Open Sources, June 6, 2012

BRIGADIER GENERAL NEIL TOLLEY, whose poor choice of words led to a myriad of (almost certainly) untrue reports that U.S. Army special forces were parachuting into North Korea, has been canned.

I’M NOT OPPOSED TO THE IDEA THAT THE United States should help its allies who seek to check China’s regional expansionism, but rather than asking whether America is serious about defending its allies in Asia, we ought to be asking just how serious our Asian allies are about defending themselves, with our support. I’m glad this pivot toward Asia doesn’t seem to involve stationing more ground forces there. I’ve long believed that the United States could counter China more effectively with good diplomacy (think NATO, back when it had a reason to exist, and in the Pacific), and we may be seeing the first signs of that. Given the impatience of Americans for foreign ground wars and the impatience of Asian allies with a large U.S. troop presence, a far more sustainable force structure would combine Asian ground forces and tactical air power with American command, control, communications, intelligence, and strategic air power, and then meld those ingredients into an expeditionary mutual-security alliance.

STATE DEPARTMENT SHAMES SYRIA with satellite imagery:

A U.S. government website on Friday published what it said was photographic evidence of mass graves and attacks on civilian areas by Syrian government forces.

The website, operated by a bureau of the State Department, published a series of overhead photos, said to be taken earlier this week by commercial satellite, showing what it said were mass graves dug following a massacre near the town of Houla.

They also showed apparent artillery impact craters near civilian areas of a town called Atarib.

Included on the web page, which can be viewed at http://www.humanrights.gov/2012/03/05/situation-in-syria/, are pictures which apparently show artillery deployed as of May 31 – Thursday – near three Syrian towns and attack helicopters allegedly deployed near the towns of Shayrat and Homs.

We could do this with North Korea’s prison camps, too, but for some reason, our government chooses not to.

TODAY, HE’S A LAW STUDENT IN SEOUL:

During the famine of the mid-1990s, when Ji was 14, he suffered a terrible accident. “I was helping my parents make a living by stealing coal off trains and selling it in the market. I got dizzy once and I ended up falling off a moving train. It ran me over,” Ji explains. He lost his left hand and foot. [VOA]

SELIG HARRISON, are you still out there?

IT’S FRIGHTENING to contemplate that this could happen in America.