About Us

About Joshua Stanton:

• Attorney practicing in Washington, DC. U.S. Army Judge Advocate in Korea, 1998-2002. Left active duty, 2003.
• Member, North Korean Freedom Coalition since 2003, and of Liberty in North Korea since 2004.
• Started this blog in January 2004. Advocated the human rights of the North Korean people to influential politicians and diplomats, including Ambassador John Bolton, then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and Senator Richard Lugar, then-Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
• Testified before the House International Relations Committee regarding the state of the U.S.-South Korean alliance and rising anti-Americanism in 2006.
• Provided research assistance to National Geographic Magazine for this article.
• Provided research assistance and Google Earth images of North Korean concentration camps to U.S. Senator Sam Brownback for this speech, and this one.
• Featured in this May 2009 front page Wall Street Journal story and this July 2009 story in Madrid’s El Pais (in Spanish).
• Provided research assistance and source material for this July 2009 story in The Washington Post (see this interactive for the Post’s acknowledgment and link).
• Cited and linked in this November 2009 Wall Street Journal editorial.
• Cited and linked by the London Daily Telegraph in this May 2010 photo essay.

About Jodi Kiely:

• Jodi’s interest in Korean affairs comes after spending several years living and working in Seoul and Busan, South Korea where she spent most of her years there working in public and investor relations.
• Jodi is currently finishing her M.A. in East Asian Affairs with the University of Leeds.

About Daniel Bielefeld:

A former resident of Washington, D.C., DanB moved to Seoul several years ago to study the Korean language. Dan describes the origins of his interest in North Korea this way:

I recently had taken a trip to South Korea, and as I kept up with news from the country, I inevitably found myself reading about North Korea. I simply couldn’t believe what was — and is — going on there.

Dan has volunteered and helped raise funds for LiNK and a handful of groups in Seoul working on various aspects of the North Korean crisis. Dan also blogs and posts wonderful photos at his personal website..

Disclaimers:

The views expressed here are not those of any other person, organization, or entity; they are the author’s alone. We don’t always agree on everything — how much thinking would we do if we always agreed? Discussion of legal subject matter is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. The material I post on this blog is either from open sources or unclassified information provided by readers.

When I link to published articles, papers, posts, or other sources, I presume them to be reliable unless I say otherwise. Newspapers don’t e-mail bloggers if they correct their stories; too often, they don’t correct their stories at all. If you believe anything I write or link here is inaccurate, kindly drop a comment or e-mail me and I’ll cheerfully correct the post. Your comments contribute to the quality of this blog. I appreciate corrections, and I’ve actually formed friendships with readers specifically because of corrections. If a reader catches an error and I correct something, I’ll indicate the correction by indicating the erroneous language. If I catch an error, typo, or just plain awful phrasing on my own, I’ll just make the fix without cluttering up the post.

I occasionally frequently criticize and occasionally approve of things politicians or candidates say, but I don’t endorse parties or candidates or tell you how to vote. You don’t care, and I don’t pretend otherwise.

I don’t accept ads or donations (as if). I run this site on my time and pay the operating costs out of my own pocket.

Comment Policy:

1. Stay on topic.
2. Be polite: Don’t attack other people because of their race, gender, nationality, or religion. Leave private or personal details about other people out of the discussion. Profanity is tolerated as long as it helps illustrate your point or appeals to my subjective sense of humor, but don’t direct it at other participants in the discussion.
3. No commercial links, please.
4. No sock puppetry. If you’ve posted here under one online identity, use that identity or comment anonymously.
5. I reserve the right to delete comments that are just plain stupid, or to put the authors of consistently stupid comments into moderation. It’s an unfortunate fact that stupid comments drive away intelligent ones, and if you doubt me, just have a look at that principle in action. Different bloggers take different views of how to approach this — to each his own. I’m just trying to create a small, safe space for intelligent discussion on one narrow range of subjects, on one small site I built with my own time and money. There’s plenty of room elsewhere on the Internet for caps-locked rants about why fire doesn’t melt steel, why Bush is Hitler, why Gitmo is exactly the same as Auschwitz, or how Barack Obama covered up his Molodvan birth certificate.

That said, I especially welcome dissenting views. All I ask — and this applies equally to everyone — is that you keep it reasonably civil and intelligent, and support your views with supporting links where necessary. Comments should contribute to our knowledge and the quality of our thinking.
Contact: onefreekorea(at)yahoo(dot)com

About The Banner Image: It’s is a NASA low light level image of the Korean peninsula taken on the night of April 15, 2001. I first saw this image when I was serving with the U.S. Army in Korea when it became popular to put this image, and perhaps other similar images you can find on the Web, on soldiers’ farewell plaques.

I found this particular image here, at the Web site of the left-of-center Federation of American Scientists, after Christopher Hitchens linked it in his excellent article, “Worse than 1984: North Korea, Slave State.” Click to see it full size.

To make the banner image, I cut the Korean peninsula out of the original image, put it on a transparent background, changed the eerie green boundary lines to gray, and restored the extreme northeastern parts of North Hamgyeong Province, which had been cut out of the original image. On occasion, I get e-mails accusing me of altering this image, suggesting that I dimmed or grayed out the lights of Pyongyang or other cities in the North (I didn’t). Examine the original image. A small amount of light is visible in Pyongyang if you look closely at my banner. Can’t see it? Well, here it is full size.