It looks like the highly politicized Korean Truth & Reconciliation Commission may finally be completing its work with this announcement:

A commission charged with investigating wartime atrocities has found that American troops killed groups of South Korean civilians on 138 separate occasions during the Korean War.

But in a flurry of rulings made in the past few days, the commission decided not to seek compensation or criminal charges in about 130 of the cases either for lack of evidence or because it found that the killings were militarily justified.

The findings, which have not been formally announced and will end the commission’s work, appear to reflect the desire of the conservative government of President Lee Myung-bak to wrap up the inquiry and to avoid antagonizing the United States.

The commission will recommend that South Korea start negotiations with Washington to seek compensation for the victims in the remaining eight cases, the president of the commission said Friday.

In the other 130 cases, the commission could not find evidence of illegality by the American military or it determined that the deaths resulted from “military necessity,” said Lee Young-jo, president of the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

“They were more like cases of negligence than of liability or war crimes,” said Mr. Lee, whose commission wrapped up its four-year-old investigation on June 30. “For such a low level of unlawfulness, I don’t think any government negotiations with the United States for compensation are necessary.”  [New York Times]

Read the rest at the link, but the article did not have a complete listing of what the 8 incidents were.  If anyone has a link to all 8 incidents please let me know.  Anyway since the article was written by Choe Sang-hun of No Gun Ri fame he of course brought up the No Gun Ri incident.  He however makes no mention in the article if No Gun Ri was one of the 8 incidents the T&R Commission is recommending compensation for.  Since Choe makes no mention of this it leads me to believe it is not one of the 8 incidents cited in the report, which is yet another blow to the creditability of the Associated Press team’s article on the incident.

One of the incidents the article did cite from the T&R Commission’s report was the shelling by the USS DeHaven on a group of refugees huddled on a beach.  This incident in a prior posting I was able to provide context and poke holes into the claims of what happened.  In my opinion this incident hardly qualifies as a war crime.  The other two incidents mentioned in the article I would have to do further research on to draw firm conclusions on, but judging by the faulty historical revisionism of the T&R Commission that I have uncovered in the past I remain skeptical.

Anyway I am wondering when the list of Korean War incidents where the Truth & Reconciliation Commission is recommending compensation for victims of atrocities by the North Korean and Chinese militiaries will be published?