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Here is the KTC statesment which Brian Willson, one of KTC advisor, wrote
behalf of Korea Truth Commission regarding Clinton's statsment about No Gun
Ri.

WHEN WILL THE UNITED STATES APOLOGIZE FOR ITS WAR CRIMES?

By S. Brian Willson, Martin Luther King Day, January 15, 2001

U.S. President Clinton's recent refusal to explicitly apologize for the murder of Korean civilians by U.S. military forces during the Korean War is another lost moment of desperately needed "American" honesty.

The defining and enabling experience of the Republic of the United States of America continues to be the genocidal elimination of the original human beings who lived on our lands. Eurocentric racism and so-called divinely inspired thnocentrism have been inherent characteristics that facilitated the "development " of our civilization. This has been accomplished through a long history of exploitation of land, labor, and natural resources, first on the North American Continent, but which now stretches to every corner of the globe.

Captain John Smith of the Virginia colony in the early 1600s referred to our original inhabitants as "subanimals" and "beasts" worthy only of "extermination." Puritan leader John Endecott of the Massachusetts Bay Colony regularly ordered "death" to the Pequot Indians. Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, refers to our original inhabitants as "merciless savages" and George Washington termed them "beasts of prey" to be "destroyed." European settlors regularly called them "brutes" or "vermin" to be "destroyed." General William Tecumseh Sherman in the 1870s ordered "extermination" as the "final solution" to the "Indian problem."

During what we call the Spanish-American War U.S. forces fought against Filipino
citizens, calling them "goo-goos," while murdering upwards of a half million of them under orders such as "burn and kill the natives" issued by General Jacob H.
("Hell-Raising") Smith to U.S. Marines.

Lyman Frank Baum, author of the ever popular, The Wonderful Wizand of Oz (1900),
called for the "annihilation" of all Native Americans.
Our racism is another name for native-hating, whether "Niggers," "Chinks," "Japs," "Greasers," "dagoes," "Waps," etc. People in Korea and Vietnam were "gooks." The fact is that from the very beginning the people whom our European ancestors were demonizing, both here and abroad, were real human beings, tragically caught in the path of merciless "American Manifest Destiny." Under any legal or moral definition, virtually all would be considered "civilians," until some chose to defend their sovereignty and land from the invaders and exploiters from the West in which case they became "combatants."
With the advent of aerial bombings during World War I, the number of civilians
murdered has dramatically increased. The bombing of civilian targets by U.S. forces preceded similar crimes by Italy in Ethiopia in 1936-37 and Germany in Guernica in Spain in 1937. The U.S. used aerial bombings in Haiti in 1919 and Nicaragua in 1927 in efforts to rout native people resisting U.S. occupation forces, murdering countless civilians in the process, always disregarding the cries of the people for due recognition.

However, the massive, saturation bombings in World War II in Germany and Japan
were conducted with no pretense of striking only military targets. It legitimized bombing with no concern for civilians despite explicit prohibition by the U.S. Field Manual 27-10 Rules of Land Warfare.

The U.S. record in Korea is horrendous! It would behoove our political leaders, and academicians, to learn of a more authentic history of Korea. Simply relying on the popular comic book versions demonizing the evil North koreans without recognizing the U.S. role in creating the conditions that led to the war in the first place, continues a tragic disservice to history.
The vast majority of the people who resided on the Korean Peninsula when the Japanese were finally defeated on August 15, 1945, immediately began to celebrate, then organize for a return to Korean sovereigny after 40 years of foreign occupation. When the U.S. insisted on creating the Peninsula as a Cold War arena with the Russians, people throughout Korea organized resistance, at first nonviolent, later in the form of a guerrilla war. The U.S. created a puppet government, similar to what we did later in Vietnam, and oversaw the systematic repression and murder of hundreds of thousands of Koreans who wanted their independence. That U.S. military and political policy can proceed without understanding this fundamental reality of Korean hsitory continues one of the truly tragic chapters of the Twentieth Century.

During the Korean "hot" war, General Douglas MacArthur ordered in the Fall of 1950, that the U.S. Air Forces "destroy every means of communication, every installation, factory, city, and village" south of the Yalu River boundary with China. Massive saturation bombings, especially with napalm and other jellied bombs murdered as many as 2 million civilians. Major General William B. Kean of the 25th Infantry Division had ordered "civilians in the combat zone" to be considered as enemy. The famous July 25, 1950 Fifth Air Force memorandum to General Timberlake declared that adherence to Army orders to "strafe all civilian refugees" has been "complied with." USA Today (Oct. 1, 1999) and the New York Times (Dec. 29, 1999) reported from declassified U.S. Air Force documents the "deliberate" strafings and bombings of Korean "civilians" and "people in white."

In 1973 as part of the Paris Peace Accords ending the U.S. War against Vietnam, Henry Kissinger, representing President Nixon, promised the Vietnamese over $4 billion in reparations as part of the ceasefire agreement. The United States dishonored that agreement, consistent with what Native Americans have concluded all along that the "White Man speaks with forked tongue," citing the U.S. government's violation of each of the 400 treaties signed with the Indigenous.
President Clinton came close to a 1999 apology to Guatemala for the role of the U.S. in supporting repressive forces that murdered over 200,000 Mayan Indians. He stated that U.S. policy was "wrong," even as it continues to support economic policies destined to preserve poverty there. Former U.S.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara confessed in his book, In Retrospect, that what the U.S. did in Vietnam was "wrong," though he did not acknowledge that we had violated moral or legal codes. Clinton's Defense Secretary William Cohen visited Vietnam in March 1999, and explicitly refused to apologize.
Clinton during his visit to Vietnam in November 1999, also failed to issue an apology or to explain why the 1973 promise of reparations had never been provided.

The question continues to beg as to when the United States will fess up to its long history of crimes against humanity, thereby revealing that a genuine humbling has replaced U.S. arrogance. Failing that, the lives of all the people of the world, including those residing in the United States, are endangered by an arrogance continually nourished by insidious racism that knows no limits to its unwanted proselytization. It inevitably creates rage among the billions of people who resent the imposition of our values and policies.

An apology by the United States, followed by an offer of appropriate reparations to the Korean people, would be a tremendous new omen for a peaceful world based on mutual respect and justice.