Archive for January 2007

If He’d Just Thrown His Medals Across the Fence, He’d Be a Senator Today

January 26, 2007 Abductions, Defectors, U.S. Military 4 comments

dresnok.jpgSixty Minutes will broadast a long-anticipated interview with traitor Joe Dresnok this Sunday, and one thing’s apparent:  he’s eating well enough. From the CBS promo story:

The last American defector still living in North Korea says a billion dollars in gold couldn’t entice him to leave the country he ran to 44 years ago.  In the first communication from Joe Dresnok since he defected in 1962, the former G.I. also says his fellow defector, Charles Jenkins, who was permitted to leave North Korea, lied about him. Â  Bob Simon’s report will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, Jan. 28 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

I believe I speak for most Americans when I express my gratitude to North Korea for keeping him, and for carrying out what must be the most severe punishment for desertion in the last seven decades.

Dresnok told his story to two British filmmakers, Dan Gordon and Nick Bonner, who have made a documentary based on it called “Crossing the Line.Â  Gordon and Bonner, in addition to portions of their interview with Dresnok, also appear on 60 MINUTES.
“I don’t have intentions of leaving, could give a s*&% if you put a billion damn dollars of gold on the table,” Dresnok says about leaving North Korea.  “I feel at home. I really feel at home. I wouldn’t trade it for nothing,” he says.
Dresnok became fed up with his life one summer day four decades ago. His wife had left him and he was in line for a court martial for sneaking off base to visit a Korean woman, so he deserted. “I was finished. There’s only one place to go.  Yes, I was afraid. Am I going to live or die?  And when I stepped into the minefield and I seen [North Korea] with my own eyes, I started sweating,” he recalls.  “I crossed over, looking for my new life,” says Dresnok.

By every account I’ve heard, discipline was much more lax in those days, so it comes as a surprise to me that Dresnok reasonably feared that he’d have been shot at dawn for going AWOL. 

In the North, Dresnok eventually met three other American deserters and all of them participated in propaganda activities, including films that depicted the U.S. as evil.  He accuses one of those Americans, Charles Jenkins, a former Army sergeant, with lying about their time together.  Jenkins was permitted to leave the country two years ago to join his Japanese wife.  He said Dresnok had beaten him on the orders of North Korean authorities in a 60 MINUTES interview.  Says Dresnok: “He’s a liar.  One day he tried to push me around with his so-called rank and there was two blows.  I hit him and he hit the ground.  I think you know Alice in Wonderland.  Well, I just wonder if it’s not Jenkins in Wonderland.

Jenkins’s side of the story, here.  Anyway, it’s apparent that life in North Korea was considerably less pleasant than he might admit in the presence of his minders.

Dresnok didn’t always feel at home; after fours years, he and the others sought asylum in the Soviet embassy. They were turned away.  Faced with no other option, he succumbed to the North Korean indoctrination process, believe Gordon and Bonner.  Dresnok told them, “They might be a different race”¦color, but God damn it, I’m going to sit down and learn their way of life”¦.I did everything I could, learning the language”¦customs”¦greetings”¦life. I got to think like this”¦act like this. I’ve studied their revolutionary history, their lofty virtues about the great leader.

Uh huh.  Slobo Milosebvic and Josef Stalin died peacefully in their sleep, Saddam Hussein died much too easily, and Paris Hilton has yet to stricken from the public eye by some disfiguring but non-life-threatening skin condition.  The injustice of these things may bother you, as they bother me, but in Dresnok, we have an example of a man who has made his own misery in this life.  He is living the life he has earned.

 

Thanks to a friend for sending.

Kim Jong Il, Defender of Free Speech

January 26, 2007 Censorship, Deprogramming One comment

North Korea said on Friday the South Korean government was violating the public’s basic right to information by blocking access to Web sites sympathetic to the North.

South Korea has denied access to more than 30 Web sites that it has designated “pro-North Korea” since 2004, including the North’s official KCNA news agency’s Web service and sites operated outside.

“This is a fascist action against democracy and human rights as it infringes upon the South Koreans’ freedom of speech and deprives them of even their right to enjoy the civilization offered by the IT age,” the North’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper said.

“The above-said actions are as rude as blindfolding people’s eyes and stopping their ears and mouths,” Rodong Sinmun said in a commentary carried by KCNA news agency.  [link]

The reporters did their very best to stifle the irony:

Most North Koreans have limited or no access to computers let alone the Internet, refugees from the North and human rights activists in Seoul have said.

South Korea is one of the world’s most wired countries. Three-quarters of the population have access to the Internet.

For what it’s worth, I think it should be perfectly legal for South Koreans to read information both from and about North Korea.  I also favor the use of non-permissive means to get “unofficial” information into North Korea, although I suspect that the North Korean attitude toward free speech might be less principled in that case.

Scandal

January 26, 2007 Iran, Terrorism/Iraq No comments

Why on earth has it taken this long to let our soldiers kill the people who are killing them?  Micromanaging their fight against a hostile force transforms the rules of engagement into a suicide pact.

The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran’s influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The “catch and release” policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

Expect the ACLU to file for an injunction by next Wednesday. 

Notwithstanding the fact that Dafna Lizner wrote it, the entire story is a must-read.  Iranian intel agents are already at war against us, and their goal is to trigger the world’s next great mass slaughter — an all-out mass slaughter that will vividly clarify that the current violence is not a civil war, as terrible as it is.  The Iranians will never cooperate with us, because they believe that this mass slaughter serves their interests.  They with either fear us or hold us in predatory contempt.  It’s about damn time:  terminate with extreme prejudice.  ht

This Could Only Mean that All South Korean Soldiers Are Infected with Abnormal Sexual Desires

January 26, 2007 Media Criticism, UCMJ & SOFA 5 comments

Here.  I’m linking this because you’ll never hear the American or Korean press, other than the Stripes, breathe a word about it or project its significance upon thousands of other people. 

(Those of you (a) have no irony gene, or (b) who don’t get the reference, click here before you spit fire in my comments.)

Shenyang Six Update

January 26, 2007 Activism, China & Korea, Human Rights, Refugees 3 comments

LiNK sends:

Hello Friends,  

….

It feels strange to be back here in Washington at LiNK headquarters, typing away at a computer. For those of you who have been following the news, the past few weeks have not been calm and restful- they have been rather dramatic and urgent.

On December 21, 2006, myself, two LiNK field workers and 6 North Korean refugees were caught and imprisoned by Chinese authorities. I was taken into custody in Beijing, and the others en route to Beijing from Shenyang.

We were placed in prison outside of Shenyang after interrogation. The three LiNK workers were released after 10 days. Our 6 North Korean friends remain in Chinese custody.

However, we remain hopeful. The fact that the Chinese have not yet repatriated the North Koreans (they had said they would send them back immediately following our capture) is a very positive sign. We are currently engaged in discussions with the Chinese government regarding their release, and we are hopeful of a positive resolution to the event.

There is of course much more to the story and what transpired, and we will be sharing more with you all as time goes. We know how agonizing it is to think of the possible fate of the Shenyang Six if things do not go well in negotiations with the People’s Republic of China. Please rest assured that we are doing all that we can. The instant there is a role for us all in the grassroots to play, you will hear about it, and we will mobilize internationally for the six. At the moment, we are waiting on high-level discussions and working quietly to secure their release.

Final thoughts: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Accepting Nobel Peace Prize
December 10, 1964

Stay tuned for updates, and thank you for your consistent support and conviction for this cause. Thank you!

Adrian Hong
Executive Director

Coup Rumors Swirl in North Korea

January 26, 2007 Kim Jong Il, Kremlinology No comments

Update:  More coup rumors. 

Thanks to a friend for alerting me to this one, although it doesn’t seem to have worked out the way I hoped:

The South Korean government on Friday denied a Japanese report that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il could be ill or faced a military coup.

Japan’s Jiji Press reported that Kim may be under house arrest at his villa in Wonsan along the east coast.

“The Japanese report on Kim Jong-il seems groundless because various circumstances in North Korea are normal for now,” a South Korean government official said, asking to remain anonymous. “The report by Jiji is not reliable.”
According to wire reports from Tokyo, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki, asked about the report, said, “We have not heard information of that kind.”

Other reports, based on diplomatic sources, report that things are normal on the streets of Pyongyang.  I recall, but cannot find, reports from a month or two ago of “unusual military movements” near Pyongyang that may have been military exercises.

Axis, Schmaxis, Part 5

January 25, 2007 Axis of Evil, Iran, Terrorism/Iraq, WMD One comment

This blog has previously tracked reports of nuclear and missile co-development between Iran and North Korea; London’s Daily Telegraph is now reporting a widening expansion of Iranian-North Korean nuclear cooperation.

North Korea is helping Iran to prepare an underground nuclear test similar to the one Pyongyang carried out last year.

Under the terms of a new understanding between the two countries, the North Koreans have agreed to share all the data and information they received from their successful test last October with Teheran’s nuclear scientists.

The source for this is a “senior European defence official,” who says Iran may try to test a nuke of its own by the end of this year.  I have seen previous reports of North Korean scientists living in Iran, helping that regime with its own nuclear program. Â Which reminds me:  how goes the U.N./Soft Reich partnership to disarm Iran diplomatically?

France expressed concern yesterday over an Iranian decision to bar 38 UN nuclear inspectors from Iran, claiming that Teheran appeared to be singling out westerners from the inspection team.

I see.  At least we have some time.

Intelligence estimates vary about how long it could take Teheran to produce a nuclear warhead. But defence officials monitoring the growing co-operation between North Korea and Iran believe the Iranians could be in a position to test fire a low-grade device — less than half a kiloton — within 12 months.

Reflexive protectors of every enemy of the United States will dredge up the intelligence fiasco of Iraq at once to cast doubt on this report, but in my mind, there is another Iraq intelligence fiasco that was potentially much more significant than the one set on their keyboard macros. Â This was the revelation, after the Gulf War first brought U.N. inspectors to Iraq, that Iraq was much closer to having a nuclear weapon than anyone had guessed:

Questions remain about the status of Iraq’s nuclear weapon program at the time of the Allied bombing campaign in 1991, when most activities were halted. Nevertheless, the Action Team inspectors have concluded that, with the accelerated effort under the crash program (described in section VII), Iraq could have finished a nuclear explosive design by the middle or end of 1991 if certain technical problems were overcome.

This alarming fact, and 2002′s highly politicized recriminations over the Clinton and Bush Administrations’ underestimation of al-Qaeda’s will and means to strike at the United States, may well have caused the intelligence community to put a hypervigilant interpretation on known facts about Iraq.  (It’s worth noting that plenty of those findings and interpretations were confirmed, although it’s alarming how many were discredited.)  I conclude from this that we have all come to expect too much precision from the intelligence community when it comes to secretive regimes.  Bush’s greatest mistake may have been his failure to qualify the merits of intelligence as an exact science, and to put the burden back on secretive regimes to rebut presumptions that we’re almost forced to make in the interest of our own survival.

So our intelligence isn’t very good, but it’s also all we have. Â Some have been honest enough to admit that at the root of their universal rejection of intelligence findings is their approval of Iran and North Korea having nuclear weapons.  I wish more of them would.  The low quality of our intelligence does not lead to the conclusion that we should abandon all vigilance; it militates for a more vigilant interpretation of the facts we know.  Strong but nonviolent intervention is much more likely to work if it comes early.

In light of the Iranian presence at last July’s North Korean missile tests, one also hopes this will further discredit the foolish argument that Wahhabi terrorists would never cooperate with Shiites or Sunni secularists.  And as we have seen in history, Nazis and Stalinists were able to sign a Non-Aggression Pact, and ardent white supremacists allied themselves with Japanese and Palestinians.  What is often most surprising about extremists is how exceptionally practical they can be in the course of achieving strategic objectives.

KTU Update

January 25, 2007 Korean Education No comments

Korean Education takes another small step toward reform.

The ministry said soon all bonuses will be performance-related. The seniority system will also disappear. With recognized capabilities, teachers in their early 40s can become vice principals, whereas long-serving teachers with low scores will miss out on promotion.

Parents and pupils will now get to evaluate teachers, which is curious from a social perspective, because the status of teachers has traditionally been so high in Korean’s highly Confucian society that the idea of students evaluating teachers might have been unthinkable not long ago.  Not surprisingly, the far-left Korean Teachers’ Union is bitterly opposed.

N. Korea Denies Misuse of UNDP Funds

January 25, 2007 "United" Nations, Famine & Food Aid One comment

Update 1/26: Â The UNDP North Korea program has pretty much hit the wall.  The UN says it will “adjust the North Korea program and delay its implementation“ until “approved,” which most likely means until the audit is completed. Â The U.S. annual allocation to the UNDP remains, but it has decided to withhold all of those funds for the time being, and may propose an end to all UN programs in North Korea, except the humanitarian ones.

Here’s the one that really fascinates me:  The UN Population Fund.  Yes, that’s right:  a dying nation with a (probably) shrinking population of shrinking people has a UN population control program!  In this particular context, this would be tasteless humor if the UN bureaucracy hadn’t given it its own budget allocation. 

I had asked this question during the exchange of some e-mails with Claudia Rosett of the Wall Street Journal, who also published a story under the provocative title, “Ban’s First Cover-Up.”  Perhaps that’s premature, but recall Ban Ki Moon’s previous promise to allow an “external” audit of the programs. Â Now, Ban is backtracking and giving the job to an internal UN audit agency with a less-than-unimpeachable record for integrity:  its former head, Vladimir Kuznetsov, was indicted for bribery and money laundering in 2005; he goes on trial next month.  The agency itself performed poorly during Oil-for-Food.  

This is a familiar pattern with Ban.  Ban is an exceptionally pliable man with a purge-survival record bested only by Nikita Khruschev, and he has learned that he can mollify his critics by telling them what they want to hear, and then quietly go about doing something different when no one is watching.  Ignore what Ban Ki Moon says.  Watch what Ban Ki Moon does.

What I cannot emphasize enough:  the real action is at the World Food Program.  We need more pressure on North Korea — all forms of pressure — to get it to accept openly monitored food aid for all of its people.  This issue is far closer to the base of the iceberg than nuclear negotiations, because food aid drives at the regime-imposed isolation, the machinery of selective deprivation, and the political system they sustain. 

Updates:   In my visitors’ log:

undp-visit.bmp

It’s like I’ve been firing tracer rounds lately (they’d have found GI Korea, too).  Meanwhile, the slow starvation of the North Korean people goes on.

The number of undernourished people in North Korea has more than doubled over the past decade with a diminishing dietary energy supply despite the country’s increased food production, a latest report from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.

Released in Rome on Wednesday, FAO’s annual flagship report, “Status of Food and Agriculture,” put the number of undernourished in North Korea at 7.9 million for 2001-2003, more than twice as many as the 3.6 million recorded for 1990-1992.

Much of this malnutrition obviously took place while the UN World Food Program’s feeding operations were at their peak, further suggesting that diversion was widespread.  I emphasize that it’s the North Korean government that bears primary responsibility for this, not the WFP, whose best intentions the North Koreans frustrated at every turn.  But had the WFP been tougher and forced the military and the elite to share in this misery, the regime might have had to agree to real transparency and effective monitoring.

Original Post:  Background here.   

North Korea on Thursday rejected an allegation by the United States that it misused funds it took from the United Nations Development Program, accusing Washington of conducting a smear campaign to increase pressure on Pyongyang.

“We will continue to develop our cooperative relationship with all U.N. agencies including the United Nations Development Program, but we will never overlook any attempt to politicize the cooperative relationship and will never accept any conditional or inappropriate assistance from the beginning,” Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a report carried by the Korean Central News Agency, the North’s main media outlet.  [link]

By “conditional,” they are probably referring to monitoring that the aid goes to the people it was intended to help, instead of to purposes that would violate UN Resolutions 1695 and 1718.

Prediction:  more press attention to be focused on the misuse and misappropriation of food aid.

Lawless Will Stay

January 25, 2007 Washington Views One comment

No link, because I’m passing along informed gossip from after-dinner conversation (no names, and no, this was NOT from a certain off-the-record event).  Indeed, his portfolio there will reportedly be enhanced to add Afghanistan and Pakistan to his area of interest.

If this is in fact the case, it suggests that USFK restructuring will proceed as previously planned.

The other informed gossip is split:  on the question of whether we are at the cusp of some kind of graceful-exit deal with the North Koreans.  While it does appear that there was some kind of “progress” at Berlin, there is disagreement about whether it will amount to anything.  My fear is that this administration is so desperate to have a deal it can wave at the Democrats that it will sign someting the North Koreans will already be violating before the next president is inaugurating.

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