Search Results for “swift”

January 16, 2009

That’s Weapons Grade Uranium

The debate about North Korea’s uranium cheat should be over with even Hillary Clinton’s acknowledgment of it, but Condi Rice’s statement that North Korea possesses some unknown quantity of weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium isn’t a fact we should just gloss over. That’s the first time I’ve seen that reported. Update: The Daily NK has more recent statements from the Administration on this topic, including from President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. The President stated during the last press conference of his...

Proliferation/WMD

Holocaust Now: Looking Down Into Hell at Camp 22

Those who have lived to tell us about Camp 22, located in the bleak northeastern tip of North Korea, can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and all of them are former guards or staff. Of all of North Korea’s numerous labor camps and detention facilities, large and small, Camp 22 is one of the largest, and almost certainly the most terrible, if only for the inhuman experiments witnesses say were done to the men, women, children, and...

Comments: 55

August 31, 2008

Under Lee Myung Bak, Refugee Policy Moves in a More Humane Direction … Mostly

The number of North Korean refugees arriving in South Korea has risen by a whopping 42 percent from the number arriving this time last year: The ministry estimated the number of North Korean defectors coming to the South in the first six months of this year to be 1,744, up 41.7 percent from 1,230 during the same period last year. The figure represented a growth of 101 percent from 869 in the corresponding period in 2006. A ministry official said...

Anju Links/Refugees

August 26, 2008

Anju Links for 26 August 2008

MEETING WITH HU JINTAO IN BEIJING, “[South Korean President] Lee [Myung Bak] requested Hu’s cooperation to ensure ‘North Korean defectors won’t be forcefully sent back to the North against their will,’ Lee’s spokesman Lee Dong-kwan told reporters.” [IHT] WORTHY OF ITS NAME: South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission is calling on the Unification Ministry to come up with some answers about those 22 North Korean boat people who arrived in South Korea earlier this year, only to be returned to...

Anju Links

August 26, 2008

Chris Hill Resignation Watch: N. Korea Halts Disablement, Balks at Verification, Accounting for Abductees

You had to know that verification was where this thing was destined to fall apart. And that certainly looks like what’s happening today. North Korea said Tuesday it has suspended work to disable its nuclear reactor in anger over Washington’s failure to remove it from the U.S. list of terror sponsors. The North said it will soon consider a step to restore the plutonium-producing facility. The announcement poses the biggest hurdle yet to the communist nation’s denuclearization process under a...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Uncategorized

August 12, 2008

Anju Links for 12 August 2008

NO JUCHE FOR YOU: The South Korean government has refused permission for delegations from an unnamed “local youth group” and the infamously extremist Korean Teachers’ and Educational Workers’ Union to visit North Korea. The decision has reportedly caused a spike in the prices of invisible ink, pen-shaped transmitters, and cyanide capsules in college dormitories, faculty lounges, and union halls across South Korea. A SECOND SHIPMENT OF AMERICAN FOOD AID has arrived to feed North Korea’s needy army. FIVE NORTH KOREAN...

Anju Links

July 1, 2008

Oops, We Changed the Wrong Regime

People can differ about the merits of overthrowing noxious regimes and the various ways that can be pursued, but I’m guessing this is one item Condoleezza Rice wasn’t pursuing for her legacy showcase: Rice’s sudden turnabout on de-listing North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism may soon plunge the Japanese government into crisis. Japan must now decide whether to join the United States in providing aid to a country that kidnaps and refuses to account for unknown numbers of...

Abductions/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Japan/Japan & Korea/Six-Party Talks

June 26, 2008

Get Ready for Kim Jong Il’s Incomplete, Incorrect, and Expensive Nuclear Declaration (Updated and Bumped)

[Updated below: Today, President Bush embarks on the process of throwing away most of our diplomatic leverage against North Korea in exchange for a declaration that’s incomplete, incorrect, and unverified. Those who rightly criticized President Clinton for appeasing North Korea after the 1994 Agreed Framework should be honest enough to admit that Bush’s eleventh-hour grasp at a diplomatic legacy is probably even more dangerous.] [Original Post, 24 Jun 08] In a speech at the Heritage Foundation last week, Secretary of...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks

March 7, 2008

Can Kim Jong Il Outlive “Military First?”

In the last two months, I’ve come to believe that the decay of Kim Jong Il’s control of North Korea is accelerating. I’m not quite on board with Jane’s, which predicts imminent collapse, because regime collapse is not proceeding at equal rates in all areas of North Korea, and history tells us that there’s been plenty of dissent in North Korea that the regime was able to contain, localize, and suppress. There are, however, clear signs that chaos is taking...

Kremlinology/Regime Change

March 4, 2008

Of Geography and Mortality: The Food Crisis Worsens, Again

All of the worst stories that hardly anyone ever hears happen in North Korea, and here is one of the best worst stories I’ve heard. It’s an object lesson in how useless good intentions can be when bad intentions have all the spine. In 1997, at the peak of the Great Famine, documentary filmmaker Mark Davis accompanied a Care aid worker — and two North Korean minders — into the North Korean countryside. They went there to looking, in vain,...

Famine & Food Aid

February 17, 2008

Yonhap: N. Korea Executes 22 Who “Drifted” into S. Korean Waters

Public execution in Hoeryong, North Korea, 2005 Just one week remains in leftist President Roh Moo Hyun’s disgraceful term of office, yet his Sunshine Policy is still killing North Koreans. That policy was generous to the man who lives in this palace, but for the rest of North Korea’s people, it has always meant “die in place” and “you are not welcome.” And while there’s much we still don’t know about this incident, I didn’t believe the official story from...

Appeasement/Human Rights/Refugees

November 24, 2007

Casualties of Banalities: The Arrest and Coming Death of Yoo Sang-Joon

One of the bravest men I have ever met is locked in a Chinese prison this weekend, facing the risk of being sent back to certain execution in his native North Korea. His story stands for the human suffering that endures while diplomats craft a controversial agreement to disarm North Korea of its nuclear weapons and to grant its dictator, Kim Jong-il, the peace treaty and the recognition that his regime has sought for decades. [The Sunday Times, Michael Sheridan]...

"United" Nations/Activism/China/China & Korea/Human Rights/Refugees/U.S. Politics

September 7, 2007

The Death of an Alliance, Part 67

[Update: As I had figured, only video really does it justice. Just watch the body language and Bush’s expression. And for that matter, Roh’s. Roh certainly has used his presidency to perfect a sublime aura of idiocy. It’s hard for me to imagine that South Korean voters will be impressed if their media ever decide to cover this story. There definitely isn’t much love in that room. Click the image. Update 1 continued below, with an AP report that does...

An Alliance?/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea

July 26, 2007

South Korea: No Worse Friend, No Better Enemy

By now you’ve heard that the Taliban have murdered their first Korean hostage, and so Korea has now wheeled as one in spontaneous rage at the Taliban, as though they’d issued postage stamps with images of Tokdo, right? Well, not exactly. There are many things I could say about the reactions of Roh Moo Hyun, his government, and his country’s media, but Robert Kohler has pretty much already said those things, and a few others. Two lessons bears repeating: first,...

Anti-Americanism/Korean Society/Religion/Terrorism/Iraq

May 7, 2007

So Much for ‘Hawk Engagement:’ Victor Cha Steps Down

The proponent of the “hawk-engagement” theory of North Korea policy looks to be the first casualty of the unraveling of Agreed Framework 2.0. The AP tries to shoehorn this into its standard anti-Iraq War meme, but it’s a strained fit for on Cha, an architect of a soft-line diplomatic approach that is clearly failing: Cha leaves amid concerns over North Korea’s failure to comply with deadlines to eliminate its nuclear weapons programs. [AP] Reporter Matthew Lee’s story is what you’d...

An Alliance?/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics

March 6, 2007

Can They Do It? A Brief History of Resistance to the North Korean Regime

[Updated March 2007; See new incidents and survey stats at the bottom of the post.] According to the image of the North Korean people that their rulers carefully cultivate, North Koreans are brainwashed automatons. Regime minders, who closely follow foreign camera crews inside North Korea, seldom permit outsiders to see any alternative. That image is probably a combination of fear, stage management, brainwashing, and a degree of truth: few North Koreans have ever known anything else, and extreme nationalism...

Resistance

February 14, 2007

A Bus Bombing Even I Can Like

A car loaded with explosives blew up near a bus carrying members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards in southeastern Iran, killing 18 of them, the state-run news agency reported today. The car stopped in front of the bus near Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan Province, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. It called the attack a terrorist operation and said the car’s occupants fled on motorbikes seconds before the car exploded. [The Independent; ht Gateway Pundit] The Al-Quds are...

Iran

December 13, 2006

South Dakota Moves One Step Closer to Global Hegemony

Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota suffered a possible stroke Wednesday and was taken to a hospital, his office said. If he should be unable to continue to serve, it could halt the scheduled Democratic takeover of the Senate. Democrats won a 51-49 majority in the November election. South Dakota’s governor, who would appoint any temporary replacement, is a Republican. “Senator Tim Johnson was taken to George Washington University Hospital this afternoon suffering from a possible stroke,” read a...

America

Search Results for: swift