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12 years of North Korean labor camp for American journalists
matisyahu
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More people should be talking about this, but most news organizations are more entranced by finding pieces of an airplane in the ocean.
Why aren't more media outlets talking about this? Is it because they're Asian?
The other pertinent question is of course, what's the Obama administration's next move?
Here you can read more about the situation:
http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-06-08-voa3.cfm
And here you can read about how this is basically a death sentence (though they will probably be given preferential treatment):
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-korea-labor-camps9-2009jun09,0,3230915.story
Why aren't more media outlets talking about this? Is it because they're Asian?
The other pertinent question is of course, what's the Obama administration's next move?
Here you can read more about the situation:
http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-06-08-voa3.cfm
North Korea says it has handed a harsh sentence to two U.S. women journalists, more than two months after it captured them for allegedly crossing its border illegally. Whether they actually serve that sentence may depend on closed door diplomacy.
North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency reported Monday the country's highest court had sentenced U.S. journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee to 12 years of what it calls "reform through labor."
North Korean authorities captured the women in March, accusing them of illegally crossing the border from China and committing "hostile actions" against the country. Their employer, U.S. broadcaster Current TV, says they were gathering video footage for a documentary on human rights abuses of North Korean refugees.
The U.S. State Department says it is "deeply concerned" about the sentencing. In a recorded public phone announcement, the agency says it will continue seeking the women's freedom.
"We are engaged through all possible channels to secure their release. We once again urge North Korea to grant the immediate release of the two American citizen journalists on humanitarian grounds," the recording stated.
The sentence announcement comes days after the scheduled start of the trial last Thursday.
Kim Yong-hyun is a professor of North Korean studies at Dongkuk University in Seoul. He says the sentence has a lot to do with the North's diplomatic positioning towards the United States.
He says North Korea has created a concrete and practical matter requiring diplomatic contact with the United States. By handing the two women a harsh, 12-year labor penalty, he says, North Korea is pushing the United States to take practical action to free them.
Kim and most other analysts say the most likely next step is for Washington to send a special envoy to Pyongyang with the task of freeing the two women. Former Vice President Al Gore is frequently mentioned, not only because he is a co-founder of Current TV, but because he is a prestigious U.S. personage with no formal ties to the present administration.
Still, Professor Kim says sending Gore will not let the Obama administration completely off the hook.
He says if Al Gore does end up going to the North, it will be because some kind of negotiation took place first behind the scenes. North Korea is sure to use the substance of those behind the scenes negotiations in its future dealings with the United States.
And here you can read about how this is basically a death sentence (though they will probably be given preferential treatment):
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-korea-labor-camps9-2009jun09,0,3230915.story
"It's extremely hard labor under extremely brutal conditions," said Hawk. "These places have very high rates of deaths in detention. The casualties from forced labor and inadequate food supplies are very high."
Because the pair was tried by the nation's highest court, there can be no appeal, analysts say.
Obama administration officials said Monday that the White House is working "through all possible channels" to secure the release of the women.
In a nationally-televised interview Monday, former U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson called the verdict part of "a high-stakes poker game," adding that the atmosphere might be right for a deal between Washington and Pyongyang.
"It is harsher than expected," the New Mexico governor said of the verdict during an interview on NBC's "Today" show, saying that he would try to seek a sort of "political pardon."
Ling, 32, and Lee, 36, were arrested March 17 along the China-North Korean border while reporting a story on human trafficking by North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's regime.
The group Reporters Without Borders said in a statement Monday that the harsh verdict was "clearly designed to scare journalists trying to do investigative reporting in the border area between China and North Korea"
North Korea experts with knowledge of the nation's penitentiary system worried over the women's fate.
"The first thing that passed through my mind when I heard about the verdict was that, from an American perspective, this is tantamount to a death sentence," said Scott Snyder, director of the Center for U.S.-Korea Policy for the Asia Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.
"There aren't a lot of guarantees in that type of environment. It's different from any prison that exists in the modern-day United States. This is a very sobering challenge for a new administration."
i dont even like matisyahu and i dont know why i picked this username
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Then about a week before the trial, the Ling and Lee families couldn't hold out any longer and hit the media trail. It's been in the news pretty consistently since then.
It's bad and needs to be dealt with, but kicking up a frenzy is only going to make and negotiations more difficult.
A) According to North Korea's sorry excuse for a judicial system, "pardons" don't take place until after sentencing. They don't usually start their serious negotiations until after sentencing. Now that that's happened...
C) Bill Richardson, for whom this is not his first North Korean rodeo, is optimistic given what's gone down so far. He's not worried, I'm not worried.
You know the scene — I guess there's more than one — in West Wing where Bartlet is ranting about how he supposedly commands the most powerful armed force in the world, but he can't use it to save the tiniest handful of American citizens? That's where I'm at.
And then you have the hot war with North Korea on your hands, in addition to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Well, right. That's my point.
Not to mention the ~10 million deaths that accompany Seoul being bombed into ashes within 45 minutes of a first step across the DMZ.
China's finally starting to get sick of their bullshit, so that's a good sign that one of the last vestiges of the Cold War is going to come to a conclusion before too long.
So despite the total bullshit of the trial and the not negligible chance that they were kidnapped by NK, there hasn't been sufficent proveable provocation to justify sending in Chuck Norris and the delta force team.
My greatest fear is that someday, someone in the brainwashed ranks of the mid-level military is going to decide that the current Kim leadership is no true scotsman, and has deviated too far from the eternal true leader's ideals, and wipe out the leadership in a violent coup, leaving the country controled by those who actually believe SK built a wall to divide the country, and that there's a satellite in orbit blanketing the world in patriotic odes to the first Kim.
Perfect. North Korean refugees, by and large, don't want to stop at China. What Laura and Euna were attempting to report before their abduction is, the refugees are trying to do an end run around the DMZ. They were with a guy who runs this underground railroad to Laos (he got away), the first country that will take North Korean refugees. Get caught before then, they run the risk of being shipped back to North Korea and North Korea will not be happy with them. From there, the refugees are sorted out to wherever it is they're going. Most are headed to South Korea, with Japan and Sweden being other top destinations.
So China needs to be made to realize that the refugees don't have to end up as theirs. If they set up a kind of welcome center near the border- and they have plenty of cities that can serve the purpose- they can process the refugees, sort them out, stick them on the first plane to wherever they say they're headed and then they're the destination country's problem. Maybe they take a small number themselves, but by and large all they would be asked to do is streamline the escape process and have a controlled way of dealing with refugees. Or, alternatively, deport the refugees to Laos, where they can be handled.
What this would do is, with the fear of being shipped back to North Korea gone, more people are going to get up the guts to make the crossing into China, and with every refugee that escapes successfully, North Korea becomes more and more manageable.
China must also be made to understand that if the conflict goes hot, the refugee stream instantly gets dialed up to Zerg Rush, and with South Korea in all likelihood no longer an option, and probably no connections to lead them down to Laos, China will end up taking the lion's share of the refugees themselves. And nobody wants that.
I'm hoping that the third Kim is more modernistic and will destroy the Old Guard in a massive military takeover upon taking power. I mean shit, I wouldn't even mind if he leads the country into progression because he just wants more money or something, anything would be better then this.
Well, okay, maybe not a full-scale NK civil war.
This makes an unfortunate amount of sense. And yet it's so easy to see through.
We'll make a deal in private, the sanctions will go nowhere.
If a war with the United States was an inevitability, the DPRK basically couldn't ask for a better time to do it than now--well, perhaps with the exception of the Korea war, fifty years ago.
For the first time in history, China can tell us to stick it where the sun doesn't shine, and we'll actually have to consider it. No use bullying them, in other words.
We're still bogged down in two other wars and while the situation is improving, that doesn't change the fact that we've been doing it for seven years now? Nearly seven? The ground branches of the Armed Forces are feeling the strain.
Our economy isn't doing too well (perhaps another war could spin it around, though I wonder for how long--we can only stretch our own credit so far, and both the population and the government doesn't seem willing to actually make sacrifices for war).
Of course, the DPRK is hardly better off, but they still have the world's most concentrated (though not necessarily most effective) anti-aircraft defensive network. An a defensive war is probably one that is the most winnable, from a homefront standpoint. It won't be too hard to rally an otherwise apathetic population to a patriotic cause when our five-million-dollar cruise missiles start pounding their country every hour of every day.
I'm not saying they would win, but this is pretty much their best chance.
On the actual relevant subject of the two journalists--I think some deal-making is in order, and perhaps the best bet for getting them out of it. Here's hoping.
I can imagine the Epic fiasco that will cause.
I think I know what you're talking about...it's from the first season.
I thought of this scene when I heard about the prisoners too. And it is immediately appealing. But it stops being appealing where the rational mind kicks in and when you realize that it means certain death for these two.
Nah. The way China and the DPRK are....they'll be some backroom deal that's not even heard about in the west for a month, involving dismantling said missiles and being very sorry to China for the inconvenience it might cause.
We won't even know it happened for a few months. Or years. China knows to handle that.
Now, if you want a real shitstorm, have that missile land somewhere in the ROK or in Japan. Or far-eastern Russia.
Can you imagine how a press secretary would handle that?
"At 10:50 am, a small nuclear device detonated on the coast of Japan. By 12:20 pm, North Korea ceased to exist. I'll now take questions."
Fix'd for accuracy. Japan, lacking bomber aircraft and the like, would take a while on its own, and we'd also take a bit.
We didn't do anything when they assassinated the president of South Korea. What makes you think we'd start a war over a simple misfire?
All three of those countries have big, modern armies. Granted, Japan calls its a "self-defense force", but that's just a load of bullshit.
Plus, Park was killed by the director of (South) Korean Central Intelligence, Lieutenant General Kim Jaegyu.
That's pretty fucked up though. Imagine of George H. W. Bush killed Carter. Shot him in the face. Man.
True. There were several other attempted assassinations, though, which I was thinking of. One of them killed his wife.
And it's not like North Korea's army is some joke- it's one of the largest one Earth. Japan would have no chance of invading them, even the US would take heavy casualties. Not to mention that they have enough artillery in place to level all of Seoul.
There's really nothing we can do to them, short of a preemptive nuclear strike.
You're absolutely right--the DPRK is the most militarized country on Earth, and the JSDF or ROKA would have quite a trouble in many respects (actually landing troops, for example). Really, the Russian Federation (and the other nations of the CIS for whom they have joint-security agreements with) would probably have the best shot at an immediate ground occupation, thanks to the (small) border they share and that most DPRK defenses are intended to repulse an attack from the south, rather than the north.
It wouldn't be easy, but in pretty much every respect, Russia has superiority, including numbers, technology, and supplies/logistics.
'Course, there's China. But in this fun speculation, I already gave my two cents on that. Check out the post beneath that one too.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Nope. It's been something that's been played around with for years. I think the Soviet Burya program played around with it back before ICBMs came into their own (though it was dropped, and the research went to their shuttle program).
It's pretty scary shit, all the same.
Surprise? I guess it depends on the demand.
After the initial clash, you quickly settle into a situation where it's a North Korean army stuck in a Cold War mindset against South Korea, Japan, the US and whoever else, all of which have more modern, likely better-fed troops with better toys and who would almost assuredly be sharing notes. You end up with a cratered Seoul, a cratered Pyongyang. The largest South Korean city that remains semi-intact becomes the capital of a "unified" Korea, with North Korea becoming a puppet administrative division until they get their collective shit together, which will likely take until North Korean children grow up into a world without the Kims. (Whom will all be dead. Nobody's going to be in the mood to put up with a crimes-against-humanity trial.)
As for China, as soon as the shit starts going down, they're going to have their hands full with the refugee zerg rush, the occurrence of which ends their rationale for propping up North Korea. They might go for a land grab, but seeing as they didn't want the refugees in the first place, my money says they largely sit it out.
So was Iraq's pre-Gulf War I.
North Korea's air force is pre-Vietnam War era. A single carrier group could destroy their entire air force and that dominance would cripple the obsolete armor and make any real assault south through the DMZ nigh impossible. The only hitches are the incredible loss of life that would be incurred (who knows what Kim would do to the civilian population) and the threat of those missiles. In a conventional war the US military would cut through the North Korean military like a knife through warm butter. But then you have the same problem as Iraq presented: What do you do with it?
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