Search Results for: kenneth bae

January 23, 2016

How Congress can ban tourist travel to North Korea, and why it should

[Update: If I had known when I wrote this that the North Koreans would torture and, for all practical purposes, kill Otto Warmbier in custody, I’d have written this post very differently. Frankly, I’m ashamed to reread it today, and can only ask you to understand that at the time, I had every reason to expect that this young man’s misadventure would end as anti-climatically as other arrests of foreigners in North Korea had ended until that time, and as...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
May 19, 2015

2016 Defense Authorization Act would define N. Korea as state sponsor of terrorism

On Sunday, I spotted this interesting Yonhap headline: “U.S. defense bill calls N. Korea terror sponsor.” Given my own recent work on this subject, I was curious about the effect of this provision, so I pulled up the text of the bill, H.R. 1735, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016. The versions on Thomas and Congress.gov don’t yet reflect the amendment, but clues from the Yonhap piece led me to the amendment in question, offered by Rep....

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Terrorism (NK)
April 9, 2015

Would Christine Ahn please ask Pyongyang to stop deporting the nice aid workers? For the children?

North Korea has deported U.S. citizen Sandra Suh, a humanitarian aid worker and founder of the L.A.-based NGO Wheat Mission Ministries, who had been working in North Korea since 1998. Pyongyang accused Suh of “plot-breeding and propaganda” — specifically, by showing “propaganda abroad with photos and videos” that she “secretly produced and directed, out of inveterate repugnancy” toward the North, “under the pretense of ‘humanitarianism.’” The North Korean news agency said Suh had “admitted her acts … seriously insulted the absolute trust” North Koreans place in their...

Categories AP Watch/Famine & Food Aid/Useful Idiocy
November 8, 2014

No, this does not mean it’s safe to go to North Korea.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has left Pyongyang with U.S. hostages Kenneth Bae and Preston Somerset Matthew Todd Miller, who voluntarily presented himself to the North Koreans as both a prisoner and a spy. I’m somewhat sympathetic to Bae, who seems to have been moved to take undue risks by the suffering of the North Korean people around him. Bae has young kids, and nothing Bae did could possibly justify having his kids grow up without their father. As for Miller, his...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
November 8, 2014

How to write like an expert on sanctions: Step 1, read the sanctions.

I don’t doubt that Stanford scholar Yong Suk Lee’s minor premise—that Pyongyang shifts economic pain to the proles and peasants—is correct. To extend this into a convincing policy argument, however, that Pyongyang would only shift the pain of sanctions to the North Korean people, requires a more convincing case for his major premise–that the deprivation of the North Korean people is a function of sanctions, rather than state policies that willfully impose that deprivation. It’s a case that Lee fails to make, in part because...

Categories Sanctions
September 18, 2014

What Bob King should have said about travel to North Korea.

Ambassador Robert King, whose title is Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, has written to The Washington Post in response to Anna Fifield’s reporting on North Korea’s efforts to market itself as a tourist destination (which may be more accurately described as the efforts of foreign collaborators to sell North Korea as a fine place to go slumming). King wishes that Fifield had given more emphasis to what should be obvious to anyone with good sense — that “[t]ravel to...

Categories "United" Nations/Anju Links/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Foreigners in N. Korea
September 14, 2014

Travel in N. Korea “feels incredibly safe,” says tour company whose customer just got 6 years hard labor.

In a proceeding that took just 90 minutes — about as long as most arraignments I’ve done — North Korea’s “Supreme Court” has sentenced American tourist Matthew Todd Miller to six years of hard labor for “entering the country illegally and trying to commit espionage.” The AP omits the State Department’s easily accessible finding that North Korea’s “judiciary was not independent and did not provide fair trials,” but adds the amusing detail that Miller waived his right to a North Korean lawyer....

Categories AP Watch/Foreigners in N. Korea/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law
February 26, 2014

Open Sources, February 26, 2014

~  1  ~ “N. KOREA LISTED AS ‘HIGH-RISK’ COUNTRY IN MONEY LAUNDERING” shouts this Yonhap headline. So does that mean that Treasury has finally designated North Korea as a primary money laundering concern, something that would severely restrict its access to the global financial system? No. This is actually a non-binding advisory by an international body called the Global Financial Action Task Force, and in fact, the new FATF statement is virtually identical to other advisories that are as many...

Categories Anju Links
February 14, 2014

Open Sources, February 14, 2014

~  1  ~ SOUTH KOREA’S NATIONAL ASSEMBLY STILL HASN’T MOVED on a North Korean human rights law, although I expect that next’s week’s release of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry report will likely put pressure to the Democratic Party to stop trying to turn it into the Kim Jong Un Recreational Facility Stimulus Act. The Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights is adding some pressure of its own, by demonstrating at the National Assembly building in Yeoido. ~  2 ...

Categories Anju Links
February 7, 2014

Open Sources, February 7, 2014

~ 1 ~ ROK, U.S. MILITARIES PREPARE “TAILORED” DETERRENCE: In 2010, North Korea attacked South Korea twice without eliciting any military response at all. If you ask me, that isn’t entirely a bad thing. Bombing a few shriveled conscripts wouldn’t perturb Kim Jong Un a whit. He might even spin that as a great military victory. We have other, non-military options (banking sanctions and subversive information operations) that would deter him much more. Unfortunately, but for understandable reasons, military planners...

Categories Anju Links
January 31, 2014

Open Sources, January 31, 2014

~ 1 ~ OH LOOK, North Korea restarted a nuclear reactor. ~ 2 ~ AND NOW, A LIST OF POLITICIANS WHO DID GOOD: H.R. 1771 has some new co-sponsors in the House. Rep. Pete Sessions (R, Tex.), Rep. Jeff Duncan (R, S.C.), and Rep. Adam Smith (D, Wash.) have signed on. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa (D-HI), joins early supporter and fellow Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard. The biggest surprise? Rep. Jim McDermott, who is known for his outspoken liberal views on foreign...

Categories Anju Links
January 9, 2014

So, Dennis — other than that, how is the trip going so far?

Dennis Rodman’s September trip to North Korea included a trip to Kim’s yacht near Wonsan, which Rodman described as “like going to Hawaii or Ibiza.” Evidently, this trip hasn’t been as pleasant: A day after the former basketball star sang “Happy Birthday” to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and led a squad of former NBA players in a friendly game, Rodman issued the apology through publicist Jules Feiler in an email message to The Associated Press. “I want to...

Categories Sports/Useful Idiocy/WTF?
January 8, 2014

And now, a long list of people who think Dennis Rodman is a tool.

Update: Jesus wept (hat tip): ~  ~  ~ Charles D. Smith, one of the former players who went to Pyongyang with Dennis Rodman, is still in Pyongyang, but he’s already saying he feels “remorse” for going because of the public backlash against the trip, and because of Rodman’s mouth: “The way some of the statements and things that Dennis has said has tainted our efforts,” Smith said. “Dennis is a great guy, but how he articulates what goes on — he...

Categories Sports/Useful Idiocy
November 20, 2013

It’s time to ban travel to North Korea

In one form or another, the State Department has been cautioning Americans about travel to North Korea for years, but statistically, half of the U.S. population is of below average intelligence, and it often shows. That fact presents some complications for a government that feels a sense of duty to protect the safety of its citizens. Today, as Kenneth Bae’s health continues to decline in his North Korean prison cell, comes word that the North has taken another miguk hostage. Although...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
August 30, 2013

Open Sources, Aug. 30, 2013

THREE MILLION DEATHS IS A STATISTIC, BUT A DEAD PORN STAR IS A HEADLINE! Sure, I guess the nominal leader of a regime that starved 2.5 million people to death and killed another 400,000 in concentration camps is capable of having his ex and a bunch of her musician friends machine-gunned. I can even believe that North Koreans can buy video cameras and make porn, although I incline more to the view that, if any part of this story is...

Categories Anju Links
March 25, 2013

Open Sources, March 25, 2013

MUST SEE: Marcus Noland, speaking to the Lowy Institute in Australia, thinks that North Korea is slipping back into famine.  He thinks that the North Korea people have adapted enough that a 1990s-scale famine can be avoided, but consider this in the context of Noland’s finding that the regime itself has probably had a current account surplus since 2011. On the other hand, Kim Jong Un loves Mickey Mouse, amusement parks, the NBA, and dolphins, so reform, prosperity, and perestroika are...

Categories Anju Links
January 3, 2013

State Department Disses Kim Jong Bill, and There Is Much Rejoicing

So, to answer those of you who asked, I don’t know why Google’s Eric Schmidt is flying to Pyongyang with Kim Jong Bill, but whoever is in charge of the State Department these days doesn’t sound very happy about the visit, or by the timing of our least favorite camera-hog has-been ex-governor.  Says State’s mouthpiece — As you know, they are private citizens. They are traveling in an unofficial capacity. They are not going to be accompanied by any U.S. officials. They are...

Categories Appeasement
November 19, 2018

How engaging the wrong North Koreans set back openness, reform & peace

South Korea’s social-nationalist government, joined by too many Western academics of the sort who bask in its generosity and fear the withdrawal of it, has re-embraced the “Sunshine” hypothesis. This hypothesis equates nearly all economic “engagement” with North Korea’s military-industrial complex — also known as “the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” — with economic openness, and economic openness with political openness, disarmament, prosperity, and peace. The Western exemplar of no-questions-asked engagement is the NGO and media darling known as Choson...

Categories North-South/Sunshine