Showing posts with label NORTH KOREA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NORTH KOREA. Show all posts
Monday, June 13, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
North Korea visit to focus on food crisis: Carter
 |
| © AFP Frederic J. Brown |
BEIJING (AFP) - A group of former statesmen led by ex-US president Jimmy Carter said Monday they will focus on food shortages, human rights and denuclearisation when they visit North Korea this week.
A delegation of "The Elders" group of retired state leaders will visit Pyongyang on Tuesday in a bid to ease tensions over North Korea's nuclear weapon programmes, they told a news conference in Beijing.
The four-member group, led by Carter, includes former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, ex-Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland and former Irish president Mary Robinson.
Monday, November 29, 2010
South Korea: despatch from the frontline of World War Three
This week's bombardment from their volatile northern neighbours has left South Koreans tired of turning the other cheek
Andrew Gilligan
Telegraph
Jang Gee-Yeon, a tanker-driver on the island of Yeonpyeong, wasn’t scared at first when the North Korean shells started landing. “We’d been told there were going to be exercises, so I thought it was just a misfire,” he said. “Then I got a call saying it was real. I was in shock. I ran up to the village and it was burning in at least thirty places. There could have been more. The smoke was so thick, I couldn’t see everywhere.”
The island only has one small fire engine, so Jang and his colleagues decided to convert their tanker into a lashed-up pump. “We fixed it up so we could spray water from it,” he said. “I drove. There was nobody else. We got a hose and we put out five house fires and three fires on the mountain above the village. We were looking up the whole time, worried that another bomb would land on top of us.”
If Hollywood ever needs somewhere to start World War Three, Yeonpyeong would be a good choice. North Korea is in plain view, about as far away as Portsmouth is from Ryde. A notice at the ferry terminal warns you to call a hotline number if you see enemy frogmen. On Tuesday afternoon, from an artillery base close enough to be visible through binoculars, the North Koreans launched a rather more direct assault.
A whole street of houses and shops in the village stands charred and ruined. Blackened bar-stools and twisted bicycles show the force of the blast, and even three days later the smell of burning remained. Dogs, some of them wounded, run or limp through the streets, abandoned by their owners in the panic to get away. The village is empty of all but journalists. On the boat back, I spoke to a policeman who collected the bodies of the two civilians killed. “One of them was just a totally burnt-out shell, a skeleton,” he said. “The other was scattered, blown apart.”
According to local media, the North Koreans used “hyperbaric,” or fuel-air, explosives – rare and unusually destructive weapons, only just this side of breaching international law. But then the attack itself, Pyongyang’s first, in its own words, “precisely aimed” land assault on South Korea's civilians since the end of the war in 1953, broke wholly new and dangerous ground.
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Odd Couple: North Korea and America
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| S.K. Soldier training with U.S. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man) |
Telegraph
Jang Gee-Yeon, a tanker-driver on the island of Yeonpyeong, wasn’t scared at first when the North Korean shells started landing. “We’d been told there were going to be exercises, so I thought it was just a misfire,” he said. “Then I got a call saying it was real. I was in shock. I ran up to the village and it was burning in at least thirty places. There could have been more. The smoke was so thick, I couldn’t see everywhere.”
The island only has one small fire engine, so Jang and his colleagues decided to convert their tanker into a lashed-up pump. “We fixed it up so we could spray water from it,” he said. “I drove. There was nobody else. We got a hose and we put out five house fires and three fires on the mountain above the village. We were looking up the whole time, worried that another bomb would land on top of us.”
If Hollywood ever needs somewhere to start World War Three, Yeonpyeong would be a good choice. North Korea is in plain view, about as far away as Portsmouth is from Ryde. A notice at the ferry terminal warns you to call a hotline number if you see enemy frogmen. On Tuesday afternoon, from an artillery base close enough to be visible through binoculars, the North Koreans launched a rather more direct assault.
A whole street of houses and shops in the village stands charred and ruined. Blackened bar-stools and twisted bicycles show the force of the blast, and even three days later the smell of burning remained. Dogs, some of them wounded, run or limp through the streets, abandoned by their owners in the panic to get away. The village is empty of all but journalists. On the boat back, I spoke to a policeman who collected the bodies of the two civilians killed. “One of them was just a totally burnt-out shell, a skeleton,” he said. “The other was scattered, blown apart.”
According to local media, the North Koreans used “hyperbaric,” or fuel-air, explosives – rare and unusually destructive weapons, only just this side of breaching international law. But then the attack itself, Pyongyang’s first, in its own words, “precisely aimed” land assault on South Korea's civilians since the end of the war in 1953, broke wholly new and dangerous ground.
Read Full Article
RELATED ARTICLES:
6 Reasons to Start World War Three if You're a Globalist
Odd Couple: North Korea and America
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Sunday, November 28, 2010
Expats recalled as North Korea prepares for war
 |
| North Korean Workers - Reuters image |
The Independent
A mass exodus of North Korean workers from the Far East of Russia is under way, according to reports coming out of the region. As the two Koreas edged towards the brink of war this week, it appears that the workers in Russia have been called back to aid potential military operations.
Vladnews agency, based in Vladivostok, reported that North Korean workers had left the town of Nakhodka en masse shortly after the escalation of tension on the Korean peninsula earlier this week. "Traders have left the kiosks and markets, workers have abandoned building sites, and North Korean secret service employees working in the region have joined them and left," the agency reported.
Russia's migration service said that there were over 20,000 North Koreans in Russia at the beginning of 2010, of which the vast majority worked in construction. The workers are usually chaperoned by agents from Kim Jong-il's security services and have little contact with the world around them. Defectors have suggested that the labourers work 13-hour days and that most of their pay is sent back to the government in Pyongyang. Hundreds of workers have fled the harsh conditions and live in hiding in Russia, constantly in fear of being deported back to North Korea.
Read Full Article
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Odd Couple: North Korea and America
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Odd Couple: North Korea & America
The sails of US Asian policy ride on the winds of North Korean belligerence
Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post
On March 26, 2010, the ROKS Cheonan is hit by what appears to be a German-made torpedo, sinks while claiming the lives of 46 South Korean sailors. The world, America at the lead, was quick to point its finger at North Korea before South Korea itself ruled them out as a suspect. North Korea adamantly insisted it was not behind the attack, and despite their paranoid and isolated posture little beyond insanity could serve as a motive.
Despite evidence adding up otherwise, to no one's surprise a joint "international" investigation by the US, UK, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Sweden would later conclude that a North Korean submarine was the culprit, leaving even South Koreans skeptical.
During this period of time, America's position in Asia Pacific was already waning. Endless war in Central Asia and the Middle East, along with deepening economic crisis in the West allowed other actors to begin eying the seemingly inevitable void soon to be left. Japan under then Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, began reasserting itself over unpopular US military installations scattered throughout the nation. China was continuing to expand its economic and diplomatic influence in the region, luring in even America's traditional allies like Australia and Thailand.
The sinking of the ROKS Cheonan then "serendipitously" served as a reminder as to why America claims their troops and influence are needed in the region for "peace and security." The Korean Won tumbled as the US Dollar was temporarily bolstered and Japanese PM Hatoyama not only conceded to US demands regarding US installations, but would also resign over the matter. Literally citing the mysterious, still unsolved sinking of the Cheonan, Washington insisted its need to reassert itself in Asia to counter North Korea, if not for any other reason.
North Korea, either out of shadowy complicity or because of its paranoid predictable nature, became America's greatest ally in many ways.
November 2010, a similar scenario is playing out after the recent artillery exchange between North and South Korea which claimed several lives. America was again bolstered in its highly tenuous position not only in Asia as a whole, but on the Korean Peninsula itself, having been rebuffed on the US-Korean FTA and facing the possibility of US banking interests meeting with Tobin taxes in the Korean markets.
South Korean leadership now admits they were conducting joint US-Korean live fire exercises close to highly contested waters in the Yellow Sea before the exchange took place. North Korea maintains this incident was intentionally provoked, as was the sinking of the Cheonan, as contrived incidents of opportunity for the waning American empire to reassert itself.
In fact, much of what North Korea claims in official statements is now confirmed by the mainstream media, though the average reader might not know this because North Korean statements are either completely censored by South Korea's Korean Communications Standard Commission (KCSC) as is the case for www.uriminzokkiri.com, or cherry picked by the West's more subtle form of censorship; spin. Official North Korean statements can be found below.
North Korea's version of the recent November skirmish...
http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2010/201011/news25/20101125-01ee.html
And here is North Korea's version of the ROKS Cheonan's sinking...
http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2010/201005/news26/20100526-19ee.html
And like the sinking of the Cheonan, America once again renews the rhetorical lease on its presence in Asia Pacific. A financial and political chill is trying to take hold over the protectionist climate growing in the face of America's collapsing economy and even worse remedies like the Federal Reserve's Quantitative Easing (QE2).
How long this chill lasts and whether it takes hold depends not as much on the madman in Pyongyang, but on the madmen in Washington reversing their self-inflicted economic and geopolitical decline in coincidence with yet another attempt to reassert themselves regionally. While such a reverse is unlikely especially when the prescription is more of the same uninspired, antiquated policies that created the decline in the first place, in the interim, the United States and the globalists can depend on North Korea as the only consistent factor in an otherwise changing region.
Like ship sails to the wind, American foreign policy makers are outstretched and ready to harness North Korea's belligerence, and in the case of the Cheonan, apparently blow on the sails themselves when the winds are calm. A reclusive hereditary communist dictatorship is scary, those with no qualms utilizing such a dictatorship at the risk of regional or world war, are even scarier.
Worth repeating, was Donald Rumsfeld's position on the board of directors of ABB out of Zurich, when the engineering firm sold North Korea the nuclear technology they later used as the basis of their nuclear arms program. Rumsfeld would then later, as Secretary of Defense in the ever revolving door between big business and globalist government, leverage the enhanced menace of North Korea against America's supposed ally in the south.
This reality highlights that the stability America represents in Asia Pacific is not one of rule of law and healthy foreign diplomacy, but rather one of holding stability over the head of the region with the constant threat of unhinging peace through carefully arranged events, be it staging Maoist color revolutions in Bangkok, funding the Khmer Rouge or now, in 2010 training land grabbing troops in Cambodia, or provoking an unstable military dictatorship on the Korean Peninsula.
If China, Japan, or South Korea can offer a substantial alternative focused on cooperation without the need to merciless strip national sovereignty and force integration, then the manipulative invasive nature of the Anglo-American banking elite and their empty globalization agenda, no matter how much peace America manages to unhinge, will be all but expelled from the region.
Recently by Tony Cartalucci
Oregon: FBI Thwarts Own Car Bomb
RELATED ARTICLE:
6 Reasons To Start WWIII If You Are A Globalist
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 |
| Surveillance aircraft are monitoring North Korean activity during the latest joint naval exercise between US and S. Korean forces - just days after a similar exercise started a deadly artillery exchange. |
Activist Post
On March 26, 2010, the ROKS Cheonan is hit by what appears to be a German-made torpedo, sinks while claiming the lives of 46 South Korean sailors. The world, America at the lead, was quick to point its finger at North Korea before South Korea itself ruled them out as a suspect. North Korea adamantly insisted it was not behind the attack, and despite their paranoid and isolated posture little beyond insanity could serve as a motive.
Despite evidence adding up otherwise, to no one's surprise a joint "international" investigation by the US, UK, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Sweden would later conclude that a North Korean submarine was the culprit, leaving even South Koreans skeptical.
During this period of time, America's position in Asia Pacific was already waning. Endless war in Central Asia and the Middle East, along with deepening economic crisis in the West allowed other actors to begin eying the seemingly inevitable void soon to be left. Japan under then Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, began reasserting itself over unpopular US military installations scattered throughout the nation. China was continuing to expand its economic and diplomatic influence in the region, luring in even America's traditional allies like Australia and Thailand.
The sinking of the ROKS Cheonan then "serendipitously" served as a reminder as to why America claims their troops and influence are needed in the region for "peace and security." The Korean Won tumbled as the US Dollar was temporarily bolstered and Japanese PM Hatoyama not only conceded to US demands regarding US installations, but would also resign over the matter. Literally citing the mysterious, still unsolved sinking of the Cheonan, Washington insisted its need to reassert itself in Asia to counter North Korea, if not for any other reason.
North Korea, either out of shadowy complicity or because of its paranoid predictable nature, became America's greatest ally in many ways.
November 2010, a similar scenario is playing out after the recent artillery exchange between North and South Korea which claimed several lives. America was again bolstered in its highly tenuous position not only in Asia as a whole, but on the Korean Peninsula itself, having been rebuffed on the US-Korean FTA and facing the possibility of US banking interests meeting with Tobin taxes in the Korean markets.
South Korean leadership now admits they were conducting joint US-Korean live fire exercises close to highly contested waters in the Yellow Sea before the exchange took place. North Korea maintains this incident was intentionally provoked, as was the sinking of the Cheonan, as contrived incidents of opportunity for the waning American empire to reassert itself.
In fact, much of what North Korea claims in official statements is now confirmed by the mainstream media, though the average reader might not know this because North Korean statements are either completely censored by South Korea's Korean Communications Standard Commission (KCSC) as is the case for www.uriminzokkiri.com, or cherry picked by the West's more subtle form of censorship; spin. Official North Korean statements can be found below.
North Korea's version of the recent November skirmish...
http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2010/201011/news25/20101125-01ee.html
And here is North Korea's version of the ROKS Cheonan's sinking...
http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2010/201005/news26/20100526-19ee.html
And like the sinking of the Cheonan, America once again renews the rhetorical lease on its presence in Asia Pacific. A financial and political chill is trying to take hold over the protectionist climate growing in the face of America's collapsing economy and even worse remedies like the Federal Reserve's Quantitative Easing (QE2).
How long this chill lasts and whether it takes hold depends not as much on the madman in Pyongyang, but on the madmen in Washington reversing their self-inflicted economic and geopolitical decline in coincidence with yet another attempt to reassert themselves regionally. While such a reverse is unlikely especially when the prescription is more of the same uninspired, antiquated policies that created the decline in the first place, in the interim, the United States and the globalists can depend on North Korea as the only consistent factor in an otherwise changing region.
Like ship sails to the wind, American foreign policy makers are outstretched and ready to harness North Korea's belligerence, and in the case of the Cheonan, apparently blow on the sails themselves when the winds are calm. A reclusive hereditary communist dictatorship is scary, those with no qualms utilizing such a dictatorship at the risk of regional or world war, are even scarier.
Worth repeating, was Donald Rumsfeld's position on the board of directors of ABB out of Zurich, when the engineering firm sold North Korea the nuclear technology they later used as the basis of their nuclear arms program. Rumsfeld would then later, as Secretary of Defense in the ever revolving door between big business and globalist government, leverage the enhanced menace of North Korea against America's supposed ally in the south.
This reality highlights that the stability America represents in Asia Pacific is not one of rule of law and healthy foreign diplomacy, but rather one of holding stability over the head of the region with the constant threat of unhinging peace through carefully arranged events, be it staging Maoist color revolutions in Bangkok, funding the Khmer Rouge or now, in 2010 training land grabbing troops in Cambodia, or provoking an unstable military dictatorship on the Korean Peninsula.
If China, Japan, or South Korea can offer a substantial alternative focused on cooperation without the need to merciless strip national sovereignty and force integration, then the manipulative invasive nature of the Anglo-American banking elite and their empty globalization agenda, no matter how much peace America manages to unhinge, will be all but expelled from the region.
Recently by Tony Cartalucci
Oregon: FBI Thwarts Own Car Bomb
RELATED ARTICLE:
6 Reasons To Start WWIII If You Are A Globalist
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Live Superfoods
Print this page
International calls for calm after North Korea fires barrage at South Korean island
guardian.co.uk
China, Japan and Germany express their concern about Pyongyang's attack on the island of Yeonpyeong, and call on both parties to resolve their differences peacefully
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China, Japan and Germany express their concern about Pyongyang's attack on the island of Yeonpyeong, and call on both parties to resolve their differences peacefully
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Friday, November 26, 2010
China Warns U.S. On Naval Exercises as North Korea Promises Retaliation
Infowars
China has warned the United States against engaging in military activity on its coastline.
“We oppose any military act by any party conducted in China’s exclusive economic zone without approval,” China’s Foreign Ministry replied in response to a question about the inclusion of a U.S. Aircraft carrier strike group participating in the joint exercise.
The exclusive economic zone is a maritime zone up to 200 nautical miles from a country’s coast.
It was reported today that Obama would be speaking with his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao in coming days. China has refused to condemn North Korea’s attack.
The Chinese statement arrives ahead of U.S.-South Korean naval exercises, according to Reuters. Earlier in the week, the Pentagon sent the USS George Washington and four other Navy ships to the Yellow Sea after North Korea shelled South Korean soldiers and civilians in response to South Korean military exercises.
In a statement from the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet, the military exercises are described as a measure to show the United States’ “commitment to regional stability through deterrence.” Joint military exercises with the South Koreans begin on Sunday. North Korea has promised “waves of retaliation” if provoked.
Asian experts and political commentators warn the provocative military exercises near the North Korean and Chinese borders may result in war on the Korean Peninsula. North and South Korea have engaged in heightened saber-rattling since the incident earlier in the week.
On Friday, North Korea engaged in artillery drills within sight of the island bombed last week. The attack killed two soldiers and two civilians. Gen. Walter Sharp, the U.S. commander in South Korea, was on the island touring the damage at the time. “None of the latest rounds hit the South’s territory, and U.S. military officials said Sharp did not even hear the concussions, though residents on other parts of the island panicked and ran back to the air raid shelters where they huddled earlier in the week as white smoke rose from North Korean territory,” reports the Associated Press.
“The situation on the Korean peninsula is inching closer to the brink of war,” a report issued by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said. Pyongyang’s military “precisely aimed and hit the enemy artillery base” on the island as punishment for South Korean military drills, said a North Korean official, who also warned of a “shower of dreadful fire” in response to the joint U.S.-South Korean exercises. “Gone are the days when verbal warnings are served only.”
North Korea has the largest artillery force in the world. It maintains 80,000 special forces and is believed to have some 13,000 artillery pieces deployed along the border.
In South Korea, the situation has resulted in political chaos.
Following the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, South Korean president Lee Myung-bak accepted the resignation of his defense minister and ordered more troops and advanced weaponry to the maritime border with North Korea. “We should not ease our sense of crisis in preparation for the possibility of another provocation by North Korea,” spokesman Hong Sang-pyo said, quoting the South Korean president. “A provocation like this can recur any time.” Myung-bak appointed his security adviser Lee Hee-Won as his new defense minister.
“The South Korean media is baying for blood (or at least air strikes), the South Korean defense minister has fallen on his sword, and extra troops have been posted on the outlying islands,” writes Peter Foster for the Telegraph.
“If the North Koreans continue to act in this provocative way, it’s fair to ask the question, where does that all end in terms of South Korea’s ability to simply continue to turn the other cheek,” said Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd. “This question goes to the heart of the political and security order of the world, [and] it’s important, I believe, for China to step up to the plate,” said Rudd after talking to the U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
“The pressing task now is to put the situation under control and prevent a recurrence of similar incidents,” said Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi today after talking with Clinton by phone. Yang Jiechi also spoke with the South Korean foreign minister and the North Korean ambassador to China.
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North Korea Warns: 'Brink Of War'
Associated Press
YEONPYEONG ISLAND, South Korea — North Korea warned Friday that U.S.-South Korean plans for military maneuvers put the peninsula on the brink of war, and appeared to launch its own artillery drills within sight of an island it showered with a deadly barrage this week.
The fresh artillery blasts were especially defiant because they came as the U.S. commander in South Korea, Gen. Walter Sharp, toured the South Korean island to survey damage from Tuesday's hail of North Korean artillery fire that killed four people.
None of the latest rounds hit the South's territory, and U.S. military officials said Sharp did not even hear the concussions, though residents on other parts of the island panicked and ran back to the air raid shelters where they huddled earlier in the week as white smoke rose from North Korean territory.
Tensions have soared between the Koreas since the North's strike Tuesday destroyed large parts of this island, killing two civilians as well as two marines in a major escalation of their sporadic skirmishes along the sea border.
The attack – eight months after a torpedo sank a South Korean warship further west, killing 46 sailors – has also laid bare weaknesses in South Korea's defense 60 years after the Korean War. The skirmish forced South Korea's beleaguered defense minister to resign Thursday, and President Lee Myung-bak on Friday named a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the post.
The heightened animosity between the Koreas is taking place as the North undergoes a delicate transition of power from leader Kim Jong Il to his young, inexperienced son Kim Jong Un, who is in his late 20s and is expected to eventually succeed his ailing father.
As Washington and Seoul pressed China to use its influence on Pyongyang to ease tensions amid worries of all-out war, the U.S. prepared to send a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to South Korean waters for joint military drills in the Yellow Sea starting Sunday.
The North, which sees the drills as a major military provocation, unleashed its anger over the planned exercises in a dispatch earlier Friday.
"The situation on the Korean peninsula is inching closer to the brink of war," the report in the North's official Korean Central News Agency said.
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Wednesday, November 24, 2010
What Will China's Next Move on North Korea Be?
 |
| LIU JIN / AFP / Getty Images; STR / AFP / Getty Images |
Time
Smoke was still billowing from Yeonpyeong, the South Korean island that endured barrages of North Korean artillery fire on Nov. 23, when China's state-run network CCTV led its news program with the conflagration on the Korean peninsula. A natural move, it would seem, given that it was one of the worst border conflicts between the two Koreas in half a century, in which at least two South Korean soldiers died. But even though video footage appeared to clearly show North Korea initiating the attack on Yeonpyeong island, the CCTV newscast took a different stance. Blame was not apportioned to the North. Instead, the news program quoted a North Korean official claiming that it was actually South Korea that had struck first. While a chorus of nations quickly condemned North Korea for its belligerence, China, as usual, had chosen to dissemble.
The rest of the world may consider North Korea the ultimate rogue state, but China has a long and close connection with its hermit neighbor. After all, during the Korean War, Beijing sent wave after wave of People's Liberation Army soldiers to fight on the North's behalf. Chairman Mao Zedong famously called the relationship between the communist bedfellows as close "as lips and teeth." Even as North Korea's intransigence and unpredictability has grown, China has hesitated to criticize its isolated ally too harshly. The reasoning has been simple: Not only do the countries share a historical ideological bond, but Beijing wants to avoid a collapse of the North Korean regime lest a deluge of refugees flood over into northeastern China. It's also an important cushion between China and a major U.S. military ally, South Korea. In fact, relations between Pyongyang and its one and only ally are so close that North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il — hardly a world traveler — has twice visited China this year.
(See pictures of the Koreas' exchange of fire.)
But Beijing's quiescent North Korea policy raises concerns that China is not willing to engage in regional affairs on a level commensurate with its rising-power status. In the wake of the Yeonpyeong attack, Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, who once served in China as a diplomat, said what many other nations have surely been thinking: "I believe it's important now for China to bring all of its influence to bear on North Korea." The island artillery fire comes just days after an American academic visited a North Korean facility, where he said he saw over a thousand centrifuges used for enriching uranium — a key step in eventually developing nuclear weapons. "This is a huge test for Chinese diplomacy," says John Delury, an assistant professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, who studies Chinese-North Korean relations. "China needs to move quickly. It needs to find ways to acknowledge the severity of the situation and then do whatever it can to turn the focus back to dialogue and negotiation."
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Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Ron Paul: Korea Conflict May Be Orchestrated Crisis To Boost Dollar
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
November 23, 2010
Infowars.com
November 23, 2010
Congressman Ron Paul speculated on the Alex Jones Show today that the war footing between North and South Korea could be an orchestrated crisis to boost the dollar and reverse the US economy, paralleling the RAND Corporation’s call two years ago for the United States to become embroiled in a major war as a means of preventing a double dip recession.
South Korea admitted that it fired the first shots prompting a North Korean retaliation that killed two South Korean Marines and set ablaze many homes on the Yellow Sea border island of Yeonpyeong.
Tensions are running dangerously high after North Korea’s military vowed a “merciless military strike” and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak ordered his military to strike North Korea’s missile base around its coastline artillery positions if the North made any further moves. Japan announced that it was preparing for “any eventuality” while Russia said the events represented a “colossal danger” to peace in the region.
Stock markets sank worldwide while the dollar and gold bullion rallied in response to the news.
Speaking to the Alex Jones Show, Congressman Paul said it was frightening that people in the Obama administration were advocating war as a means of escaping the economic crisis, saying that North Korea stood no chance whatsoever of successfully defeating South Korea in any conflict.
Paul speculated that the US military-industrial complex was, “Doing it deliberately, and sort of orchestrating this in order to have the military-industrial complex benefit and the dollar temporarily benefit.”
As we highlighted two years ago when the story first broke, the RAND Corporation has been aggressively lobbying the Pentagon to become embroiled in a major new war to jump-start a recovery of the US economy and boost profits for the military-industrial complex after the scaling down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Chinese media sources reported that RAND had presented a proposal to the Pentagon that revolved around fostering a conflict with a major foreign power in order to stimulate the American economy and prevent a double dip recession.
Although at the time RAND considered North Korea on its own to be too small a target, any full scale confrontation between the Koreas would embroil the United States on the side of the South and China on the side of the North. If North Korea were to tap its arsenal of nuclear weapons, the entire international community would quickly rubber stamp a US-led military assault on the rogue nation.
Given the fact that North Korea’s nuclear belligerency has its foundations in the best efforts of people like Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration, through the AQ Khan weapons trading network, to provide Communist agitator Kim Jong-Il and his hereditary successor with nuclear weapons, the fact that we are now seeing tensions reach boiling point represents a huge opportunity for the US military-industrial complex to manipulate into being the massive war that they have been seeking for years.
—
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.
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North Korea Attack Part Of RAND Plan For Total War?
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
November 23, 2010
Infowars.com
November 23, 2010
The exchange of artillery fire between North and South Korea, which the North says was started by South Korea firing shells during a military drill, could act as the catalyst for a huge new conflict that the RAND Corporation has been lobbying for over the past two years.
The clash, which took place on the Yellow Sea border island of Yeonpyeong, killed two South Korean soldiers and wounded 18 others. North Korea has reportedly fired some 200 shells, setting numerous buildings on fire on the island. Both countries have elevated their threat status and are preparing for potential full out warfare.
As we warned two years ago, the military-industrial complex has been yearning for a new conflict since the invasion of Iraq some seven and a half years ago.
Back in October 2008, we reported on how the RAND Corporation was lobbying for a war to be started with a major foreign power in order to stimulate the American economy and prevent a double dip recession.
The RAND Corporation is a notoriously powerful NGO with deep ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex as well as interlocking connections with the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations.
The RAND proposal, which was reported on by Chinese media sources, brazenly urged that a new war could be launched to benefit the economy, but stressed that the target country would have to be a major influential power, and not a smaller country on the scale of Afghanistan or Iraq.
Although at the time RAND considered North Korea on its own to be too small a target, any full scale confrontation between the Koreas would embroil the United States on the side of the South and China on the side of the North. If North Korea were to tap its arsenal of nuclear weapons, the entire international community would quickly rubber stamp a US-led military assault on the rogue nation.
Given the fact that North Korea’s nuclear belligerency has its foundations in the best efforts of people like Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration, through the AQ Khan weapons trading network, to provide Communist agitator Kim Jong-Il and his hereditary successor with nuclear weapons, the fact that we are now seeing tensions reach boiling point represents a huge opportunity for the US military-industrial complex to manipulate into being the massive war that they have been seeking for years.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.
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Korean War Crisis: Brought To You By Uncle Sam
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
November 23, 2010
Infowars.com
November 23, 2010
Despite the fact that South Korea admits it fired the first shots that prompted the North to retaliate, the vast majority of the establishment press are feverishly blaming North Korea for a new escalation in the crisis, while failing completely to acknowledge the fact that the whole fiasco was generated as a direct result of Uncle Sam’s policy through two separate administrations to ensure hereditary dictator Kim Jong-Il and his successors acquired the atom bomb.
As we have exhaustively documented, North Korea’s nuclear belligerency was almost exclusively a creation of the U.S. government in that they armed the Stalinist state both directly and indirectly through global arms dealers under their control, namely Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. While labeling North Korea as part of the “axis of evil,” the U.S. government was enthusiastically funding its nuclear weapons program at every stage.
Both the Clinton and Bush administrations played a key role in helping Kim Jong-Il develop North Korea’s nuclear prowess from the mid 1990’s onwards.
Just as with Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons program, it was Donald Rumsfeld who played a key role in arming Kim-Jong-Il.
Rumsfeld was man who presided over a $200 million dollar contract to deliver equipment and services to build two light water reactor stations in North Korea in January 2000 when he was an executive director of ABB (Asea Brown Boveri). Wolfram Eberhardt, a spokesman for ABB confirmed that Rumsfeld was at nearly all the board meetings during his involvement with the company.
Rumsfeld was merely picking up the baton from the Clinton administration, who in 1994 agreed to replace North Korea’s domestically built nuclear reactors with light water nuclear reactors. So-called government-funded ‘experts’ claimed that light water reactors couldn’t be used to make bombs. Not so according to Henry Sokolski, head of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, who stated, “LWRs could be used to produce dozens of bombs’ worth of weapons-grade plutonium in both North Korea and Iran. This is true of all LWRs — a depressing fact U.S. policymakers have managed to block out.”
“These reactors are like all reactors, they have the potential to make weapons. So you might end up supplying the worst nuclear violator with the means to acquire the very weapons we’re trying to prevent it acquiring,” said Sokolski.
The U.S. State Department claimed that the light water reactors could not be used to produce bomb grade material and yet in 2002 urged Russia to end its nuclear co-operation with Iran for the reason that it didn’t want Iran armed with weapons of mass destruction. At the time, Russia was building light water reactors in Iran. According to the State Department, light water reactors in Iran can produce nuclear material but somehow the same rule doesn’t apply in North Korea.
In April 2002, the Bush administration announced that it would release $95 million of American taxpayer’s dollars to begin construction of the ‘harmless’ light water reactors in North Korea. Bush argued that arming the megalomaniac dictator Kim Jong-Il with the potential to produce a hundred nukes a year was, “vital to the national security interests of the United States.” Bush released even more money in January 2003, as was reported byBloomberg News.
Bush released the funds despite the startling revelation, reported by South Korean newspapers, that a North Korean missile warhead had been found in Alaska.
Construction of the reactors was eventually suspended, but North Korea had an alternative source through which they could obtain the nuclear secrets vital to building an atom bomb arsenal – CIA asset and international arms smuggler AQ Khan.
In 2004, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb program, admitted sharing nuclear technology via a worldwide smuggling network that included facilities in Malaysia that manufactured key parts for centrifuges.
Khan’s collaborator B.S.A. Tahir ran a front company out of Dubai that shipped centrifuge components to North Korea.
Despite Dutch authorities being deeply suspicious of Khan’s activities as far back as 1975, the CIA prevented them from arresting him on two occasions.
“The man was followed for almost ten years and obviously he was a serious problem. But again I was told that the secret services could handle it more effectively,” former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers said. “The Hague did not have the final say in the matter. Washington did.”
Lubbers stated that Khan was allowed to slip in and out of the Netherlands with the blessing of the CIA, eventually allowing him to become the “primary salesman of an extensive international network for the proliferation of nuclear technology and know-how,” according to George W. Bush himself, and sell nuclear secrets that allowed North Korea to build nuclear bombs.
“Lubbers suspects that Washington allowed Khan’s activities because Pakistan was a key ally in the fight against the Soviets,” reports CFP. “At the time, the US government funded and armed mujahideen such as Osama bin Laden. They were trained by Pakistani intelligence to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Anwar Iqbal, Washington correspondent for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, told ISN Security Watch that Lubbers’ assertions may be correct. “This was part of a long-term foolish strategy. The US knew Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons but couldn’t care less because it was not going to be used against them. It was a deterrent against India and possibly the Soviets.”
In September 2005 it emerged that the Amsterdam court which sentenced Khan to four years imprisonment in 1983 had lost the legal files pertaining to the case. The court’s vice-president, Judge Anita Leeser, accused the CIA of stealing the files. “Something is not right, we just don’t lose things like that,” she told Dutch news show NOVA. “I find it bewildering that people lose files with a political goal, especially if it is on request of the CIA. It is unheard of.”
In 2005, Pakistani President Pervez Musharaf acknowledged that Khan had provided centrifuges and their designs to North Korea.
Through their policies in aiding North Korea to build light water reactors, and via the CIA asset AQ Khan who was protected at every step of the way while he helped provide North Korea with the means to build a nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government itself is directly complicit in providing North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il with the nuclear weapons he now threatens to use against U.S. ally South Korea.
North Korea is controlled by a hereditary Stalinist dictatorship that has starved two million of its citizens to death in favor of building a million-man army. Some people put the figure at four million, one-quarter of the population. In the far north of the country there is a network of forced labor gulags where people who have ‘expressed a bland political opinion’ are, along with their entire families, tortured, raped and executed. Horrific bio-chemical experiments are performed on mass numbers of people. Babies are delivered and then stamped to death by the camp guards. If the mother screams while the guards are stamping on the baby’s neck, she is immediately assassinated by a firing squad. These guards are rewarded with bonuses and promotions for ripping out prisoners’ eyeballs.
The North Korean people are enslaved by a government that is using food as a weapon. Perhaps this is why the EU and the United States, via the UN World Food Program, resumed the shipment of hundreds of thousands of tons in food aid at the end of February 2003. This goes directly to the sitting dictatorship, which then decides who gets it by their level of allegiance to the state. Food aid only increases the power of Kim Jong-Il and yet it is veiled by the UN in bleeding heart humanitarian rhetoric. The money goes straight to enabling the North Korean leadership to live in the lap of westernized luxury with casinos and lavish new cars.
President Bush publicly claimed to loathe Kim Jong-Il and yet his administration, like Bill Clinton before him, set the policy to help North Korea obtain nuclear expertise. The U.S. intelligence network also protected AQ Khan and allowed him to provide the means with which North Korea acquired their nuclear capability.
If the tensions between the Koreas were to escalate into all out war, don’t expect the castrated American corporate media to mention how Kim Jong-Il and his successors grew to be such a threat in the first place – with the aid of nuclear weapons enthusiastically supplied by the U.S. government and its surrogates.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.
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