These Are Not Your Father’s North Korean Terrorists
Those North Korean spies sent to assassinate Hwang Jang Yop have appeared in open court to plead guilty:
They stayed tight-lipped during the 30-minute hearing but for just a couple of questions when the judge addressed them directly. They briefly replied – “Yes” or “Yes that’s true.”
During the hearing, they frequently gazed at the ceiling of the courtroom and at the prosecutors sitting on the opposite side, but never turned their eyes to the judge or toward the guest seats occupied by reporters and intelligence agents. The two pled guilty on all charges against them and raised no objection to the nearly 200 recorded items the prosecution submitted as evidence.
Prosecutor Lee Jae-young had asked the judge for a closed-door trial for security reasons, but the judge refused, citing freedom of the press. “Their family members are still alive in the North. They are in fear of possible punishment or ill-treatment since the case has been made public,” Lee said.
You know, in my day, any self-respecting North Korean terrorist captured by puppet forces would have swallowed a cyanide capsule or, failing that, stood before a firing squad and coolly smoked a last cigarette while still refusing to talk. But these kids today, they lawyer up and confess before a battery of cameras. It’s enough to make you wonder what this world is coming to.
President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 1, 2008 to reward it for its progress toward complete, verifiable, and irreversible nuclear disarmament. President Obama reaffirmed the de-listing on February 3, 2010, citing a lack of evidence for North Korea’s recent sponsorship of terrorism. Discuss among yourselves.
It looks like we’re just one or two hearings away from the State Department having yet another criminal conviction to try to ignore.
Maybe these terrorists want a book deal.
Maybe the Sunshine IS working! Hah…. I guess what surprises me is that they’re not yelling in court, at the judge and the South in general, and doing so precisely because they’ve got family up North.
From OP:
I don’t know if I’d really think this about these two mooks, but I got the feeling not long after the incident over Detroit that the underwear bomber had deliberately not succeeded and sought to get caught.
One explanation is that North Korea is running out of hoplites just like the Spartans did. North Korea is remarkably similar to Sparta in many ways, especially its small despotic ruling class being willing to serve in the most dangerous special operations for the State, and their determination to hold onto monopoly on military force, and its rigid caste system.
North Korea, just like Sparta manages to hold on to significant military capabilities (albeit increasingly asymmetric) in spite of an economy in ruins. But just like Sparta, the North Korean oligarchy is getting smaller over time as more people are pushed out of the Nomenklatura class, into the Outer Party and people in the Outer Party fall out into the ranks of the Helots. Wealth and power is concentrated in a smaller pool, and it is from that smaller pool that North Korea recruits is Special Forces and agents. Sparta also had difficulty fielding its phalanxes of hoplites as time went on, because the rich oligarchs increased their wealth and power and more of the citizenry became landless Helots.
On the other hand, the North Korean Nomenklatura still numbers in the hundreds of thousands. The fact that they continue to develop nukes while their economy is literally falling apart would indicate that if they really wanted to assassinate Hwang, they could have sent more ferocious warriors, and they have far better ways to make it to South Korea than the “Seoul Train” routes used by North Korean refugees.
One theory that some of the North Korean defectors have mentioned on the Korean discussion-boards is that the effort seemed so half-assed that the goal was not to seriously threaten Hwang but to sow distrust of North Korean refugees amongst South Koreans escaping via the underground railroads through China to Thailand and Mongolia.
The Korean cybersphere has brought us the Mad Cow craze and the conspiracy theories about South Korean and US complicity in sinking the Cheonan, so anything from .kr needs a lot of salt, and sadly, the people of South Korea by no means give North Korean refugees a warm welcome. So this theory also seems far fetched as well, but the North has tried crazy things in the past.
My own favorite explanation for now is to apply Occam’s Razor: Wet ops is always messy and sometimes they do not go well. This one does not seem particularly well planned or executed so the lack of cyanide capsules were just one of many things that went wrong.
Personally, I think it’s a PR move. They rattled their saber and Seoul sucked it up. Since the Pyongyang couldn’t intimidate them, they are trying another tact, “Look, we are protecting you from evil terrorists.” Find a couple yutz’s to put on a dog and pony show, then make them disappear. How they disappear is any one’s guess. It may, or may not have been a real attempt. My guess it’s all a cover to show how the Pyongyang doesn’t support terrorists and is actaully looking our for the South. This way, they can feed their own people more BS about how nice and spiffy they are while also trying to appear nice and part of the war on terror with evey one else, or at least really are, “good guys.”