Open Sources, October 2, 2013

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THREE CHEERS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST: Ever since Blaine Harden, Chico Harlan, and Max Fisher have covered the story, the Post‘s North Korea coverage has been leagues beyond that of any competitor, especially The New York Times. What’s really commendable is that the Post‘s editorial board draws the necessary conclusions from what its journalists are reporting:

A COMMON illusion held by dictators is that they need only to shut the borders, turn off the Internet and control television for no one to notice the horrors they commit inside the country. The work of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has demonstrated how wrong they are. The commission has shined a light on one of the world’s human rights sinkholes, North Korea, without ever setting foot there. Michael Kirby, the retired Australian jurist who heads the commission, delivered an interim report last week that manages to shock on a topic that has already shocked for some time. The commission’s witnesses provided evidence of systematic and widespread human rights violations, including torture, sexual violence, deliberate starvation, arbitrary detention and more.

Read the rest on your own, and if your views on this issue are anything like mine, savor the strange surroundings that some call “the mainstream.”

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CHARM OFFENSIVE UPDATE:

After years of relying on foreign-made technology to develop its nuclear weapons program, North Korea appears to have figured out how to make that equipment at home, according to an alarming report by nuclear proliferation expert Joshua Pollack and MIT-based nuclear scientist Scott Kemp. The scholars conclude that North Korean engineers are now using indigenously manufactured equipment, previously imported from abroad, to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Pollack has blogged some of the details of his report, and shown some compelling evidence, right here. [Max Fisher, Washington Post]

Seven years ago, a conclusion suggesting that North Korea continued a determined acquisition and proliferation of nuclear weapons would have been just as true, but many journalists (including the Post’s correspondent at that time) would have given more ink to skeptics who’d have attributed it to neocon warmongers. I suppose one advantage of having a Democrat as president is that journalists temporarily take external threats seriously. It shouldn’t work that way.

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IT’S PRETTY RARE THAT I SEE anything worth reading in a travelogue of North Korea, but this was just too funny and too sad not to link: He could just as well have said “journalism plan.”

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THREE WORDS: FREEZE THEIR ASSETS: This photo of Kaesong suggests that the place really is back in production. I hope those Korean-American investors who are thinking about investing there have good lawyers, because the laws surrounding investment in North Korea are complex, and the penalties for violating them are harsh. Related:  Russia completes a rail link to North Korea.

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FIFTH COLUMN WATCH:  The NIS arrests more suspects in Li Seok-Ki’s plot to attack key South Korean installations in support of a hypothetical North Korean invasion.  What I’d like to know is whether any evidence suggests that North Korea actually had active plans for that.

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PRESIDENT OBAMA’S UNSTEADINESS on Syria is finally costing him politically, as it should. His errors early on mean that Syria has descended into something hellish that still hasn’t hit bottom, and will metastasize worldwide. I suppose it takes something like this every few years to convince voters to stop humming “Make the World Go Away.”