January 12, 2015

The Interview: A Review (Updated)

Does The Interview trivialize the suffering of North Koreans?  I’m not sure what you had a right to expect from the likes of Seth Rogen and James Franco, but I’d say it did so less than I expected. A central theme of the film’s climactic scene — Franco’s interview with Kim Jong Un — was hunger, and the contrast between Kim’s obscene wealth and the squalor of his people. Was The Interview a good parody of North Korea? It was a...

Categories Books & Films
January 12, 2015

U.S., S. Korea reject N. Korea’s nuke test offer

North Korea has offered to stop testing nuclear weapons — something that several U.N. Security Council resolutions already prohibit — if President Obama cancels annual military exercises (full KNCA article below the fold.) Which sounds something like a bank robber promising to stop robbing you if you disable your alarm system and leave the safe unlocked. Which is almost exactly what the Korean Defense Ministry thought. To his credit, President Obama saw this for what it was: “The DPRK (North...

Categories North-South/Proliferation/WMD
January 10, 2015

But wouldn’t Su-35s divert money needed for flat-screens and ski resorts?

I could be wrong, but I doubt even Vlad Putin would violate U.N. Security Council Sanctions so blatantly as this: North Korea made an attempt to purchase advanced fighter jets from Russia by sending a special envoy, a senior South Korean military official told the JoongAng Ilbo on Thursday. “Choe Ryong-hae, who visited Moscow as a special envoy of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in November last year, asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to provide Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets,” the...

Categories Anju Links
January 9, 2015

Der Spiegel: N. Koreans helping Syria to nuke up. Again.

Evidently, I refreshed your memory of the 2007 Al-Kibar reactor raid just in time for this cheery piece of news: Der Spiegel, citing anonymous intelligence sources, reports that Syria “has apparently built a new nuclear facility at a secret location” in the mountains near the Lebanese border. The conclusion is based, in part, on signals intelligence: [T]he clearest proof that it is a nuclear facility comes from radio traffic recently intercepted by a network of spies. A voice identified as belonging to a...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/WMD
January 9, 2015

Dear President Bush: You had eight years.

The George W. Bush center has released a call for “a new approach” to improve human rights in North Korea, complete with a video of the former President, looking a little older than the man we once knew. It’s hard to disagree with anything in the Bush Center’s call. For example, it calls for raising global awareness of the situation, citing polls showing that just half of Americans have heard of North Korea’s political prison camps. (This polling, of course, was done before Seth Rogen...

Categories Activism/Human Rights
January 8, 2015

N. Korea threatens U.S. with “a hail of bullets and shells on its own territory.”

Via our friends at the Korean Central News Service, North Korea’s official journo-terrorism service. In 2011, the Associated Press signed two memoranda of agreement with KCNA in which AP and KCNA agreed to cooperate in the reporting of “news” about North Korea. The AP refuses to disclose the contents of those memoranda. President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. The Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to...

Categories Terrorism (NK)
January 8, 2015

FBI Director: Yes, I’m sure North Korea did it. (Update: So is NSA’s Director)

The other day, a reporter asked me whether the “considerable doubt” about Pyongyang’s responsibility for the Sony hacks and terror threats undermined the legitimacy of the President’s response. I suppose the answer depends on your perspective. I’m not privy to the FBI’s evidence against North Korea, but my greater doubt is whether the President’s response, so far, is meaningful. A week ago, however, I decided that the FBI was losing the battle for public opinion. I recalled the CIA’s video...

Categories Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)
January 7, 2015

Dear Professor Lankov: Shall we make it double or nothing?

As he did in 2012, Andrei Lankov has gone all-in supporting the latest rumors of economic and agricultural reforms in North Korea, calling them “revolutionary.” The Wall Street Journal’s excellent Alastair Gale describes Lankov’s prediction, notes the skepticism of the South Korean government, and notes that Lankov is “not often associated with very bullish views on North Korean reform.” The plan, he says, citing recent visitors to the country, would give more freedom and land to the country’s farmers. North...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
January 7, 2015

Jean Lee resigns from AP

Via Nate Thayer. Lee says this had been planned for some time. I think Lee made some bad choices as a reporter in Pyongyang, but I wish her well in her new career. I don’t know the extent to which the much worse choices made by AP corporate management constrained Lee’s decisions or coverage. One day, I hope she’ll tell us. One last note on this: Lee recently tweeted that she was receiving hate tweets from people who called her a North...

Categories AP Watch
January 6, 2015

Activists send 600K leaflets into N. Korea

An activist group of North Korean defectors has launched balloons containing anti-North Korea leaflets across the inter-Korean border, police said Tuesday, in an act that could dampen a burgeoning thaw in inter-Korean relations. The Campaign for Helping North Korean in Direct Way scattered some 600,000 leaflets from Yeoncheon, a county bordering North Korea, on Monday evening, local police said. Lee Min-bok, the head of the group, and his wife participated in the 30-minute leaflet-scattering event, the police said, adding the...

Categories Propaganda/Subversion
January 6, 2015

N. Korea perestroika watch

Following North Korea’s expansive crackdown on illegal mobile phone calls being placed to other countries – namely South Korea and China – some 30 residents of North Hamkyung Province’s Musan County have been arrested. “One or two minutes after you switch on your phone and start talking, security agents with detectors show up. So you’re putting your life at risk when you make calls to other countries,” a source based in North Hamkyung Province told the Daily NK on Wednesday....

Categories Border Control/Capitalism
January 6, 2015

Ros-Lehtinen bill to call for N. Korea’s listing as a terrorism sponsor

WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 (Yonhap) — A U.S. congresswoman said Monday she will introduce a bill calling for re-listing North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism in response to the communist nation’s alleged cyber-attack on Sony Pictures. “North Korea should have never been taken off the state sponsor of terrorism list and should be reinstated immediately,” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) said in comments emailed to Yonhap News Agency. “I will soon be reintroducing legislation to redesignate North Korea as a...

Categories Anju Links/Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)
January 5, 2015

The AP should release its MOU or register as a N. Korean propagandist

Those who expect to shatter the illusions of 23 million North Koreans by airdropping copies of The Interview over the no-smile line probably overestimate the translatability of its humor into North Korea’s socially conservative culture. But for all its flaws, The Interview approached brilliance on one level – not as a parody of Kim Jong Un (Randall Park wasn’t nearly fat enough) but as a parody of the Americans who choose to nuzzle up to him. When James Franco was...

Categories AP Watch