Phillip Buck Featured in WSJ

Underground railroad worker Phillip Buck,  recently released from a Chinese prison,  has told Melanie Kirkpatrick  about his activities, his  arrest, and even his new identity:

Pastor Buck is nothing if not determined. In 2002, while in a Southeast Asian country with a group of refugees he had guided there, his apartment in Yanji city, in northeast China, was raided. Nineteen refugees were captured and a copy of his passport was confiscated. With his identity now compromised, Mr. Buck returned to the U.S. and underwent legal proceedings to change his name. John Yoon, the name he was born with, was dead; Phillip Buck was born.

The new Pastor Buck returned to China, where, on May 25, 2005, he was arrested and eventually convicted of the crime of helping illegal immigrants. Thanks to the intervention of the U.S. government, he was deported before he could be sentenced.

He Kirkpatrick also relates the tale of a North Korean camp survivor who accompanied him  Buck at the interview:

One morning at roll call, he recounts, one of his cellmates, a man who had been badly beaten during the night, was too sick to get out of bed. The guards ordered the prisoners to carry the injured man into the woods and bury him. “I keep thinking, maybe he would still be alive if we hadn’t buried him,” the escapee says. The name of the dead man was Kim Young Jin. The name of the prison is Chong Jin. Says the man who escaped: “I am very glad to be here, and tell the people in America how life in North Korea really is.”

Well, yes, but for the fact that doing so might deceive some people out of the idea that Gitmo is the worst place on earth, a  theory put into perspective by my friend and co-author, Gordon Cucullu.