Shorrock replies: I'm reading this late Sunday night and don't have time to write a lot, but this article is a good summary of what I've written based on the FOIA documents I obtained. Best place to read them is to do a search under my name - Tim Shorrock - using google or some other decent engine - and my Kwangju articles usually pop up first or second. Look also for the piece I did in The Nation in late 1996 on Richard Holbrooke's role in this fiasco. The only US paper to cover my documents was the Washington Post, which did a very cursory job shortly after my stories came out in the paper I worked for at the time, The Journal of Commerce. NY Times and LA Times were both convinced by US diplomats that there was nothing new in the secret documents, which show that the US ambassador and top US general in Korea were consulted by Chun in advance of the broad crackdown on popular democratic forces in the spring of 1980 and told him they would not oppose contingency plans to use military forces under the joint US-Korea command to put down the labor and student 'unrest.' The US also knew that special forces (modeled after the US green berets) trained to kill North Koreans were being used to quell dissent. My documents did not show that any US officials knew that the black berets were going to murder Kwangju citizens but demonstrate that even after Holbrooke et. all learned of the massacres, Carter and his national security people decided that the uprising must be put down militarily. They then allowed Korean army troops to be 'chopped' from the US-Korea command to put an end to the Kwangju uprising. At a recent conference at UCLA on Kwangju where both Gleysteen & I spoke, Gleysteen once again stated that the US had no reason to apologize for what happened. He's written a book giving his rather pathetic side to the story. I will have much more to say on all of this shortly. The Kwangju story is worth remembering when we think about the increasingly shrill debate about China PNTR. We now have the AFL-CIO lobbying hand in hand with the American Legion, arguing quite forcefully that US ground forces in Asia (most of which are in South Korea and Okinawa) are key to US national security and the US defense posture against the 'rogue nation' China. I find this argument repellent. Is US labor now going to lead the rightwing charge to maintain US military bases in Asia for another 50 years without even a whimper of dissent from within its ranks? I sure hope not. Tim Shorrock
Tim Shorrock