How Much More Don’t We Know?

There are two  unfolding enigmas  from that black hole of disappearing humanity known as North Korea this week.  The L.A. Times  catches us up on the rumors that North Korea may soon “discover” that, notwithstanding years of denials, it may have some more Japanese abductees after all.  I wonder how many Yen this will cost the Japanese  in ransom reparations.  Wouldn’t that make this, you know, terrorism?

The second story involves an American who has been missing since the Korean War, who turns out to have been brought into China, where he died and  was secretly  buried in apparent violation of the Armistice:

After decades of denials, the Chinese have acknowledged burying an American prisoner of war in China, telling the U.S. that a teenage soldier captured in the Korean War died a week after he “became mentally ill,” according to documents provided to The Associated Press. 

China had long insisted that all POW questions were answered at the conclusion of the war in 1953 and that no Americans were moved to Chinese territory from North Korea. The little-known case of Army Sgt. Richard G. Desautels, of Shoreham, Vt., opens another chapter in this story and raises the possibility that new details concerning the fate of other POWs may eventually surface.  [AP, Robert Burns]

Credit for revealing Sgt. Desaultels’s story  goes to the National Alliance of families, which recently joined the fight against the atrocities in North Korea.  They’re holding their convention today in Virginia.