Revisiting History of Korea Again--Part 4

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea during the early 1950s Korean War:

"...[U.S.]General Curtis LeMay...boasted later that `over a period of three years or so, we burned down just about every town in North and South Korea both..., we killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes.' Attacks...also included a 500 bomber raid in June 1952 that destroyed a complex of hydroelectric power stations on the Yalu River, knocking out 90 percent of the country's remaining power supply; massive air assaults in July and August 1952 on Pyongyang, the heaviest bombing attack to that date in a capital, which drenched the city in napalm and produced a civilian death toll of 6,000; and finally, in May 1953, the bombing of the irrigation dams on which the agricultural infrastructure of the country depended. That raid was designed to starve the enemy into submission.

"...An overwhelming proportion of the [Korean] war's three to four million casualties were civilians...

"At the outbreak of war in 1950, one of the first acts of the [South Korean] Rhee regime was to order the execution of political prisoners, whose deaths were in due course attributed to atrocities by the incoming Northern forces...Declassified U.S. documents indicated that `more than 2,000' political prisoners were executed without trial in the early weeks, hundreds of them were taken out to sea from the port of Pohang and shot, their bodies dumped overboard...Throughout the country, according to Gregory Henderson, then a U.S. Embassy official in Seoul and later a prominent historian of Korea, probably over 100,000 people were killed without trial or legal warrant. Investigations into all this have scarcely begun...

"When Seoul was recaptured by U.S. and South Korean forces perhaps as many as 29,000 Koreans were executed on suspicion of collaboration with the North...The occupation of Pyongyang and many other cities and villages above the 38th parallel [by South Korean forces] was characterized by atrocities...According to one estimate, 150,000 people were executed or kidnapped...

"The official U.S. Army report at the end of the [Korean] war gave 7,334 as the figure for civilian victims of North Korean atrocities, a small fraction of those now known to have been executed by [government of South Korean leader] Rhee in the first moments of the war alone...

"...The Taejon Massacre...became the centerpiece of the U.S. case for North Korean brutality...A U.S. Army report on the massacre, including graphic photographs, was published around the world in October 1953...

"At Taejon, a town of about 160 kilometers south of Seoul, a massacre undoubtedly occurred...

"...It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the most brutal North Korean atrocity in the South was actually a Southern atrocity in a brutal ongoing civil war...

"...The figure of 1,800 massacre victims was given...Somebody--presumably in either the American military or government--seems to have made the decision to turn this into a Northern massacre, the characteristic, single atrocity of the entire war. The truth seems inescapable: The worst atrocity of the war was committed by forces acting in the name of the United Nations, and a concerted effort was then made to cover it up by blaming it on the North Korean enemy...

"...On the admission of [U.S.] General Ridgeway's Head Office, more POWs died in United Nations camps than in North Korean camps..."

Hidden History of Texas: 1954-1973--Part 16

(This article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on April 17, 2013)

Inspired by the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement protests of groups like the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE], the Southern Christian Leadership Council [SCLC], and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and in response to the 1965 escalation of the Pentagon’s War in Viet Nam, an increasing number of students and non-students in Austin, Texas, became involved in New Left and countercultural groups like SDS and in underground press journalism during the 1960s.

There was substantial New Left activity in other Texas cities, including Houston where underground newspaper Space City! helped pull together an active movement community, but Austin -- which had always been a center for cultural and political iconoclasm -- would become one of the nation's New Left hot spots.

As Beverly Burr observed in her thesis, "History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-88)":

“The Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] formed a chapter in the early spring of 1964. From 1964-7, the UT chapter of SDS began to build the local white, radical student movement. Alice Embree, one of the early participants in SDS at UT, said that when she went through registration at the beginning of the Spring 1964 semester, there was an SDS information table. She conjectured that 4 or 5 people started the group.

“The early focus of the group was participating with black student activists in the sit-ins at downtown Austin restaurants... In mid-October 1965, SDS held a death march protesting U.S. policy toward Vietnam. This protest was apparently the first antiwar demonstration on the campus during the 1960s. About 70 students participated in the march and rally... SDS had attempted to get a parade permit to march on the streets during the rally but the permit had been refused by the City Council...

“SDS held its first fall 1966 meeting in late October [1966]... At the same time, students organized an underground newspaper called The Rag... Most of the staffers were SDSers who created the paper not only to publicize issues of importance to the movement but also in reaction to the corporate controlled mainstream media... During the fall [of 1966] 10 SDS and Rag women... held a sit-in protesting the draft at the Selective Service in Austin. In January of 1967 several demonstrations were held against Secretary of State Dean Rusk while he was in town... Over 200 came to the second protest which succeeded in canceling Rusk’s dinner at the UT Alumni Center...

“The first conflict between SDS and the University occurred later in the spring of 1967 during Flipped-Out Week... SDS had planned a week of activities including a speech by... Stokely Carmichael..., an anti-war march to the Capitol, and Gentle Thursday... The activities attracted several thousands... The week after Flipped-Out Week, SDS “distributed flyers... to plan a Monday protest against Vice President Hubert Humphrey who would be speaking at the Capitol... On Monday, about 150 students protested at the Capitol against the war in Vietnam. Later that day, UT withdrew recognition of SDS as a campus organization...

“UT initiated disciplinary proceedings against 6 students involved in the anti-war protest... against Hubert Humphrey... Simultaneously the UT administration... called for the arrest of George Vizard, a non-student. Vizard was arrested by Austin police... The police brutally arrested him in the Chuckwagon, a café and radical hangout in the Student Union... Over 250 outraged students and faculty members... founded the University Freedom Movement [UFM].”

But despite subsequently well-attended free speech rallies and extralegal campus protests by UFM supporters during the rest of April 1967, the six anti-war students who were being disciplined by the UT administration were all placed on probation for their political activity on May 1, 1967. Yet the anti-war countercultural movement in Austin continued to gain more local popular support, and in October 1969, around 10,000 people protested in Austin against the Republican Nixon Administration's failure to end the Pentagon’s War in Vietnam .

African-American student and non-student Movement activists also continued to organize anti-racist protests during the late 1960s in Austin. As the “History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin ” thesis also noted:

“In 1966, the Negro Association for Progress [NAP] was formed... During the spring of 1967, NAP... members converged on the office of... athletic director and... football coach Darrell Royal to find out why UT was not accepting or recruiting black athletes... In October [1967]... NAP held an illegal demonstration for black student rights... In the spring of 1968 NAP was replaced by the Afro-Americans for Black Liberation [AABL]...

"In May [1968]... the owner of a Conoco station... attacked a black musician... Larry Jackson of Austin SNCC and Grace Cleaver, chair of AABL, called on all persons opposed to racism to picket [and to boycott the station]... Jackson requested that SDS participate in the action and the group agreed. The students held several sit-ins at the gas station. City police arrested about 50 in the demonstrations... That fall AABL won 2 academic programs in Afro-American Studies...”

And in a Feb. 1, 2003, speech before the W.H. Passion Historical Society at the Southgate-Lewis House in Austin, former Austin SNCC activist Larry Jackson also recalled how a SNCC chapter came to be formed in Austin during the late 1960s:

“I was born in central East Texas, a little town called Hearne... And that’s the place I first began my activities in civil rights... I first got involved in a lot of civil rights activities when I was in high school in Hearne, Texas. And I was trying to integrate the pool... I left Hearne, Texas because I was involved with so much strife there...

“And in Houston I became very active in school activities at Texas Southern... And what really got me here in Austin was I had previously worked on the Martin Luther King speech day in Houston... And at the music hall, outside of the TSU people and a few whites to hear Martin Luther King speak, there was not 200 people there. And this happened in 1967... And I ended up coming here on a speaking deal with Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. That’s how I got to Austin , Texas... And so he was speaking out there at the University of Texas. So I stayed on here because I was gonna form a SNCC chapter here in Austin...”

Austin was also a center for the fast-growing women's liberation movement and, according to Jo Freeman in Women: A Feminist Perspective, the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade, "was the project of a small feminist group in Austin, Texas and the lawyer [Sarah Weddington] who argued Roe before the Supreme Court was one of its participants."

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: CBS and Dan Rather's Reporting Historically

A 1990 book by Monte Evans, entitled The Rather Narrative: Is Dan Rather The JFK Conspiracy San Andreas Fault?, apparently "accused [former CBS Evening News Anchor] Rather of aiding the conspiracy through his `long history of inaccurate reporting of the circumstances of [the] assassination,'" according to Covering The Body: The Kennedy Assassination, The Media, and The Shaping of Collective Memory by Temple University Professor Barbie Zelizer. Covering The Body also observed that former CBS Evening News Anchor Rather, coincidentally, "invested considerable efforts in addressing JFK and Oliver Stone" and "In February of 1992 Rather devoted a special program of `48 Hours' to an investigation of Kennedy's death, where he paid special attention to the controversy surrounding Stone's movie."

On Rather's anti-JFK program, JFK Director Stone responded to the former CBS Evening News Anchor's hostile questions by stating the following:

"Dan, when the House Report came out implying that there was a probable conspiracy in the murder of both Kennedy and King, why weren't you running around trying to dig into the case again? I didn't see you, you know, rush out there and look at some of these three dozen discrepancies that we present in our movie."

According to Covering The Body, in February 1992 "an NBC poll reported that a full 51 percent of the American public believed...that the CIA was responsible for Kennedy's death" and "only 6 percent believed the Warren Commission." Yet as Coup D'Etat! November 22, 1963 by Stanley Marks asserted: "The responsibility for the `success' of the Warren Commission and its `Report' must rest solely upon the mass communications media which went out of its way to protect the duplicity, deceit, and deception practiced by the Commission upon the American Citizen..."

(Downtown 10/27/93)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Did Ruby, Oswald and Ferrie Work For CIA Together?

In Chapter 1 of its report, the Warren Commission asserted that "No direct or indirect relationship between Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby has been discovered by the commission, nor has it been able to find any credible evidence that either knew the other, although a thorough investigation was made of the many rumors and speculations of such a relationship."

Yet in his early 1990s book First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated In The CIA-Mafia Murder Of President Kennedy, former CIA operative Robert Morrow claimed that on October 9, 1962 CIA official Tracy Barnes told him that both Jack Ruby and Lee Oswald were members of Clay Shaw's "inside group." And Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs also stated the following:

"Beverly Oliver...was 19 years old at the time of the assassination and worked for the Colony Club, a stri-show club located next door to Jack Ruby's Carousel Club...Oliver...said that three weeks prior to the Kennedy assassination, she was visiting in Ruby's club. There she met a man whom Ruby introduced as `Lee Oswald of the CIA.' She later recognized Oswald when his picture was broadcast following the assassination.

"She also said David Ferrie was in Ruby's club in late 1963, in fact, he was there so often, Oliver mistook Ferrie as an assistant manager of the Carousel Club.

"A friend of Oliver's also knew of Oswald being in Ruby's club and spoke openly about itt. According to Oliver, her friend disappeared and she `decided it would be in her best interests not to say anything.'"

(Downtown 9/29/93)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Where Was Dan Rather At Moment of JFK Assassination?

In his 1977 book, The Camera Never Blinks, former CBS Evening News Anchor Dan Rather claimed that he was in Dallas "on the other side of the railroad tracks, beyond the triple underpass 30 yards from a grassy knoll," at the very moment JFK was eliminated. Yet, according to Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs, "...discovered film footage of the west side of the underpass has now become public" [in the early 1990s] and "the film plus some still photographs show the Kennedy limousine speeding through the underpass and on to Stemmons Freeway--but no sign of Dan Rather."

The same book also stated:

"The major news media have been content to let sleeping assassination conspiracies lie, compounding this timidity by characterizing anyone who dared look hard at the case as a `buff,' `fantasist,' `paranoid,' or `sensationalist'...

"Who done it?--A consensus of powerful men in the leadership of U.S. military, banking, government, intelligence and organized crime circles ordered their faithful agents to manipulate Mafia-Cuban-Agency pawns to kill the chief..."

(Downtown 9/29/93)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Did CIA's Hunt Correct `Projecting Ears'?

A number of U.S. writers have historically asserted that CIA Official Tracy Barnes' chief of Covert Activities in the early 1960s--E. Howard Hunt--was one of the press-photographed derelicts or "tramps" who was temporarily taken into custody in the area behind the grassy knoll, shortly after JFK was eliminated on November 22, 1963. As the volume VI appendix of the House Select Committee On Assassinations Report noted in 1979:

"It was claimed that two of the derelicts or `tramps' as they had come to be called, bore striking resemblance to Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis respectively. Allegations have been made that Hunt, who had been a CIA employee in 1963, and Sturgis, who--had been invoved in CIA-related activities, had been together in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and had participated in the assassination as part of a CIA conspiracy..."

The House Select Committee On Assassinations also revealed that Hunt may have altered his appearance by surgery after the assassination, so that he now bears less of a resemblance to the press-photographed "tramp":

"From his photographs, it is apparent that Hunt underwent surgery to correct his rather projecting ears. The date of this operation was not determined but from the photographs, it would appear to have been within a few years before or after the assassination. In degree of projection, the Tramp's ears appear to more closely match Hunt's pre-surgical condition."

(Downtown 9/29/93)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Oswald's `201' CIA File

On September 22, 1978, the following exchange took place between former CIA Director Richard Helms and House Select Committee On Assassinations Senior Staff Counsel Michael Goldsmith:

Mr. Goldsmith: "Did the Agency ever conduct an investigation to determine whether Lee Harvey Oswald had been connected with the CIA?"

Mr. Helms: "Yes, and I believe that Mr. McCone [former CIA Director] presented to the Warren Commission a sworn affidavit saying that he had no formal connectiion with the CIA of any kind...

"...He was not an agent of the CIA and I was horrified this morning to have Mr. Blakey [House Select Committee On Assassinations Chief Counsel], as a part of this committee's work coming out with the allegation at this late date that he had some identification with the Agency. Can't this ever be put to rest? What does it take to put it to rest?

"Excuse me. I am asking you a question. I will rephrase it. I would hope that at some juncture someone would find some means of putting this allegation to rest..."

Mr. Goldsmith: "Was there a written report summarizing the Agency's investigation?"

Mr. Helms: "I don't know."

Mr. Goldsmith: "Do you think one should have been filed?"

Mr. Helms. "I don't know."

Mr. Goldsmith: "Why not?"

Mr. Helms: "I don't have any idea why it should have. If it manifests itself in the affidavit sworn by Mr. McCone, isn't that evidence enough?:

Mr. Goldsmith: "Are the Agency's files sufficiently accurate to resolve that issue?"

Mr. Helms: "I don't know..."

Mr. Goldsmith: "Does this memorandum make reference to 37 documents being missing from Oswald's `201 file'?"

Mr. Helms: "Yes, it does..."

According to Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs, "at least three former CIA officers have stated publicly that the mere existence of a 201 file on Oswald indicated a relationship between the ex-Marine and the Agency" and "Vincent Marchetti, formerly an executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director, said `Basically, if Oswald had a `201' file, he was an agent.''"

(Downtown 9/15/93)