is for you to reverse the falsehoods and fix the errors you've introduced, rather than repeat ancient, baseless allegations from the reckless 7th Cav'er Bateman, lies that have nothing to do with Wikipedia 2013. In your desperation to gut this article, you won't even act when it's pointed out (visible to anyone at Google Books) that you have seriously misquoted that book by Sloan. Much more seriously, when will you restore the fact, deleted twice by you, that the U.S. Army in 2001 suppressed the smoking-gun "Muccio letter" from its investigative report? As for your "well-documented" nonsense, your "document" is a grossly deceitful magazine article inspired by Bateman 13 years ago. If you actually read it, you may have noticed that, incredibly, it never told readers there were two dozen Korean witnesses as well, providing powerful matching detail to what a dozen GI witnesses had told the AP. Bateman and his 7th Cav crony writing the article wanted to dupe the willingly gullible -- as they obviously have, even these days on this Talk page -- into believing the story of No Gun Ri came from a couple of GIs "who weren't there." That's WeldNeck's "document."

* The reliance on US veterans who were not present but were reported as being eyewitnesses: Hesselman, Daily, Flint

Hesselman and Flint sure as hell were there. Where's your "document" saying otherwise? The AP got their medical records, and also knew how to read company morning reports, a "skill" that eluded Bateman. Daily, AP later confirmed, wasn't there, but he was the unit's unofficial historian over the years and knew all about No Gun Ri, knowledge he shared with journalists. It also says a lot that neither Hesselman nor Flint would cooperate with the IG.

Multiple reliable source have confirmed they were not. As far as the AP confirming Daily wasn’t there, that’s a very polite way to say the mountain of evidence presented to the AP team months before the Pulitzer committee met finally cajoled the AP into admitting they had flubbed it. Daily’s role as the “unofficial historian” should have been a red flag that he contaminated many members of the 7th who were convinced that not only was he who he claimed he was but that he was at No Gun Ri with them:

When confronted with the fact that Daily could not have been at No Gun Ri, one of the AP’s other notable witnesses, Eugene Hesselman, repeated over and over again, “I know that Daily was there. I know that. I know that.”

* The misrepresentation of US veteran’s statements to support your preferred POV: Patterson, Kerns, Steward.

Nobody was misquoted. Period. The men were on videotape, audiotape and in repeated telephone interviews saying what it was said they said. Does anyone believe some men in such a situation wouldn't start dissembling once they saw the headlines and it became a "federal case"?

Well, since these supposed videotaped interviews are not available, I suppose all we have is the word of the AP team … not exactly a reliable source in this case. But if they do exist, I think they might look something like this

* Downplaying and ignoring numerous and well documented reports uses of civilian refugees by the KPA to infiltrate disguised KPA troops, mask KPA troop movements, and infiltrate KPA partisans, even ignoring KPA infiltrators attaching the 1st Cavalry division HQ on the 26th.

This is one of your most deceitful interventions, WeldNeck. How can one assume "good faith" in you when it has been pointed out that the official Army history makes totally clear that the "infiltrators" during this period were uniformed North Korean soldiers -- not troops disguised as refugees -- skirting the exposed flanks of U.S. units and attacking from behind. You now know this and yet you are dumping fraudulent "examples" of "refugee" infiltration into the paragraph under Background. When will you reverse this particular falsehood?

The official Army history does not make that “totally clear”, in face Appleman makes totally clear that North Korean infiltrators made use of refuges to hide their movements and that it was an issue throughout the war:

The large numbers of Korean refugees crowding the Yongdong area undoubtedly helped the enemy infiltrate the 1st Cavalry Division positions. On 24 July, for example, a man dressed in white carrying a heavy pack, and accompanied by a woman appearing to be pregnant, came under suspicion. The couple was searched and the woman's assumed pregnancy proved to be a small radio hidden under her clothes. She used this radio for reporting American positions. Eighth Army tried to control the refugee movement through the Korean police, permitting it only during daylight hours and along predetermined routes.

In the meantime, and pursuant to General Walker's order on the 11th, Colonel Murch's 2d Battalion, 27th Infantry, had been engaged in helping to clear the enemy from the area south of Yongsan. On the 11th Murch's battalion departed from its assembly area near Masan and rolled north toward the Naktong River. A steady stream of Korean refugees clogged the road. As the battalion pushed its way through this traffic a refugee cart overturned, exposing about fifteen rifles and several bags of ammunition. Approximately twelve North Korean soldiers disguised as refugees accompanying it fled across an open field.

* Ignoring the raging battle taking place all along the Western edge of Hwanggan.

What "raging battle" do you speak of? Do you mean 25th ID? That was east, not west, of Hwanggan, and had nothing to do with No Gun Ri. Do you mean 8th Cav at Yongdong? That's in the article. Please.

The fighting took place southwest of Hwanggan around the 26th

Contrary to the account by the Koreans and the AP, the battlefield was a dynamic place from 26 to 29 July as the North Koreans probed the American positions around Hwanggan. As day broke on 27 July, 2-7 CAV reported two columns of enemy soldiers on the railway about 1500 yards to the south of the bridge, heading toward their positions. At 0630 the 1st Battalion CP and C Company came under a mortar and artillery attack. Fifteen minutes later Colonel Nist reported to division that the regiment had successfully repulsed the enemy attack. The size of this attack suggests the North Koreans were probing the American positions to determine the disposition of 7th CAV defenses, while other units moved to the flanks and rear of the division. Shortly after this attack a friendly aircraft, perhaps called in to support the defense, strafed the 1st Battalion CP. Although no one was injured, this event led Nist to press for a TACP to help control aircraft in support of the fight.

* Representing an order given to the 8th (who were in the midst of a desperate fight to escape envelopment cause in part by KPA infiltrators) to fire on "everyone trying to cross lines" as a blanket order to all battalions.

Huh? Where do you find that? Who told you that? Ah, I remember: Thirteen years ago that was a Bateman complaint. It was false then, and false now. The WP article describes the 8th Cav order totally accurately. You're wasting everyone's time with this claptrap.

Why mention the 8th cav log if its not relevant? I agree, total claptrap.

• A refusal to accept the findings of the aerial reconnaissance analysis except to claim that they had been faked and ignoring the fact that if the South Korean analysts wanted access to the unspliced frames all they had to do was travel to the DIA and review it form themselves.

More nonsense. Journalists don't "accept" anything, or "refuse to accept" anything. We report facts. And this article reported accurately the U.S. Army's listed conclusions about that aerial analysis, and the South Koreans' counter position. That's all the article needs.

The aerial footage seems to evoke a strong degree of cognitive dissonance in you.

You continue to narrate this event from a bubble, ignoring wider events that contributed to it and the tactical situation that US forces faced in late July. WeldNeck (talk) 21:16, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Any reader of the No Gun Ri Massacre article from the period before WeldNeck began his mangling and coverup job would see that it had all the context it needed. I ask again, when will WeldNeck fix the mess he's making? He can start by quoting the Sloan book honestly and removing the dishonest "infiltration" cases. Charles J. Hanley 22:54, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

From Sloan, pg 72:

but now hundreds of enemy infiltrators, many clad in white to mingle undetected with civilian refugees who moved freely among the American troops, were all around the men of the 34th. There was no safe haven from snipers firing rifles and tossing grenades from scores of buildings, and soon after daylight, NKPA tanks rumbled into the city.

Sorry to burst another bubble. WeldNeck (talk) 00:22, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

• “Base articles largely on reliable secondary sources. While primary sources are appropriate in some cases, relying on them can be problematic," according to WP:V. In other words, this article is not a place to dump your unpublished research so you can have the last word on everything. The 2005 South Korean report receives attention here way out of proportion to what it gets anywhere else. There’s a passing mention of it in a 2007 AP story about the Muncio letter, and it has a listing on Amazon (Sales rank: 6,489,124). That’s really all I could find. There is no review, account of its contents, or explanation of who put it together anywhere on the Web except Wikipedia. In most retellings, the 2001 U.S. Army report is the end of the story. The quotes from people who carp about it and the speculation about faked photos don’t belong in an encyclopedia article. Now we’re told that unpublished video tapes confirm the AP account and disprove the Army’s report. WTF? So go write a news story about it. If you think that the Army report is a whitewash, what about the South Korean excavation of the site in 2007?[4] No bones or any evidence of a massacre were found then either. George Henry Thomas (talk) 04:46, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

While I agree that the article might make problematic use of primary sources and some editors who are more interested in telling their version of the truth rather than taking an encyclopedic perspective. <Having said that however, I must say a Korean Comission report is certainly as good as any US army report and as far as reviews and perception of source are concerned, we can't simply look at US or English publications but we need to consider other language publications (In particular Korean) as well.--Kmhkmh (talk) 14:34, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

The U.S. Army report is a case of the perpetrator of an alleged crime investigating itself. How reliable is that? (The answer lies in this article's rather limited examples of the many suppressed documents and testimony -- that is, any examples that WeldNeck has not managed to delete.) Next, Bateman is a former officer and public booster of the regiment that carried out the killings. How trustworthy is he? Not one bit, as can easily be seen in the critique of the Bateman book and its more than 100 fabrications, distortions, misreadings and other falsehoods, the critique offered long ago to WeldNeck but that he doesn't want to read. Or one can simply check scholar BW5530’s assessment of Bateman above (under “Other POV”). The official Korean reports come much closer to what independent journalists and scholars determined about No Gun Ri. Charles J. Hanley 18:11, 19 November 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

We don't need "scholarly assessments" by BW5530 oder any other WP editors, we need published external scholarly assessments and so far you've provided none.--Kmhkmh (talk) 20:20, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

But who would waste time on such an endeavor, since we're talking about 1) an insignificant writer and an insignificant publisher, 2) a writer plainly tied to the alleged perpetrator in the story (7th Cavalry) and a publisher long favored by the U.S. Army, and 3) a piece of work whose sophomoric tone right from the opening pages alerts intelligent readers that this is not something to be taken seriously and to devote any more time to? We should be grateful that BW5530 did take the time to describe its fatal flaws, beginning with the fact that the writer didn't even bother to go to Korea and interview the best witnesses, the survivors. I implore anyone interested to please conduct the simple exercise offered in Talk at "Bateman's technique," so you can see once and for all for yourself the total untrustworthiness of what he writes. Thanks. Charles J. Hanley 23:59, 19 November 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

Excavations

Is there anything else on the excavations done to the site, or is just the one article? 21:07, 30 October 2013 (UTC)WeldNeck

It's not something we can use in the article, but take a look at this account. George Henry Thomas (talk) 11:55, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

• As a newcomer to this forum and to the prolonged argument between Mr. Charles J. Hanley of the Associated Press and a person who identifies himself as WeldNeck I noted that Mr. WeldNeck contested at one point Mr. Hanley's right to edit "No Gun Ri Massacre," on the killing of civilians by US troops, because of a "conflict of interest" supposedly stemming from his having reported on the No Gun Ri affair with his Associated Press colleagues. Mr. Hanley and two other AP journalists shared a Pulitzer prize for this very work. The Pulitzer prize committee does not bestow the highest award in American journalism on biased work. This particular article moreover eventually obliged the governments of the United States and South Korea to acknowledge that there had been a massacre at No Gun Ri after years of stonewalling by the US government. Nevertheless, Mr. WeldNeck refers to this article at another point in the discussion as "yellow journalism."

Mr. WeldNeck seems to rely for his own opinions on the writings of a former officer of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, the regiment responsible for the 1950 killings. Isn't this where the conflict of interest lies? Moreover, Mr. Hanley points out in the Talk discussion that Mr. WeldNeck deleted two references to the fact that Army investigators in 2001 failed to disclose the U.S. ambassador's letter saying the Army in 1950 adopted a policy to shoot refugees. Mr. Hanley also notes that Mr. Weldneck deleted a reference to the Army's failure to investigate No Gun Ri in 1950, when it learned of the killings. Doesn't deleting these two facts, which certainly appear to be crucially important in deciding whether or not there had been any official US cover-up in 1950 and 2001, bring into serious question Mr. WeldNeck's motivations?

In this regard, I note also on Mr. WeldNeck's user page that a WP administrator warns him against "POV pushing on all the articles you have edited," and says, "This is your only warning; if you add defamatory content to Wikipedia again, as you did at My Country, My Country, you may be blocked from editing without further notice."Petiso52 (talk) 15:53, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Another brand new editor with the exact same line as Mr Hanley ... thats odd. Some corrections.

My opinions arent expressed anywhere in the article, just material from reliable sources

You said that I deleted "the fact that Army investigators in 2001 failed to disclose the U.S. ambassador's letter saying the Army in 1950 adopted a policy to shoot refugees". Its still in the article:

After the Army issued its report, it was learned it also had not disclosed its researchers' discovery of at least 14 additional declassified documents showing high-ranking commanders ordering or authorizing the use of lethal force to stop refugees in certain areas in the Korean War's early months. They included communications from 1st Cavalry Division commander Gay and a top division officer to consider refugees north of the firing line "fair game"[53] and to "shoot all refugees coming across river

I dont know if this is satire or what:

The Pulitzer prize committee does not bestow the highest award in American journalism on biased work.

That would explain Walter Duranty, Janet Cooke or Bilal Hussein (to name a few).

Your last point to my contributions on Poitras, I was unaware how things around here worked and have since learned from my early mistakes. WeldNeck (talk) 16:33, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

All of these new editors popping up with the same line of reasoning and the same writing style strongly suggest WP:SOCKPUPPETRY.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 20:00, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

I was think that or some form of Meatpuppetry. WeldNeck (talk) 21:14, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Nah, they're socks. These accounts are brand new--so new that none of their names are linked--and their first and only edits are to this talk page. Nevertheless, they show significant understanding of Wikipedia policy and knowledge of this debate, and there have been five of them. This is about as clear-cut a case of "where there's smoke, there's fire" as any I've seen on Wikipedia, yet your earlier investigation was railroaded when User:In ictu oculi baselessly accused you of being a sock (as though this would be mitigating evidence in the case against User:Cjhanley). User:Shirik refused to examine the IP--even though Cjhanley later admitted it was him--and absurdly claimed there were "significant differences" between BW5530 and Reader0234. Thus, only Reader0234 was ever checked, and the connection between him and Cjhanley was "inconclusive". Jack Radey, BW5530, Reader0234, and Petiso52 are almost certainly the same person. The obvious suspect is Cjhanley. If not him, then one of the users who have agreed with him, or a troll of some variety.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 21:59, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Checkusers will almost never comment on IPs, and certainly would not in this case. Please familiarize yourself with policy before jumping to assumptions on why a case went a certain way. That case is not even closed yet, so no decisions have actually been made. If the IP admits it is related, then it's related, and you don't need a checkuser to tell you that. --Shirik (Questions or Comments?) 23:31, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Since you're here, can you please elaborate on the "significant differences" between BW5530 and Reader0234?TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 23:46, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

I disagree that they are socks, but I do believe they have been asked to comment on the article. Their arguments are verbatim Hanley's and they only showed up recently. IMO Hanley asked them to contribute. I dont know if there's anything wrong with that, but I dont think its fair that one user can recruit other people to create a false consensus. WeldNeck (talk) 00:16, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

• To all: throwing around sock accusations shouldn't be done lightly. File at WP:SPI, but only if you believe you can make a case based on behavior and other evidence--not on a hunch. Drmies (talk) 04:10, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Shirik wasn't able to point out a single "significant difference", because there are none. The hunch is not that there is socking, but that Hanley is to blame; that there is socking is undeniable.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 04:41, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

File it then. Drmies (talk) 04:57, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Events of 25–29 July 1950

Over the next week or so, I will be rewriting this section. It will be broken down by day to provide a better narrative of what happened where to whom and by whom. It will include all the current material in the section as well as a fair deal of additional information.

A rough outline.

• 25 July

Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri evacuated

2/7 breaks down and flounders outside Yongdong and begins a disorganized retreat to Hwanggan.

• 26 July

Refugees near the railroad bridge, attacked by aircraft

2/7 still in disorganized retreat

KPA advancing from the west

(later 26th) 2/7 put back under command and sent to guard position overlooking NGR bridge.

• 27 July

2/7 positioned overlooking NGR.

2-7 reports two columns of KPA troops south of the bridge.

Refugees take shelter near bridge underpass

Refugees shot

Possible incoming fire from T-34 tanks on the 2/7

Probing attacks on the 1/7 from the KPA 3rd division

• 28 July

Some refugees manage to flee, others sat hold up under bridge

More refugees shot?

KPA 3rd division attacks 1/7 defending just east of the bridge.

• 29 July

2/7 witdraws to Hwanggan

If any of this seems out of place, please correct and make note. WeldNeck (talk) 21:10, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

OK, first go done. Before anyone takes offense take not that all material that was there is still there. I just reorganized it, placed it in chronological order and added additional information. WeldNeck (talk) 20:51, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

My Response to WeldNeck's Unreasonable Writings

Since I'm pretty shocked to learn one person is trying to distort the truth of both Korean and US history with his unreasonable writings and he is actually and tremendously damaging the very purpose of the WP itself by giving false information about the No Gun Ri Massacre to the public, I’d like to leave my personal comments as a Korean who knows the facts of what happened there at the tragic scene of the Massacre much better than WeldNeck.

The Committee for the Review and Restoration of Honor for the No Gun Ri Victims of the Republic of Korea examined the case and officially announced 150 people were killed, 13 were missing and 55 were disabled. Many other people failed to make a Damage Report. In this article, this person says “aerial footage showed no signs of mass graves or dead bodies.” But everybody always knew many bodies were under the bridge.

This person wants the public to think North Korean soldiers were with the refugees at No Gun Ri. But the committee said the refugees were searched by American soldiers and no impure elements were found.

This person also used Robert Bateman for information. Robert Bateman is well known to Koreans for spreading distortions and false information about No Gun Ri. He wore the 7th Cavalry Regiment badge. He is just a 7th Cavalry man defending the 7th Cavalry with untrue writings.

Wikipedia should not allow this person to mislead people with damaging false information. The No Gun Ri Massacre article should stick to the truth. Accurate Korean History (talk) 07:47, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

No offense but we don't need people claiming to know the facts or better person X, but we need reliable sources (preferably peer reviewed even). Wikipedia is compiled from reliable external sources and not from what individual WP editors or readers considers to the "the truth".--Kmhkmh (talk) 14:21, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Mr Inaccurate Korean History: the material is sourced to a WP:RS. That is all that's required. WeldNeck (talk) 14:27, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

The damage done

Drmies, if you plan to do any extensive editing on this article, I would strongly urge you to compare the current bloated, fact-challenged state of affairs with the way the article stood before WeldNeck descended on it. That's the June 24 version. A close analysis will show numerous significant elements deleted, particularly those incriminating of the U.S. military, and almost 1,000 words added, almost all of it either superfluous (Major Witherspoon? Bosnia? Hesselman?) and-or demonstrably untrue (most of the "infiltration episodes" in Background; "no air strikes" near No Gun Ri; Hesselman again; the "$400 million claim" etc. etc.) Charles J. Hanley 20:37, 19 November 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

Drmies, by all means compare the current more comprehensive version with the prior version carefully crafted to support the AP's contested narrative at the exclusion of any other relevant POV. Please be sure to note the high quality of the sources used for what Mr Hanley calls the "demonstrably untrue" "infiltration episodes". As for "superfluous", more detail is usually better than less when it relates ot the subject and leaves the reader with a more comprehensive understanding of the subject. WeldNeck (talk) 20:53, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

• I think that for now I'm just going to get my kid from school, thanks. Perhaps I'll be able to have a look later tonight. But may I add that I have no intention of being (sole) judge/jury on this complicated article. Drmies (talk) 21:32, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
• I couldn't resist making a few tweaks to the lead in line with WP:LEAD. Please see my edit summaries, where I have tried to be complete. Drmies (talk) 22:40, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
  • TheTimesAreChanging, you have a point with this edit: I meant to remove the label as well, and I'll do so rightaway. Why remove the word, then? Well, that the report is "controversial" is itself possibly controversial, but the statement in the lead derived from the report is not. So its supposed controversial status is completely unnecessary and POV, since it aims to discredit, slyly, an uncontroversial statement. There is plenty of room in the article already for the various criticism of the report, and a note could even be placed in the lead, saying something along the lines of "some conclusions of the report were criticized or disputed". But doing away with the entire series as "controversial" is not warranted.

    As for your earlier edit, as I pointed out the two-paragraph news flash was published while the investigation was still ongoing, so your summary, "These are salient facts, regardless of interpretation", is incorrect: the fact reported was that no remains had yet been found. So at best that reference doesn't verify the statement, besides the fact that such references aren't necessary in the lead (see WP:LEAD), if the content is properly verified in the article. But the section "Aerial Imagery" (the second capital is incorrect, per MOS) is fraught with problems: the sentence "This analysis is significant" needs to be explicitly attributed in the text, which it isn't, and when it is it will be clear that it is ascribed to a primary source which, it can easily be argued (and I'm sure Cjhanley would argue it), is itself a party in the dispute. In other words, that entire section needs to be rewritten, and the second paragraph in that section disputes the conclusions suggested by the fast-and-loose sentence you reinserted as a fact, "no remains were found". There is no prima facie reason to lend weight to the US investigation (in the lead!) and not to the Korean investigation, which, if I read it right, basically argues "it doesn't matter that nothing was found". For crying out loud, the section closes with the US recommendation that these things need to be better documented, suggested that they weren't documented well enough to lend so much weight to the US report's conclusion. And for those reasons I will again remove the statement: extraordinary claims, especially in the lead, require strong evidence, and a. that news flash doesn't accurately reflect what was going on and b. the larger section is not adequately summarized in the lead, with the opposing report not given credence, and is itself problematic. Thank you, Drmies (talk) 05:30, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Drmies, the WP:LEDE should give a concise summary of the article's contents. The section of the article describing the issues with the AP's reporting go into detail about its deficiencies and the controversies surrounding it. The adjective should stay in.

With respect to the aerial imagery the “analysis is significant” because it directly contradicts with physical evidence that there were no mass graves as Korean civilians have alleged. The Korean investigation (not available online) obviously had reasons to find fault with it as it undermined one of their central conclusion but they were given to opportunity to review the original footage and chose not to do so. WeldNeck (talk) 14:28, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

WeldNeck, no. (And this without even addressing content, as Cjhanley is doing below.) You are giving one single adjective to characterize the report, and that one adjective is overblown and undue. It's overblown because "criticized" doesn't mean "generated controversy", and it's undue because it's one single aspect. How would you like it if I stuck in "Pulitzer-Prize winning" as an adjective? That's also true, and in many ways much truer than your term. Look, I don't need to be read some riot act about what WP:LEAD says, and about what WP:NPOV says. You just came in, editing only this one article and a bunch of drama threads related to it; I think I have just a bit more familiarity with our guidelines and with encyclopedic writing. If you and the other editor reinsert it I will have no other choice but to start an RfC on it, a widely publicized one, to generate a consensus on excluding the term from the lead (as I said before, criticism of the report is valid and can find a place in the article). It will be a waste of everyone's time since, ahem, I happen to be right on this tiny issue, and an insistence on including this POV term in the face of evidence and guidelines will only serve to suggest POV editing. I'm trying very hard to accept good faith, but those kinds of shenanigans make that difficult.

As to your second paragraph, it doesn't matter: it simply needs to be ascribed. Wikipedia's voice cannot speak to its significance unless something is stated about that significance by unimpeachable and neutral sources. Even without assuming anything about politics and partisanship, it's clear as day that an involved party cannot automatically assumed to be neutral. I am not even suggesting that something was swept under the rug: it's a simple matter of the guidelines of WP:RS and the second of our five pillars. Thank you. Drmies (talk) 15:34, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

I would gladly welcome a "widely publicized" RfC.

The IG report and Bateman's are specific when contrasting the Korean civilians memories and the aerial footage that contradicts them. For the record though, what constitutes an "unimpeachable and neutral" source? WeldNeck (talk) 19:13, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

WeldNeck, this isn't about the AP report or whatever. It is clear that it was criticized, and it's also clear that it won a Pulitzer and is widely cited. It's about the word "controversial" in the lead. Drmies (talk) 19:31, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

For the record, once more: The only deficiency in the AP reporting was the fact that one of nine ex-soldiers quoted (one of 26 ultimately discussing the killings) turned out to have secondhand, not firsthand, information, a fact subsequently established by AP and reported by AP and by no one else. The rest of WeldNeck's "documented" (some "document") nonsense flowed from the fantasies of 7th Cav officer Bateman (and from two or three ex-soldiers who nervously, post-publication of an explosive news report, sought to hedge, with Bateman's coaching; no one was misquoted by the AP). In typical fashion, WeldNeck deleted from the article text a sentence and link to a lengthy AP article refuting Bateman's fabrications in 2000. In any event, as I've said repeatedly, none of this adds anything to our knowledge in 2013 of the facts of the No Gun Ri Massacre, and it doesn't even belong in the article. Let me frame it this way: There was another flaw in the original article, an officer with the No Gun Ri unit was quoted saying he didn't remember any such event. He later told the Pentagon he did remember it. Should we be highlighting this liar? In fact, one of the TV reports reconfirming the killings (BBC or ARD) identified one man incorrectly as a shooter. What about that? And we could list 300 examples of deceit in the Army's 300-page report, if we're interested in flaws. But, really, isn't 6,400 words too long already? Isn't the absurdity of all this apparent? Thanks. Charles J. Hanley 14:59, 20 November 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

The "only deficiency", lest see if I cannot document some others.

Herman Patterson: Patterson was quoted in the AP report as saying that: "It was just a wholesale slaughter." He said the AP misquoted him and that this quotation referred to being overrun at Naktong not No Gun Ri.

James Kerns: Quoted by the AP as saying that he "found at least seven dead North Korean soldiers in the underpasses, wearing uniforms under peasant white." Kerns he never told the AP he saw KAP soldiers in the underpass and he saw between four and nine bodies laying down in the culverts but was not sure if they were dead

Ed Daily: Not there.

Eugene Heseelman: AP quotes him and used his statements to support their stories, but medical records confirm he was evacuated and wasn’t present. He also still believes Daily was present.

Delos Flint: quotes him and used his statements to support their stories, but medical records confirm he was evacuated and wasn’t present.

Louis Allen: AP quotes him as being an eyewitness and claims he did not see hostile fire coming from the refugees. Louis Allen stated categorically that he was in Japan on leave during this time and his service record confirms this.

Harold Steward: The AP reported that Steward heard reports in 1950 of refugees being killed at No Gun Ri. Steward also stated the AP misquoted him and he only confirmed that to the AP team that civilians killed in crossfire throughout the entire 8th Army sector and he never mentioned No Gun Ri to the AP.

There are more examples of the AP's shenanigans if anyone wants me to post them. WeldNeck (talk) 19:13, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

You're correct, of course, Drmies, about the Aerial imagery section. As I told WeldNeck on Oct. 15, "The section can be kept simple: Despite eyewitness testimony (and, later, a commission's findings on casualties), the U.S. Army cited half-century-old aerial imagery to question whether there were many bodies at NGR, and the South Koreans rebutted that bodies were stacked out of sight and some were removed, and that the aerial imagery may be unreliable. That's all that's needed -- done factually and coherently. My last edit incorporated from yours more of the Army report's supposed evidence (no scavenger activity etc.). That's enough. Now you've restored all the errors and nonsense verbatim." As usual, he immediately reverted a good-faith effort at compromise wording. Here's the diff of my ill-fated edit from a month ago, if useful.

And your observation regarding WeldNeck's description of the investigation in the lead ("Based on interviews with surviving US veterans and aerial reconnaissance footage") is right on. That clause is an unmistakable sign of the myopic, parochial, xenophobic POV that pervaded all of his edits since August. What about South Korean interviews, forensics on the bullets all over the bridge, archival documents showing kill orders? At one point in Talk, he even said something about "only the South Koreans" questioned the aerial photos. My God, they're only half the investigation. And they're the half that wasn't responsible for the killings! Thanks and good luck. Charles J. Hanley 12:44, 20 November 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

I understand you feel that's all that's needed because the existence of such a substantial body of demonstrative evidence of this type would tends to significantly undermine the 50 year old memories. The South Koreans questioned the integrity of the aerial footage because that's all they could do. Based on the photographic evidence the eyewitness claims just didn't hold up so the South Koreans were left with only one course to save face: make a wild allegation that the material had been deliberately doctored. Even when the IG's team invited them to the US to inspect the originals from the archive instead of the reproductions, they refused. This refusal speaks to the motive the Korean team, they didnt want to know the truth. WeldNeck (talk) 19:25, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Bateman, again

With the help of another editor and JSTOR I found the reviews of Bateman's book, and then I saw that most of that had been brought up here already, on this interminable talk page. When I get a moment I'll read all of it and report here, and previous participants in the Bateman discussion are invited to comment as well, briefly. But please see my note below, a note that some of you probably won't like. Drmies (talk) 16:08, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Regarding the Bateman reviews, and without rereading the reviews, I recall that most were in military/military history publications, often written by military men, and uniformly written by people who themselves had extremely limited knowledge of the facts of No Gun Ri and who obviously -- and mistakenly -- assumed Bateman was writing in good faith and with a modicum of competence. As I've said, the example shown via a simple document at "Bateman's technique" above is enough, in my view, to disqualify him from any consideration as a honest writer on the subject, even aside from his obvious conflict as a 7th Cav officer. Scores of other examples exist, supplied upon request. Surely there comes a time when WP admins and contributors make their own independent judgments, and don’t simply say, “If someone else says it’s OK, it’s OK.” Thanks. Charles J. Hanley 17:47, 20 November 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

Mr Hanley comments abbreviated: WP:IDONTLIKEIT. WeldNeck (talk) 19:27, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

A note on COI and POV and all that

These discussions aren't very fruitful. It is abundantly clear to me that both WeldNeck and Cjhanley have a point of view that guides their comments and their editing, and many of the comments are simply not helping. Cjhanley has a habit of commenting at all-too-great length, bringing in all kinds of evidence from his personal knowledge--that doesn't discredit his comments, but in the end we need to go by what's published, and the walls of text are discouraging. WeldNeck is as combative as Hanley is, and this is creating a very unpleasant atmosphere; in addition, I think WeldNeck and TheTimesAreAChanging are too quick on the draw. (I invite any neutral editor to look at my recent edits and the reverts that followed it.) To prevent topic bans from being requested (and no doubt some would be granted) I urge Hanley and WeldNeck to refrain from editing the article for the time being, and perhaps TheTimes as well. I don't mind backing off myself, but I insist, for instance, that adding "controversial" to modify the AP report in the lead is POV and undue (just as "Pulitzer-Prize winning") would be.

In addition, I must strongly urge Hanley to either refrain from editing the talk page altogether or, at the very least, to keep comments short, to the point, and non-polemic. Kmhkmh already pointed out that Hanley has a proven professional COI here, and getting a topic ban is possible, though I wish to avoid that for now. ErrantX has criticized WeldNeck's editing style, and WeldNeck would do well to follow their suggestions. Both Kmhkmh and Errant are experienced editors here and I value their comments greatly. Now, I wish I had time to delve into the Bateman matter more deeply, but I have a little boy with pneumonia here with me and some other work to do. Can we please keep this professional? Thank you all. Drmies (talk) 16:26, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

As I've pointed out before, if fact-finding, objective journalists and academics who have mastered a subject, and whose reports and books are cited as sources on that subject at Wikipedia, are deemed to have COIs, then Wikipedia is surely in trouble. Meantime, forgive the "walls of text," the result simply of knowing so much (and exasperation at those who know so little and don't realize it). Charles J. Hanley 17:39, 20 November 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

Cjhanley, of course you have a COI. That's clear as day, and not in itself problematic. The question for us is whether that problematizes your editing/commenting. One of the problems noted on this talk page is that your interest leads you to spar at length with another interested editor, and that such sparring is not conducive to article improvement. BTW, I'm not sure we've seen this here before: if you are indeed you, congratulations on your fine achievement. I doubt I'll ever get a Pulitzer, and it certainly won't be for my work on Wikipedia: well done, sir, and thank you for your contribution to journalism. Drmies (talk) 18:07, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, Drmies. But, of course I don't have a conflict, unless you believe combativeness in defense of the journalistically established facts makes one an "interested party." In this case, the interested parties are the Korean survivors and the U.S. Army. That's where any COI would lie, not with the journalists and others who pinned down the facts. As for sparring on Talk, that was the inevitable result of a single contributor's disrespectful and defiant refusal to engage rationally on the article. That's what has problematized things, and thus far little has been done about it. Charles J. Hanley 18:46, 20 November 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

Yes, you do have a conflict of interest. You are not defending the journalistic work of some independent third party, but you are essentially defending your body of work. Defending the "journalistically established facts" of your own work do of course turn you in an "interested party". This is about as much COI as you can get (short of financial benefits maybe). The fact that you are uncapable (?) or unwilling to see that raises even more concern. Moreover from what I've seen so far, you seem to have a somewhat bitter feud with Bateman in the media over the "correct version" of the incident/massacre at No-gun ri. So with your participation here, there is a danger that Wikipedia might get misused as a "final arbiter for the truth about no-gun ri". Knowledge or final assessments need to be generate outside of Wikipedia and Wikipedia just reports neutrally on results and/or the open disputes. It is not supposed to take sides or to generate a final assessment of its own.

As far as Bateman is concerned from what we have so far, he clearly is reliable source on the grounds of Wikipedia policy (he is a Historian, his book got 2 published positive reviews by other historians and no negative published review). Now I can understand the concern that have been raised with regard to Bateman and i'm personally somewhat wary about him as well. However my personal view or that of any other WP editor ultimately doesn't matter, as we are obligated to report what reliable external sources say and not our personal conclusion or assessments. This is a core policy of Wikipedia and where writing in Wikipedia differs from many other forms of writing (see WP:NPOV, WP:RS, Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, the latter you might use to request feedback from other editors regarding the use of Bateman asa reliable source). --Kmhkmh (talk) 20:55, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Please review the footnotes to this article:

CBS News, BBC News, German ARD television, Munwha Broadcasting Corp. of Korea, The Associated Press, The New York Times, Dong-a Daily, The Korea Herald, Hankyoreh, Wichita (Kansas) Eagle, Cho Sun In Min Bo newspaper, Korea Times, Yonhap News Agency, the Kansas City Star, Diplomatic History journal, Archival Science journal, Critical Asian Studies journal, Oxford University Press, Prometheus Books, Routledge publishers, Henry Holt publishers, Dunam Publishing, U.S. Army Office of the Chief of Military History, the South Korean prime minister's review commission, the South Korean Defense Ministry's investigative report, the Army IG report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the Republic of Korea.

The body of work that is at stake in this article is not a single news report in 1999 by one news organization, but the sum of all that journalism, academic research, historiography and official investigative reporting cited above, which stretches back to before 1999 and forward to at least 2010. What is being defended are those established facts and nothing else.

When it comes to WeldNeck's efforts to distract from his depredations, by dragging in a 13-year-old, wild and baseless attack on that one news organization and that single story, it should be clear that this material of his adds absolutely nothing to the Wikipedia reader's knowledge of what happened at No Gun Ri in 1950. It's irrelevant to the No Gun Ri Massacre in 2013. It doesn't belong in the article. But it seems to be doing the trick for him.

Meantime, WeldNeck has gone about rewriting the wording of key documents, stuffing the article with patently false (check the sources) "refugee infiltration" episodes, removing crucial elements showing a U.S. military cover-up in 1950 and another in 2001, deleting quotes he doesn't like ("word I heard was kill everybody from 6 to 60"), and so on, and so on. And instead of something being done about this, we engage in a debate over a paragraph that shouldn't even be in the article? Thanks. Charles J. Hanley 22:25, 21 November 2013 (UTC) Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

Hmmm, how to respond to yet another insult free Hanley monologue.

"rewriting the wording of key documents", translation: adding all relevant material from said documents and not just the excerpts chosen for sensationalism.

stuffing the article with patently false (check the sources) "refugee infiltration" episodes, adding relevant material to the article that Hanley doesn't like. By all means though, someone verify these so Hanley will stop.

removing crucial elements showing a U.S. military cover-up in 1950 and another in 2001, nothing was removed, don't know what hes talking about. I suppose Mr Hanley thinks that if he continues to repeat the allegation then somehow it will become true.

deleting quotes he doesn't like ("word I heard was kill everybody from 6 to 60"), no reliable source for this.

and so on. WeldNeck (talk) 19:15, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Victims' review report

This is a really, really obscure report to be mentioned in the lede. The Chosun Ilbo site has 118 stories on No Gun Ri, but none of them mention this report (See "희생자심사및명예회복위원회" site:www.chosun.com). The commission issued its casualty figures in May 2005. There's a brief mention of it in an AP story from 2007, and that's about all the English-language publicity it got. Beta Quadrant (talk) 23:05, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Did you check for publicity/reviews outside the English media (in particular in South Korea) as well?--Kmhkmh (talk) 23:16, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Hankyoreh has hundreds of stories on No Gun Ri, but only eight that mention this report. This is the story they ran when it first came out. It is four paragraphs long, and the focus is on compensation issues. There is no claim to the effect that the report came up with significant new evidence, or that it debunked the U.S. Army report. The commission was expected to authorize payment for a certain amount of money, and that might have influenced how many victims they were prepared to recognize. As I wrote above, Chosun Ilbo`s Korean-language archive has nothing at all about this report. Beta Quadrant (talk) 04:57, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

This was discussed 18 months ago at Talk (see Archive 2, "Pickett's Charge" -- yes, that's right). The commission was led by the prime minister and included Ban Ki-moon, current U.N. secretary-general, among its members. It recapitulated much of the 1999-2001 investigative findings, along with updates from the intervening years, and the certification process for the casualty figures. It is the single comprehensive English-language source for this official South Korean government information. Meanwhile, I've added to the Casualties section two news media sources referring to the certified casualty figures. Thanks. Charles J. Hanley 17:47, 21 November 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cjhanley (talk • contribs)

• I don't see that information published anywhere, so we're left taking your word for it. Not that I doubt you, but there are hundreds of readily available news reports and two mainstream books that we could be basing this article on. Instead we are using this obscure source that only you seem to know anything about. This is not the way articles are supposed to be written, and somebody needs to read WP:V. If the report's casualty numbers were developed strictly to deal with compensation issue, then we may be misinterpreting them. You make it sound like Ban Ki-moon came along and blew the lid off this stuff. Beta Quadrant (talk) 03:07, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

400 dead

Where does this number come from? Let's take a look at that Pulitzer Prize winning AP story from 1999: "Early on July 29, the 7th Cavalry pulled back. North Korean troops who moved in found “about 400 bodies of old and young people and children” the North Korean newspaper Cho Sun In Min Bo reported three weeks later." I read the whole article, and I don't see any claim to the effect that it is a "survivor's estimate." The Victims Families Association gives the number of casualties as "218 confirmed victims". The 400 figure is not given anywhere on the English version of their website. Let's not put made-up stuff in the article. Beta Quadrant (talk) 04:59, 23 November 2013 (UTC)