Mass Killings In South Korea In 1950 Kept Hidden From History
CHARLES J. HANLEY | May 18, 2008 01:26 PM EST
SEOUL, South Korea — One journalist's bid to report mass murder in South Korea in 1950 was blocked by his British publisher. Another correspondent was denounced as a possibly treasonous fabricator when he did report it. In South Korea, down the generations, fear silenced those who knew.
Fifty-eight years ago, at the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korean authorities secretively executed, usually without legal process, tens of thousands of southern leftists and others rightly or wrongly identified as sympathizers. Today a government Truth and Reconciliation Commission is working to dig up the facts, and the remains of victims.
How could such a bloodbath have been hidden from history?
Among the Koreans who witnessed, took part in or lost family members to the mass killings, the events were hardly hidden, but they became a "public secret," barely whispered about through four decades of right-wing dictatorship here.
"Public secrets"--perhaps that's his paradigm.
Although Charles J. Hanley is typically identified as a "Special Correspondent" for the Associated Press and the Boston Globe features his reports fairly routinely, as often as not a story shows up just once in venues like the Arizona Star online network or, at least, it doesn't disappear from sites like the UK Guardian, where this story about the status of war and peace was picked up by the Human Security Report for 2005.
Charles J. Hanley, 'Fewer Wars, but What Is a 'Conflict'?' , Associated Press, 28 June 2006.
From the African bush to Indonesia's shores, the number of wars worldwide has dropped to a new low, peace researchers report. But the face of conflict is changing, they say, and free-for-all violence in such places as the Congo can defy their definitions.
"To say conflict as a whole is in decline, I could not draw that conclusion," said Caroline Holmqvist of Sweden's Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
One might almost conclude Hanley is a dilettante, writing about Iraq bases one year, the failure of Iraq's military to measure up the next, and then heading off to cover global warming and mass migration from Antarctica.
Mass migrations and war: Dire climate scenario
by Charles J. Hanley, AP special correspondent, physorg.com, February 23, 2009
(AP) -- If we don't deal with climate change decisively, "what we're talking about then is extended world war," the eminent economist said.
His audience on Saturday, small and elite, had been stranded here by bad weather and were talking climate. They couldn't do much about the one, but the other was squarely in their hands. And so, Lord Nicholas Stern was telling them, was the potential for mass migrations setting off mass conflict.
Perhaps Hanley has not endeared himself to the Pentagon, though his summary of events leading to the non-finding of WMD in Iraq seems entirely objective, and that got him banned from the major media outlets.
That's really too bad because, as usual, Hanley seems on top of the current story that's being down-played. Like the background on the Korean tests.
NK Test, US Treaty OK Could Set off Chain Reaction
NK test and a US nod to Obama-backed nuclear test treaty could set off global chain reaction
By CHARLES J. HANLEY AP Special Correspondent
WASHINGTON May 26, 2009 (AP)
A decade after its defeat on the Senate floor, the treaty to ban all atomic bomb tests has found new life in the age of Obama, and at a time of renewed nuclear defiance by North Korea.
Monday's bomb test by the Pyongyang government "underlines the urgency of the entry into force of the (treaty) and the necessity of putting an end to all nuclear explosions for all time," said the pact's chief booster, Tibor Toth, who heads the U.N.-affiliated Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization.
Nor was his trip to Antarctica wasted,
Vast high-tech network plays crucial role in nuke debate
Governments over the past decade have quietly built up a $1 billion International Monitoring System to enforce the treaty banning nuclear-weapons tests. At more than 200 stations around the world, from deep in the Pacific to high in the Bavarian Alps, they have deployed advanced technologies to detect secret explosions.
By CHARLES J. HANLEY
The Associated Press
In this undated photo provided by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, sensors atop the Antarctic ice near Germany's Neumayer research station can sense the very low-frequency "sounds" of a distant atmospheric nuclear test.
VIENNA — In high-rise offices along the Danube, scientists riveted by computer screens "listen" to sounds no one can hear, "feel" every rumble in the Earth, "sniff" global skies for exotic gases — on alert for signs of a newborn atomic bomb.
since he saw first-hand some of the facilities that support the opportunity to promote an agenda that's been dormant for too long.
An opportunity President Obama referenced in his speech in the Czech Republic, which didn't get a whole lot of coverage either. Ditto for the pledge in Egypt that the U.S. would have no bases in Iraq in future. As Hanley reports:
President Barack Obama endorsed this view in an agenda-setting speech in Prague, Czech Republic, on April 5, when he said he would "aggressively" pursue Senate ratification. A vote may come next year, after a lobbying campaign to win the required two-thirds Senate majority.
But, while Hanley suggests that Egypt might be a hold-out, they're already on record of being willing to join the Central Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone.
Hanley's reporting on the Reaper might not have been appreciated either, especially since it was published in the Washington Post in July of 2007.
The Reaper is loaded, but there's no one on board. Its pilot, as it bombs targets in Iraq, will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada.
The arrival of these outsized U.S. "hunter-killer" drones, in aviation history's first robot attack squadron, will be a watershed moment even in an Iraq that has seen too many innovative ways to hunt and kill.
That moment, one the Air Force will likely low-key, is expected "soon," says the regional U.S. air commander. How soon? "We're still working that," Lt. Gen. Gary North said in an interview.
The Reaper's first combat deployment is expected in Afghanistan, and senior Air Force officers estimate it will land in Iraq sometime between this fall and next spring. They look forward to it.
It certainly didn't get covered on "Good Morning America." To give them credit, theArmy Times seems to appreciate his reporting.
Iraq withdrawal would face many uncertainties
By Charles J. Hanley - The Associated Press
Posted : Saturday Jul 21, 2007 15:18:29 EDT
From crating up the bombs and bullets, to shrink-wrapping the helicopters, to counting up the endless tiers of port-a-potties, the pullout of U.S. combat forces from Iraq, when it inevitably comes, will rank as the longest-planned withdrawal ever.
Despite the years of preparation, the Pentagon’s painstaking planners just as inevitably will be challenged by the unknowables of a country at war, the vagaries of politics, the harshness of terrain and climate.
"Coming out of any theater of operations is tough," says retired Lt. Gen. Gus Pagonis. But packing to go home from that distant desert presents special problems, as simple as finding the water to wash down your grungy gear, says this man who oversaw the homecoming from the last desert war, in 1991.
But not to the extent of featuring stories like the following:
Documents Show Army Seized Wives As Tactic
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of "leveraging" their husbands into surrender, U.S. military documents show.
In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a U.S. intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one American colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family’s door telling him "to come get his wife."
The issue of female detentions in Iraq has taken on a higher profile since kidnappers seized American journalist Jill Carroll on Jan. 7 and threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women detainees are freed.
The U.S. military on Thursday freed five of what it said were 11 women among the 14,000 detainees currently held in the 2 1/2-year-old insurgency. All were accused of "aiding terrorists or planting explosives," but an Iraqi government commission found that evidence was lacking....
Of course, if the military took pictures, the release of same could result in a significant kerfuffle. Not something Obama wants to have while he's concerned with nuclear proliferation and, perhaps even more important, a regimen to overlook the production and sale of nuclear fuel for energy production.
Anyway, Hanley keeps coming up with stories that probably make him an unreliable reporter from the government's point of view. Maybe the information he comes up with is just too good.
Fallout from underground tests usually is absorbed in surrounding rock, but the gases seep out. Xenon was the smoking gun in North Korea's nuclear test.
Shock waves from that October 2006 explosion registered at half the monitoring system's 40 operating seismic stations. Then an agency radionuclide post in northern Canada detected trace amounts of xenon-133 in the air. Computerized wind models enabled the Vienna team to track the gas back to North Korea, confirming the explosion was nuclear.
The monitoring system is operating on a provisional basis. If the treaty enters force, it authorizes on-site inspections of suspicious events. Together, that "will enable us to detect any possible test which is militarily significant," Hungary's Tibor Toth, the treaty organization's executive secretary, said in an interview.
That's not going to go down well with the proponents of nuclear weapons as a deterrent and a guarantor of "dominion."
Hanley's latest addresses the other side of the equation in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Star Tribune--i.e. how nuclear energy production is going to be made less threatening.
Idea of a global uranium producer gains support
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
Last update: June 4, 2009 - 4:55 PM
VIENNA - Warren Buffett's bankroll, President Obama's clout and the partnership of a savvy ex-Soviet strongman may turn the steppes of central Asia into a nuclear mecca, a go-to place for "safe" uranium fuel in an increasingly nervous atomic age.
The $150 million idea, with seed money from billionaire Buffett, must still navigate the tricky maze of global nuclear politics, along with a parallel Russian plan. But the notion of fuel banks is moving higher on the world's agenda as a way to keep ultimate weapons out of more hands.
And didn't Bill Clinton travel to Kazakhstan to promote the uranium interests of his new Canadian friend, a Mr. Frank Giustra?
Maybe the problem is that Charles J. Hanley is just into too many weighty matters. There would seem to be enough to keep half a dozen Kossacks busy. You just have to know where to look.
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