Open Sources

“In the order, the party stressed that soldiers standing guard over the border are surviving on canned cornmeal porridge and threatened to assess the amount of donations by individual entity,” the RFA said, adding the North failed to attain its goal of securing 1.6 million tons in provisions for the military last year.” [Yonhap]

Whoever can smuggle food into North Korea now can trade it for information, the use of a truck, weapons, or ammunition. Just use your imagination.

The Japan Times reports that the Japanese government believes that another Japanese abductee, whom the North Koreans claimed was dead, was seen in Pyongyang recently with some South Korean abductees:

Provided by informed North Korean sources, the account said Taguchi was living in an apartment complex on Changgwang street in Pyongyang’s Mangyongdae district and was seen spending time with two South Korean abductees, the sources said. One of the South Koreans was Ko Sang Mun, a former high school teacher who disappeared from Norway in 1978, and the other is possibly married to Taguchi, they said. Taguchi was abducted to the North in 1978, and Pyongyang has claimed she married Tadaaki Hara, another Japanese abductee, and died in a traffic accident in 1986.

North Korea was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss among yourselves.

I’ve been fascinated by the story of the Stuxnet virus, and I’d like to believe, as this story reports, that it was also designed to hinder North Korea’s uranium enrichment program in the same way it hindered Iran’s.

In February 2005, Selig Harrison alleged “that the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the data” to falsely accuse North Korea of running a secret uranium enrichment program. Harrison has still not retracted that article. In an August 2009 interview with the Associated Press, Harrison was quoted as saying, “Everything I’ve ever said about North Korea since 1972 has seemed at the time like screaming into the wilderness, and everything I’ve ever advocated has come to pass. Discuss among yourselves.

They’ll sell China their land, and they’ll sell China their daughters and sisters.

So notwithstanding its recent boorishness, China does see the downside of all of this adverse publicity it’s attracting in America, or it wouldn’t be investing in an expensive PR campaign here. The problem with this is that Americans are inherently suspicious of propaganda, and that’s particularly true of propaganda sponsored by a foreign dictatorship that uses censorship and propaganda to managed public opinion at home. And because China thinks that the Chinese people believe its propaganda at home, it may not grasp the skepticism with which its message will be received here.

I agree with Dana Rohrabacher that China’s recent behavior doesn’t merit the kind of lavish welcome President Obama gave to Hu Jintao: “Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher condemned Obama for welcoming Hu ‘as if he had the same stature and acceptability here as a democratic leader’ and said the United States should build bridges to China’s people directly. ‘Those are our allies. What do we do to them when we welcome their oppressor, their murderer, the one who’s murdering their children, here to the United States with such respect?'”