April 7, 2015

Why people call Christine Ahn “pro-North Korean”

Last night, CNN became the first news organization to do its due diligence on Christine Ahn, the organizer of the “Women Cross DMZ” march, and to call Gloria Steinem on this questionable association (Steinem stands by Ahn). CNN aired interviews with Greg Scarlatoiu of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, and Korea scholar and former CIA Analyst Sue Terry. CNN’s report is a case study on how quickly a little scrutiny turns fame into infamy. CNN deserves praise for...

Categories Useful Idiocy
April 6, 2015

Welthungerhilfe should tell us why N. Korea expelled its country director

North Korea has expelled Regina Feindt, the Country Director for the German humanitarian NGO Welthungerhilfe, which has operated in North Korea since 1997, “[w]ithout warning or saying why.” Reuters describes Welthungerhilfe as “one of the few foreign aid groups to operate in the isolated country.” Welthungerhilfe is not simply accepting this result quietly: Feindt’s colleague Karl Fall, who had worked in the country for 12 years, left of his own volition the next month, it said. “Welthungerhilfe does not see...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
April 3, 2015

With Sony in mind, Obama signs new cyberwar E.O., but will he enforce it?

On Wednesday, the President signed a new executive order authorizing sanctions against anyone the State and Treasury Departments decide has engaged in conduct we’d colloquially call cyberespionage, cyberwarfare, or cyberterrorism. The new categories of sanctionable conduct include — (A) harming, or otherwise significantly compromising the provision of services by, a computer or network of computers that support one or more entities in a critical infrastructure sector; (B) significantly compromising the provision of services by one or more entities in a critical...

Categories Cyberwar/Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)
April 2, 2015

Tell me who you boycott and I’ll tell you who you are: On Indiana, S. Africa & N. Korea

As I write this, advocacy groups nationwide are recomposing the tested strategy of using economic isolation to coerce an oppressive, backward regime to improve its human rights practices. The regime, unfortunately, isn’t North Korea; it’s Indiana. That strategy, however, is a moral muscle memory to those of us who came of age as America and Europe mobilized to boycott and sanction apartheid out of existence. Then, when President Reagan came out for “constructive engagement” with South Africa, he was met...

Categories History/Racism/Sanctions
March 27, 2015

Latest defection of armed North Korean soldiers points to erosion in morale and discipline.

In the eleven years I’ve been writing OFK, I’ve observed a cycle in North Korea’s border security. – In Phase One, the lure of capitalism coopts and corrupts the men (and they are mostly men) who guard the borders. Most, but not all, of the corruption is financial, but it is also chemical and sensual. – In Phase Two, the corrupt practices gain acceptance. The norms of accepted illegality change the de facto rules of border security, the rules of...

Categories Border Control/NK Military
March 26, 2015

Kim Jong Un’s censorship knows no limits or borders. To submit to it is to forfeit freedom.

If Kim Jong Un is weighing whether to answer leaflets from South Korea with artillery, it won’t discourage him that many on South Korea’s illiberal left have already begun to excuse him for it. Within this confused, transpatriated constituency, there is much “anxiety” lately about “inter-Korean tensions.” Those tensions have risen since North Korea has begun threatening to shell the North Korean defectors who send leaflets critical of Kim’s misrule across the DMZ. But then, any rational mind can see...

Categories Appeasement/Censorship/Democracy/Propaganda/Subversion/Terrorism (NK)
March 25, 2015

Must read: Iranian bank handled arms transactions for Tehran, Pyongyang through Seoul branch

Investigative journalist Claudia Rosett, who covered the Tienanmen Massacre and exposed the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, has written an extensive report about the operations of Iran’s Bank Mellat in Seoul during the administrations of Roh Moo-Hyun and Lee Myung-Bak: In a cable dated March 20, State asked its embassy in Seoul to tell the South Korean government that “Bank Mellat has facilitated the movement of millions of dollars for Iran’s nuclear program since at least 2003.” Four days later, State followed...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Proliferation/Sanctions/WMD
March 23, 2015

How Barack Obama let Kim Jong Un get away with censoring and terrorizing America (updated)

Last December, after the FBI and the National Security Agency concluded that North Korea’s Unit 121 had hacked Sony Pictures and threatened the Americans who wanted to see “The Interview,” President Obama publicly accused North Korea of the cyberattack and threat, and promised a “proportional response” to it. On January 2nd, the President signed a new executive order whose potential was sweeping, but whose actual effect was “symbolic at best.” In practice, the designations under the new executive order amounted...

Categories Censorship/Cyberwar/Democracy/Terrorism (NK)
March 20, 2015

Investigators: N. Korean hackers tried to cause reactor malfunction

Earlier this week, I posted on South Korean investigators’ conclusion that North Korea was behind the hacking of several South Korean nuclear power plants, but that the attacks caused no operational impact. Evidently, that wasn’t for lack of effort: The team of South Koreans investigating the incident says the hackers tried to cause a malfunction at the reactors, which supply around 30% of the country’s electricity, but failed to break through the control systems. [Sky News] See also this report from...

Categories Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)
March 18, 2015

Breaking news! FINCEN rehashes same old North Korea advisory.

To hear Yonhap tell it, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network just stuffed Kim Jong Un into a size XXXXL iron maiden, financially speaking: The United States has issued another advisory on financial transactions with North Korea, designating the communist country as a jurisdiction with high money laundering and terrorist financing risks, a U.S. report said Wednesday. The guidance to U.S. financial institutions, issued Monday by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), is based on the international money...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 17, 2015

South Korea blames North Korea for hacking nuke plants

Let the conspiracy theories commence at Naver, Minjok Tongshin, and MissyUSA, in 3, 2, 1 …. South Korean prosecutors on Tuesday blamed North Korea for cyber attacks against the country’s nuclear reactor operator last December, based upon its investigation into Internet addresses used in the hacking. The conclusion comes less than a week after a hacker believed to be behind the cyber attacks on Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Co Ltd released more files on Twitter that are believed to...

Categories Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)
March 16, 2015

Three Pinocchios for Glenn Kessler’s “fact-check” on North Korea

If only for prudential reasons, 47 Republican Senators should not have written to Iran’s Supreme Leader. We only have one President at a time, and only the President should negotiate with foreign leaders. Parallel, shadow-government negotiations with foreign adversaries are wrong when Republican Senators do it; they were just as wrong when Jim Wright met with Daniel Ortega, when Nancy Pelosi met with with Bashar Assad over a Republican President’s objections, and when a young John Kerry met with Madam...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Iran/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/WMD
March 14, 2015

N. Korea calls for S. Koreans to join “patriotic struggle to check and foil the U.S. imperialists.”

Following North Korea’s post-hoc support for the slashing of U.S. Ambassador Mark Lippert, my two main questions where (1) whether the North had a role in inciting the attack (for which I’ve seen no direct evidence thus far); and (2) whether the North is calling for more violent anti-American attacks. KCNA’s latest helps us answer the latter question in the affirmative. It isn’t specific about its favored methods of “patriotic struggle,” although its recent approval of the slashing of diplomats should give you...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Terrorism (NK)
March 13, 2015

Good engagement: BBC, in a reversal, decides to broadcast to North Korea (Update: Did the Telegraph get it wrong?)

Congratulations to EAHRNK, Lord Alton, and Youngchan Justin Choi, another of the young Korean-American over-achievers who may already have had an impact beyond his years on the history of his ancestral homeland. Here’s another link to Choi’s pages on Twitter and Facebook, if you wish to add your congratulations to mine. (I’m sure I’ve omitted many names of those who pushed for this, so feel free to add others in the comments.) It now looks like the Beeb is going to launch a North Korea...

Categories Propaganda/Subversion
March 12, 2015

Russia’s nuclear cooperation with N. Korea violates at least three UNSC resolutions

My final excerpt from the draft U.N. Panel of Experts report is a lengthy graf (below the fold) describing long-standing and continuing Russian assistance to, and cooperation with, some of the same scientists involved in North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. It’s hard for me to understand how this is not a violation of the UNSC sanctions. Despite the fact that key scientists in designated North Korean agencies (for example, its General Bureau of Atomic Energy) were invited to do research in...

Categories Proliferation/Russia & Korea/Sanctions/WMD
March 11, 2015

Roh Moo Hyun’s ex-campaign manager just hates it when politicians exploit tragic isolated incidents

The good news is that Ambassador Mark Lippert has been released from the hospital, and is recovering well. [Joongang Ilbo] Give the South Koreans credit for making lemonade from lemons — the news coverage here has been filled with images of well-wishers greeting Lippert, or expressing regret for the attack on him. The greetings look both staged and sincere,* but because of that reaction, most Americans will see Kim Ki-Jong as one small turd in a vast, sweet, fizzy bowl of gachi gapshida....

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Terrorism (NK)/The Fifth Column/U.S. & Korea