Subtle AP Headline of the Day

I guess the dreaded guilt by association is fine as long as the media gets to bash the United States. Get a load of this headline:

AP IMPACT: Thousands killed by US's Korean ally

Why, we come off sounding almost as bad as, say, the North Koreans, who've starved and murdered untold millions.

Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.

With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.

The mass executions — intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners — were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were "the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War," said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.

Read the rest.

The Korean War no doubt was brutal, with up to two million casualties. But relying on questionable information from over 50 years ago and ignoring the atrocities of the North Koreans is absurd.