Archive for the 'North Korea' Category

Kim Jong-il: ‘I refuse to conform to normal standards of behavior!’

North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test, provoking international condemnation. Unlike North Korea’s test in October 2006, this latest attempt at detonating a nuclear weapon appears to have been successful.

So why test now, a year and a half after North Korea’s failed test? Most American sources I’ve read agree with an analysis offered by Xu Guangyu, of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association:

“North Korea’s strategic objective has not changed. That objective is to win the attention of the Obama administration, to push the North Korea issue up the agenda.”

A former South Korean foreign minister, Han Seung-joo, added: “It’s one way of breaking in the new US administration to the North Korean way of doing things … If and when negotiations take place with the US, they want to make it into disarmament or arms control talks between nuclear weapons states, which assumes the US recognises or at least reckons North Korea as a weapons state.”

In other words, the North Koreans seek to force Obama to the bargaining table by using a tactic that seems likely to make it more difficult politically for Obama to meet North Korea’s demands. It seems to me that an explanation offered by Richard Lloyd Parry, Asia editor of the Times, is more likely:

Even the best-equipped spies cannot see the workings of North Korea’s internal politics, but there are good reasons for believing that the 67-year old Mr Kim is more than usually vulnerable at present. We know with some certainty that he was gravely ill last summer, with something like a stroke. Now there are signs that he is preparing one of his three sons to succeed him.

Hereditary successions in oppressive monarchies are often moments of uncertainty, when courtiers compete to be more on-message, and when the old king feels most susceptible and afraid. Yesterday’s test may have been a calculated attempt to raise the stakes in negotiations with the new US Administration - or it may have been Mr Kim’s effort to win favour with his own military hardliners, the only people who can guarantee his family’s hold on power.

Confrontation of the kind in which North Korea specialises is the last refuge of the politically bankrupt - but it is a failure of imagination to to award Mr Kim the domestic prestige that he seeks. Any man with a gun is dangerous, but he is easier to deal with if his weakness is recognised and not mistaken for strength.

In other words, Parry says, “It’s not about us at all - it’s about him.” And the best way of dealing with this latest provocation is probably to avoid strengthening Kim’s hand by either acceding to his demands or by engaging in Bush-style ‘bullhorn diplomacy’, and instead working quietly with the Chinese (who supply most of North Korea’s energy and food) to pressure Kim into allowing international weapons inspectors and restarting the six-party disarmament talks that North Korea withdrew from last month.

While we readily admit that today we’re taking a sarcastic sort of swipe at the pretty dumb practice of stating the sodding obvious, we ourselves wish to make it perfectly obvious that we are in no way “having a go” at Ireland’s excellent ex President, Mary Robinson.

Since the sad truth is that there are still millions of westerners convinced that bums like George Bush and Tony Blair, to mention just a pair, always told us all the truth.

Just take a look at this.

GENEVA (Reuters)

Washington’s “war on terror” after the September 11 attacks has eroded human rights worldwide, creating lingering cynicism that the United Nations must now combat, international law experts said on Monday.

Mary Robinson, who was the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights when al Qaeda militants flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, said the United States caused harm with some of the ways it responded.

“Seven years after 9/11 it is time to take stock and repeal abusive laws and policies,” the former Irish president said, warning that harsh U.S. detentions and interrogations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba gave a dangerous signal to other countries that could easily follow suit.

While new U.S. President Barack Obama has announced he will close Guantanamo to break from the practices of his predecessor George W. Bush, Robinson said sweeping changes needed to take place to ensure Washington abandons its “war paradigm.”

“There has been severe damage and it needs to be addressed,” she told a news conference in Geneva. “We are not more secure. We are more divided, and people are more cynical about the operation of laws.”

Arthur Chaskalson, former chief justice of South Africa, said that the United States should launch an inquiry into its counter-terrorism practices, including acts of torture by individual security and intelligence agents.

Although counter-terrorism issues have faded from the front pages since the change of government in Washington, Chaskalson said such practices have shifted around the world and could keep restricting liberties if they are not confronted head-on.

“We all have less rights today than we had five or 10 years ago, and if nothing happens, we will have even less,”

So here’s to you, Mrs Robinson, we have to say that we like your style. Like it a lot, in fact. Truth be told, maybe we even love it.

Now read the rest of this Reuters’report.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

Authentic photo of Kim Jong-il shows that the dictator is in good health and high spirits

In order to dispel rumors that President Kim Jong-il is either dead or incapacitated, the North Korean government recently released several photos of the dictator. A lot of media outlets immediately pronounced the photos fraudulent:

Kim Jong-il: Doctored Photos?

‘Fake photo’ revives Kim rumours

Kim Jong Il: digital trickery or an amazing recovery from a stroke?

But when the Associated Press hired an actual expert to check out the photos, he said that the “proof” that the photos are faked can be easily explained:

We contacted digital-forensics expert Hany Farid, professor of computer science at Dartmouth College and author of a June Scientific American article on detecting fake images, for his take. In a phrase: More than likely not.

“What the BBC and the Times wrote can be explained,” Farid told us. “It’s not indicative of tampering.” He says: “The BBC pointed to, I think, three or four things that they thought were indicative of tampering. And in the full-resolution image you can see that they’re completely wrong.”

One alleged manipulation was between the shadow cast by Kim’s legs and the shadows cast by the soldiers flanking him—a discrepancy that Farid says can be resolved by accounting for a curvature of the background surface. “If you look closely at the back baseboard, which all the men are standing at, it’s actually curved,” he says. “So what they are assuming is that that backboard is straight.”

But assuming a curvature, the men would naturally cast different shadows. Farid calculates that only a few inches of background difference would suffice: “the sun is at such a grazing angle, so small differences make huge variations in the length of the shadow.”

The BBC also pointed to “apparently mismatched pixels” around Kim’s legs. But Farid says that the BBC “did this thing that is very dangerous, which is they zoom and they say, ‘Oh look, it’s a splice line around his feet,’” indicating that the leader may have been edited in. The problem with such an approach, he says, “is that’s all JPEG compression artifacts, and if you actually do the same thing to anyone else’s feet you see exactly the same artifacts.”

Another discrepancy, a discontinuity in a black line running horizontally behind Kim and the soldiers, could be a removable piece of the baseboard, perhaps to allow access to the bleachers above, Farid says, but he prefers not to make such “qualitative” assessments, relying instead on digital forensics.

“Quantitatively, I ran a number of forensics tools, and there’s no cloning, there’s no color-filtering artifacts, the lighting is completely consistent, you can explain the shadows,” Farid says. “The image was edited, as all images are, because they all get cropped and contrast-enhanced, but other than that, there was just no signs of tampering anywhere.”

That doesn’t mean that Kim isn’t gravely ill, of course. It doesn’t take much effort to pose for a couple of photos. But it does mean that we should be careful when we accuse the North Koreans of deceiving us.

Now, please read some of these seriously salient messages being sent from the wider world.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

Lost in the swirl of election news was a major foreign policy climbdown by the Bush administration.

Ever since Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice negotiated an end to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program in February of 2007, the Bush administration has resisted following through on a key part of the agreement: removing North Korea from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. On October 9, North Korean premier Kim Jong Il decided he’d had enough of Bush’s stalling, and announced that he would expel UN weapons inspectors. On October 10, Bush capitulated, agreeing to remove North Korea from the terror list. On October 12, North Korea resumed the shutdown of its nuclear weapons program.

So why didn’t Bush remove North Korea from the list last year? As it is, it looks as though Bush is weak and that he was negotiating in bad faith. Since North Korea was in the process of demolishing its nuclear weapons facilities, why didn’t Bush live up to his end of the agreement?

We may never know the answer to that one, but this event mirrors the entire history of the negotiations between the Bush administration and North Korea. When Bush took office, North Korea’s nuclear program had under suspension for six years under an agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration. Clinton had agreed to provide fuel oil in exchange for North Korea’s compliance. But in 2002, the Bush administration suspended the oil shipments and North Korea resumed its weapons program. The administration’s policy was driven by neoconservatives in the administration, most notably Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Bolton, the World’s Worst Diplomat.

The crisis worsened until October 9, 2006, when North Korea tried and failed to detonate a nuclear weapon. A month later, Democrats won control of congress and forced Bush to fire Rumsfeld and the World’s Worst Diplomat. Shortly after that, Condi Rice negotiated an agreement that was essentially the same as the one that Bush had abandoned in 2002, with the added provision that North Korea be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Naturally, the World’s Worst Diplomat is outraged that the North Korea crisis has once again been defused. And naturally, John McCain agrees with the World’s Worst Diplomat.

(cross posted at This Old Brit)

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il stayed on vacation and took guitar lessons while hundreds of his people perished in massive floods

North Korea’s long-neglected infrastructure was battered by floods and torrential rains, resulting in the deaths of hundreds and the displacement of tens of thousands. The floods were aggravated by short-sighted environmental policies that have resulted in widespread deforestation, soil erosion, and loss of wetlands.

Critics of Kim’s regime complained about the dictator’s apparent lack of concern for the plight of flood victims. They point to a remark made by Kim’s mother at a soccer stadium that has become a makeshift shelter for flood refugees:

So many of the comrades in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.

The resentment that many feel toward the current regime was summed up in the words of a popular North Korean singer:

“Kim Jong-il doesn’t care about Korean people.”

The North Korean government did commit to providing trailers to temporarily house the displaced, but there are concerns about their quality and safety.

What’s plain is that the incompetence and neglect of the North Korean government helped create conditions that left thousands vulnerable to a preventable catastrophe, and it’s unlikely that the government will provide adequate relief for the victims of the flood. So take a moment and be thankful that you don’t live under a regime that cares so little for the lives and well-being of its citizens.

The North Korean deal has a very Clintonian character to it; I wish I were the first person to note that, but Ice Weasel beat me to it. Nonetheless, the fact that Bush is engaging in serious diplomacy, consisting of negotiating a food for nukes program, suggests that he’s not so reckless as he seems when one looks only at Iraq.

Iraq is a spectacular occupation that the global media can’t get enough of. If he changes anything in it, even by commissioning an Iraq Study Group report that he has no intention of following the recommendations of, the media will notice and write about Bush’s admission of failure.

Bush is a politician. He wants to do good, subject to the constraint that what he thinks is good for the country and the world is slanted by what he thinks is good for himself and his wing of the Republican Party. He also wants to accumulate kudos, and that means getting the 30-35% of Americans who still approve of his performance to keep approving him. This means that while he can admit failure in private and change course in places where he can do so safely, he won’t do that in public.

In situations like this, it’s therefore a great boon for the relations with a country to be relatively out of the media spotlight. That way, politicians can learn from experience in dealing with it, leading to more Clintonian deals that emphasize pragmatism and fewer Bushite threats that emphasize grandstanding and self-righteousness.

Kim Kong Il, last of the Stalinist gorillas, threatens the world with nuclear missiles

The Bush administration now admits that North Korea may not have been enriching uranium after all. You may recall that it was this alleged enriching of uranium that caused the Bush administration to back out of an agreement that had kept the North Koreans from turning their plutonium into nuclear weapons.

Under that agreement, the North Korean government allowed inspectors from the United Nations to monitor the plutonium being produced by its nuclear energy plants. When Bush withdrew, the North Koreans kicked out the inspectors and began turning their plutonium into bombs. And now we find that Bush pulled out of the agreement because of yet another “intelligence failure?” Give me a break.

Ape Man of the Liberal Avenger doesn’t buy it either:

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Once Ambassador John Bolton left, negotiations with North Korea began to bear fruit

North Korea’s state media can try to play down the full extent of Kim Jong-il’s capitulation, but the facts are clear: North Korea has agreed to halt its nuclear program, in exchange for just enough aid to allow Kim to save face.

Of course, not everyone is happy with this latest development. Former Ambassador John Bolton, who helped delay the current agreement for several years, is livid:

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Study on Nicotine Levels Stirs Calls for New Controls

A Harvard study concluding that cigarette makers have for years deliberately increased nicotine levels in cigarettes to make them more addictive led to renewed calls Thursday for greater federal oversight of the industry.

“Given the harm that tobacco causes, it shouldn’t be a game of cat-and-mouse to figure out what the industry is doing to cigarettes,” said Dr. Josh Sharfstein, commissioner of health for the City of Baltimore.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is now chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, promised to reintroduce within weeks a bill that would allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate cigarettes.

North Korea Reports Progress In Talks With U.S. Envoy

North Korea said Friday that progress had been made during talks with the United States this week on its nuclear program, and the top U.S. nuclear envoy suggested the foundation had been laid for more progress when six-nation nuclear negotiations resume.

North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said three days of talks in Berlin between U.S. envoy Christopher R. Hill and North Korea’s main nuclear negotiator, Kim Gye Gwan, had been held “in a positive and sincere atmosphere and a certain agreement was reached there.” No further details were given.

This makes it - what - the four hundredth such negotiation? I’m not sure who’s being more irrational here - North Korea, which keeps spending whatever money it has on the military instead of on making sure people stop starving, or the US, which keeps botching negotiations with North Korea. -Alon.

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