Tonight, we gather to pay tribute Cpl. Steven Lucas, one more hero who gave his last full measure for his country - 58 years ago.  

On Wednesday, the Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced that the remains of Cpl. Steven Lucas, a U.S. serviceman, missing in action from the Korean War, have been identified and will be returned to his family for burial with full military honors.  This man was a hero beyond heroes.  He fought with his Brothers in Arms, helping them to cut a way out of a cul-de-sac of 30,000 Chinese soldiers bent on exterminating his unit.  Pray with me in tribute to a man who helped his brothers make it home to their families.  

Associated Press continues to follow the story being unravelled by South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, investigating war crimes and atrocities long kept secret from the Korean War of the early 1950s. Their latest story follows an earlier report last May, which I also discussed here.

The latest news continues the grisly tale of uncovering mass graves, and unearthing formerly classified documents. The number of leftists, political opponents, and just plain innocent citizens killed at the orders of then South Korean President Syngman Rhee, shortly after North Korean troops invaded the south. The number killed is estimated to be from 100,000 to 200,000 people, many of them lined up above hastily-dug trenches and shot by military police. Some apparently were buried still alive.

Ex-CIA high official Victor Marchetti wrote:

"A 'limited hangout' is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting - sometimes even volunteering - some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further."

Scott Shane's New York Times article, China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo (7/2/08), details the use of Albert Biderman's "Chart of Coercion" by members of the the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape program, or SERE, program to teach torture techniques to interrogators. The article is a fine example of how to conduct a limited hangout, or selected revelation, of intelligence-related material. Its headline and story is disingenuous or betrays ignorance.

Army Sgt. Gene F. Clark was buried today at a cemetery outside of his hometown of Muncie, Indiana.  On the way to the cemetery, his flag-draped coffin was driven past his childhood home.

Army Sgt. Edward J. O’Brien will be buried on July 2nd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with full military honors.

Sgt. Clark and Sgt. O’Brien died just three weeks and ten miles from each other, each on cold battlefields near Unsan, North Korea, in November 1950.  Their bodies were not recovered for decades.

Join us in remembering these gallant young men tonight, both of whom are finally home.

  We Shall Keep the Faith  

      Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
      Sleep sweet - to rise anew!
      We caught the torch you threw
      And holding high, we keep the Faith
      With All who died.

      We cherish, too, the poppy red
      That grows on fields where valor led;
      It seems to signal to the skies
      That blood of heroes never dies,
      But lends a lustre to the red
      Of the flower that blooms above the dead
      In Flanders Fields.

      And now the Torch and Poppy Red
      We wear in honor of our dead.
      Fear not that ye have died for naught;
      We'll teach the lesson that ye wrought
      In Flanders Fields.

   by Moina Michael, November 1918

There's been a few diaries on this already, but they barely got notice. I'm going to keep posting on this until it gets the notice it deserves, whether it's from my diary or someone else's. This is a major revelation of one of the most barbaric episodes in U.S. history.

Associated Press is reporting shocking news of mass graves being uncovered in South Korea. The expose is partly due to the work of a South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The mass executions of many tens of thousands took place in 1950, only weeks after North Korean armies invaded the South. One mass grave was exposed by a typhoon a few years ago. Recently declassified U.S. documents showed the Americans had taken pictures of a mass killing outside Daejeon. As reported at ABC News:

Horrifying information about the Korean War is coming to light in the Western press. This is some really atrocious stuff.

Apparently during the early part of the Korean War tens if not hundreds of thousands of political prisoners and people who got caught up in the regime's grasp were brutally murdered by the South Korean government.

The US appears to have watched and done nothing.

Tonight we remember Sgt. John Kyle Daggett, a young man who recently died of wounds suffered in Iraq, and we bear witness to the bittersweet homecoming of two soldiers missing from the Korean War, Sgt. 1st Class George W. Koon and Sgt. 1st Class Jack O. Tye.

Please join me below the fold to pay tribute to their memory.

Once again we welcome our dead back home. Tonight those we honor are:

* Private First Class William T. Dix - an engineer who will be honored at services in Virginia
* Private First Class Joseph K. Meyer, Jr. - the only son of a North Dakota family
* Corporal Robert L. Mason - a teenager from Parkersburg, West Virginia

The family and friends of William Dix are still recovering from the shock of his recent death. However, those still living, who knew Joseph Meyer and Robert Mason have waited 57 years to hold a funeral for them.

Due to the large number of casualties announced this week, there will be two IGTNT diaries published tonight. Be sure to visit Moneysmith's diary also.

Yesterday was the funeral of a man who fought for our country in Korea. His remains were unidentified for 57 years. He was US Army Sergeant Virgil L. Phillips of Columbus, Indiana.

Sergeant Phillips was buried in Loogootee, Indiana. Phillips had been assigned to Company K, 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. Company K was operating in Unsan, North Korea, near a bend in the Kuryong River known as the Camel’s Head. In November 1950, a few days before he would have turned 25, parts of two Chinese Communist divisions struck the 1st Cavalry Division, collapsing the perimeter and forcing a withdrawal. In the process, the 3rd Battalion was surrounded and effectively ceased to exist as a fighting unit. Phillips was one of the more than 350 servicemen unaccounted-for from the battle at Unsan.

they will always be young
they will always be beautiful
they will be in our hearts
they have become part of our souls
we will carry them with us always
and meet in the fullness of time.

(thank you labwitchy)

The siblings of Army Pfc. Elwood Reynolds dreamt their brother was alive for 57 years. It’s not that they really thought he was – it’s that they never had the closure of being able to lay him to rest.

The daughter of Army Capt. Edward B. Scullion, just 6 when her father left for Korea, said this upon hearing her father’s remains have been identified:

"I have known for almost 60 years that he was gone, but the identification "is a cause for celebration and a joyous thing."

The Reynolds and Scullion families finally have peace. And they will be reunited with their brave soldiers in the fullness of time.

"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived."

George S. Patton

That is a great quote, but I only agree with half of it. It is not wrong to mourn our dead, it would be inhuman not too, especially the three men who we honor today. They died in different battles, on different continents, and many years apart from each other, but they are all worthy of the grief of our nation.

The Department of Defense (DoD) recently announced the death of US Army Spc. Joshua A. Molina, a casualty of the Iraq War. There were also announcements from the DoD's POW/Missing Personnel Office that the remains of Army Sgt. Harry J. Laurence, an MIA from the Korean War; and that 2nd Lt. Arthur F. Eastman, an MIA from World War II, have been identified

In the Open Thread today Scout Finch tells us that it is the 100th birthday of the legendary journalist I. F. Stone: I. F. Stone's 100th birthday  Among the many things Izzy Stone did that were remarkable, he wrote a book entitled The Hidden History of the Korean War in which he revealed some very different accounts of how that war started and what our involvement in it really was. I will tell about it and the many other things he did briefly beneath the fold, but this one book has a message that John McCain needs to review before he glibly speaks about our troops stationed in South Korea as a rationale for long term troop committmens to Iraq.

In the hills of North Korea
by a lake of icy blue,
there's no monument to witness,
and no crosses are in view.

Just some land of little value
covered well by falling snow,
but they say to listen carefully
when the wind begins to blow.

You will hear the ghostly bugles
from the mountain pass, nearby.
You may hear the battle spreading
from the mountains to the sky.

*       *       *

The battle long is over now,
but fought each night anew,
in dreams of those who can’t forget;
They are called "The Chosin Few."

~ The Chosin Reservoir
By Bob Hammond (U.S. Army 57TH FA/ 7th DIV )

Today we pay tribute to two former Texans. The Department of Defense (DoD) recently announced the death of 1st Lieutenant Jeremy E Ray in Iraq. There was also a notice that the remains of a man who was held prisoner during the Korean war, Corporal Robert S. Ferrell, have been identified. Robert was from Dallas and Jeremy was from Houston.

The New York Times today reports on one of a batch of newly declassified documents from the early 1950s. The document in question, a memo from then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, is dated July 7 1950 (only two weeks after the outbreak of the Korean War). Hoover was angling for President Truman's permission to implement a plan to suspend habeas corpus, arrest thousands of citizens who were "potentially dangerous", hold them for an unspecified period, and permit the Attorney General to create special tribunals to decide whether to keep them imprisoned.

Hoover was hoping, in other words, for something close to a declaration of martial law.

For some months representatives of the FBI and of the Department of Justice have been formulating a plan of action for an emergency situation wherein it would be necessary to apprehend and detain persons who are potentially dangerous to the internal security of the country. I thought you would be interested in a brief outline of the plan.

Action to Be Taken By the Department of Justice

The plan envisions four types of emergency situations: (1) attack upon the United States; (2) threatened invasion; (3) attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory; and (4) rebellion.

The plan contains a prepared document which should be referred to the President immediately upon the existence of one of the emergency situations for the President's signature. Briefly, this proclamation recites the existence of the emergency situation and that in order to immediately protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage the Attorney General is instructed to apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous to the internal security.

In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus for apprehensions made pursuant to it. The plan also contains a prepared joint resolution to be passed by Congress and an Executive Order for the President which too will validate the previous Presidential proclamation.

The next step in the plan is a prepared order from the Attorney General to the Director of the FBI to apprehend dangerous individuals, conduct necessary searches and seize contraband as defined in the plan. Together with the order to the Director of the FBI the Attorney General will forward a master warrant attached to a list of names of individuals which names have previously been furnished from time to time to the Attorney General by the FBI as being individuals who are potentially dangerous to the internal security.

It should be pointed out that the plan does not distinguish between aliens and citizens and both are included in its purview. If for some reason the full plan is not put into operation it has so been drawn that the section applicable only to alien enemies may be put into effect.

Hoover goes on to describe an "index" of about 12,000 dangerous people, nearly all citizens, whom the FBI had been watching for some time (since at least 1948). After these 12,000 "potentially dangerous" people were locked up without charge, their dangerousness would be assessed by what are unmistakably kangaroo courts.

The plan calls for a statement of charges to be served on each detainee and a hearing be afforded the individual within a specified period. The Hearing Board will consist of three members to be appointed by the Attorney General composed of one Judge of the United States or State Court and two citizens. The hearing procedure will give the detainee an opportunity to know why he is being detained and permit him to introduce material in the nature of evidence in his own behalf. The hearing procedure will not be bound by the rules of evidence.

The Hearing Board may make one of three recommendations, that is; that the individual be detained, paroled or released. This action by the Board is subject to review by the Attorney General and the Attorney General's decision on the matter will be final except for appeal to the President.

It seems pretty clear that Truman rejected Hoover's plan, or at least refused to give an order to implement it. In retrospect, it may be easy and certainly is pleasant to assume that such a hare-brained scheme would go nowhere. But it's closer to the truth to say that it was far from inevitable during the summer of 1950 that the president would turn down this ridiculously unconstitutional scheme. It's worth pausing to consider how narrowly the nation avoided that fate.

Truman had had a spotty record on civil liberties for years. In March of 1947, for example, he created governmental "loyalty boards" that inquired into the "loyalty" of all federal employees. These pernicious boards eventually got some 400 - 1200 federal workers fired, and another 1000 or more employees resigned. It was one of several ugly marks against a president who was too ready to give ground to anti-communist hysteria in Congress, and too willing to appease several hardliners among his own top officials (such as his Attorney General, Tom Clark, whom Truman described as addicted to "secret police proposition(s)").

In creating these loyalty boards Truman acted to pre-empt the Republican Congress from legislating something even more abusive of civil liberties. Truman also feared that something truly evil might be stirred up by Hoover, whom he loathed. Truman told Clark Clifford on May 2, 1947 that he "wants to be sure and hold FBI down, afraid of 'Gestapo'". Truman believed, rightly I think, that Hoover had assembled enough dirt on members of Congress that they would give in to almost any of Hoover's demands. In fact within hours of taking the oath of office in 1945, the President had his eye on the manipulative Hoover (Hoover had sent over to the White House a young FBI agent from Truman's home town, to chat the new President up).

So the background to this notorious decision from 1947 illustrates that Truman, far from indifferent to the Bill of Rights, instead believed that he was fighting as best he could on its behalf. His profound skepticism of the FBI Director was both a personal as well as a politically savvy judgment. For all his faults (including cronyism, occasional ineptitude, stubbornness), Truman was at least a very sharp, self-reflective, and principled man. Such a person has the potential to rise above his times.

To return to Hoover's plan in July 1950. He was attempting to turn the military crisis on the Korean peninsula to his own aggrandizement by introducing (with little public notice) a policy of illegal secret detentions and a separate, secretive, and illiberal court system--under color of a national emergency. Hoover was trying to achieve something like what Dick Cheney's gang did succeed in creating after September 2001.

Today's NYT report by Tim Weiner draws attention to some of those parallels, but it strikes a false note in setting the political context of Truman's actions:

In September 1950, Congress passed and the president signed a law authorizing the detention of "dangerous radicals" if the president declared a national emergency. Truman did declare such an emergency in December 1950, after China entered the Korean War. But no known evidence suggests he or any other president approved any part of Hoover’s proposal.

In point of fact Truman did NOT sign the McCarran Act in September 1950. Quite the opposite, he vetoed the bill and denounced it as unconstitutional. I quote from Alonzo Hamby's biography, Man of the People:

But on this bill, the president--implicitly comparing himself with Jefferson in 1798 and encouraged in this direction by key aides--was determined to draw the line. He would not, he had told them for months, sign "a sedition bill."

On September 22, he released a long veto message, which he had sent with a personal appeal for consideration to every member of Congress. Its most memorable line asserted: "In a free country, we punish men for the crimes they commit, but never for the opinions they have."

Congress then overrode Truman's veto and enacted what the American public quickly dubbed the "concentration camp law". Most of the McCarran Act was subsequently ruled unconstitutional, or repealed.

In the long term, Truman emerged from this losing battle looking like a statesman. But in the heat of a mid-term election, with Democrats facing unrelenting attacks from Republicans for alleged weakness in rooting out "subversives", and having too few Congressional allies willing to fight back against the Nixonian mob, it took political courage to veto the McCarran Act. Or was it principle, or 'character', that was required?

Whatever the cause, the country was fortunate to have a real leader when Hoover's vicious scheme for destroying the Writ of habeas corpus needed to be rebuffed. And whatever that trait is, I'm looking for it in the next president. I'm searching for a candidate who can be trusted to take a firm line the next time the crazies try to pull a stunt like this.

Never the spirit is born,
The spirit will cease to be never.
Never the time when it was not.
End and beginning are dreams;
Birthless and deathless and changeless.
Remains the spirit forever.
Death has not touched it at all,
Dead though the house of it seems.

Sioux Prayer of Passing

    Tonight we remember and honor a courageous young soldier, an American hero and member of the Great Sioux Nation. Nearly 120 years ago this month, his ancestors fought the 7th Cavalry at the infamous battle of Wounded Knee. On December 9, he lost his life fighting for our nation in Afghanistan. Please join me over the fold as we say good-bye to Corporal Tanner J. O’Leary.  

The Dark Hills
by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade – as if the last of days
Were fading, and all the wars were done.

    Tonight, we have a rare opportunity say goodbye to a serviceman who has been gone for nearly sixty years. Declared MIA during the Korean War, U.S. Army Sgt. Agostino Di Rienzo will finally be laid to rest. Please join me over the fold to remember and honor this brave man, who served in both World War II and Korea, and is now home at last.