A few days ago there was a segment on NPR about North Korea. The correspondent had actually been allowed into North Korea, but from what I could tell they are basically shown the exact same thing as us regular tourists. I really should have pursued that foreign correspondent career. I could have been getting paid to go to North Korea instead of using my own funds. Also, I wouldn’t have to dress up for work. C’est la vie.

Anyways, in the past week there have been two interesting WashPost articles about North Korea. The first concerns the crew of the USS Pueblo and their efforts to sue the North Korean government for the torture they endured after their ship was captured by the North Korean navy in 1968:

William Thomas Massie’s nightmares almost always begin in a dusty prison cell. His arms are lashed behind his back, and North Korean guards are karate-chopping his neck, kicking his groin and ankles, and smashing his face with fists and rifle butts.

The frigid room is illuminated only by tannin-tinted light trickling through newspaper-covered windows. The guards are screaming. One thrusts an assault rifle into Massie’s mouth. The soldier’s finger is on the trigger. Sweat stings Massie’s eyes. He is terrified.

The second article details North Korea’s expansion of its special forces and their adoption of terrorist tactics used in Afghanistan and Iraq:

In a conflict, tens of thousands of special forces members would try to infiltrate South Korea: by air in radar-evading biplanes, by ground through secret tunnels beneath the demilitarized zone (DMZ), and by sea aboard midget submarines and hovercraft, according to South Korean and U.S. military analysts.

Disguised in the uniforms of South Korean police and military personnel, special forces are also expected to try to walk into Seoul. Dressed as civilians, they may also arrive aboard passenger flights from Beijing and other foreign capitals.

“These are not your standard North Korean guys,” Bechtol said. “They are the best-trained, best-fed and most indoctrinated soldiers in the North. They know how to fight, and if they are caught, they are trained to kill themselves.”

[...]

Their low-tech, low-cost training includes throwing knives, firing poisonous darts and running up steep hills wearing backpacks filled with 60 pounds of rocks and sand, said Ha Tae-jun, a former South Korean commando who has debriefed captured members of the North’s special forces. They are also drilled in street warfare, chemical attacks, night fighting, martial arts, car theft and using spoons and forks as weapons, say South Korean government reports and military experts.

Beware North Korean soldiers wielding spoons…

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I still have a ton of Costa Rica photos to upload, but here are a few photos from this past weekend when Liz, Nick, and I went to the Joint Service Open House at Andrews Air Force Base. You basically spend the day checking out all the cool military equipment that your tax money buys and eating junk food like hamburgers and funnel cake. Mmm tanks and funnel cake. What could be more American?

AWACS

Chinook

Bunker buster

F-35

Cockpit of a DC Air National Guard F-16

The Golden Knights (U.S. Army parachute team)

Liz and I in the Huey

Nixonian

Crazy Red Bull helicopter that did a bunch of tricks

Seahawk

Stryker

Manning the Mk 19 grenade launcher atop the Stryker. Liz and I had to wait in a line full of seven year-olds for our turn to climb up there. No, seriously, everyone playing in the Stryker was at least 20 years younger than us.

Patriot missile battery

Hawkeye

I’m on a boat, I’m on a boat, everybody look at me

USAF Thunderbirds. These guys put on an amazing show.

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Heeey, I coulda sworn the Bush administration said the reconstruction would pay for itself:

Plummeting oil prices may force Iraq’s government to slow ambitious reconstruction plans, and the country could face a budget shortfall by next summer, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

“We’re in a situation where Iraq is … potentially going to be in a deficit mode next year,” said Paul Brinkley, who leads Pentagon efforts to aid Iraq’s economy.

The trend worries U.S. officials who say a strong economy is needed to lock in the security gains made over the past year. “The long-term stability of the country heavily depends on a vibrant economy,” Brinkley said.

[...]

“For next year, with the oil prices going down, we’re going to have a problem,” said Samir Sumaidaie, Iraq’s ambassador to the United States.

If prices decline after that, “it’s not even going to be enough to pay salaries, never mind reconstruction of the infrastructure,” he said in a speech Tuesday.

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For many detainees who grew up in Afghanistan — where music was prohibited under Taliban rule — their interrogations by U.S. forces marked their first exposure to the pounding rhythms, played at top volume.

The experience was overwhelming for many. Binyam Mohammed, now a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, said men held with him at the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan wound up screaming and smashing their heads against walls, unable to endure more.

“There was loud music, (Eminem’s) ‘Slim Shady’ and Dr. Dre for 20 days. I heard this nonstop over and over,” he told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith.

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Justice officials revealed shocking new details of the attacks at a DOJ press conference today, which they said included shooting a grenade into a nearby girl’s school and the killing of an Iraqi man who has his hands up in the air.

All of the victims were unarmed and none were insurgents, officials said.

“Many were shot while inside civilian vehicles that were attempting to flee from the convoy,” said Jeffrey Taylor, the U.S. Attorney. Taylor said the guards knew that they were not allowed to use suppressive fire, engage in offensive military action, or “exercise police powers.”

In documents filed in connection with his guilty plea, Ridgeway acknowledged killing at least one civilian, a female doctor, with “multiple rounds” into a vehicle.

Ridgeway, in the document, acknowledged the government evidence would prove he and the others “opened fire with automatic weapons and grenade launchers on unarmed civilians.”

He agreed none of the civilians “was an insurgent, and many were shot while inside of civilian vehicles that were attempting to flee.”

Ridgeway also admitted one victim was shot in his chest “while standing in the street with his hands up.”

Ridgeway also admitted to prosecutors “there was no attempt to provide reasonable warning” to the driver of a vehicle that was first targeted.

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Destroyer USS Shaw exploding during early morning air attack by Japanese on Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu, near Honolulu.

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I’ve always been fascinated by the French Foreign Legion. Probably due to the “Crock” comics. Or maybe because the enlistees fight for a country they have no connection to. The NYTimes visits the Legion’s Camp Szuts in French Guiana:

And new legionnaires like Mr. Baird of Virginia must adopt pseudonyms, which often evoke their national origins, a tradition that seems to let them break free of the past, murky as it can be.

“I guess the spelling of Stiven is French,” said Mr. Baird, mumbling, almost incoherently, that he had once studied engineering at Old Dominion University under the name Kevin Barnet.

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I would highly recommend watching Bill Moyer’s interview of Andrew J. Bacevich, the author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. Bacevich is a graduate of West Point, retired Army colonel, and a Professor of International Relations at Boston University who speaks candidly of the problems facing our nation’s economy and security. It is unfortunate that we don’t have more Americans like Bacevich leading our country.

We’re going to have a long argument about the Iraq War. We, Americans. Not unlike the way we had a very long argument about the Vietnam War. In fact, maybe the argument about the Vietnam War continues to the present day. And that argument is going to be – is going to cause us, I hope, to ask serious questions about where this war came from.

How did we come to be a nation in which we really thought that we could transform the greater Middle East with our army?

What have been the costs that have been imposed on this country? Hundreds of billions of dollars. Some projections, two to three trillion dollars. Where is that money coming from? How else could it have been spent? For what? Who bears the burden?

Who died? Who suffered loss? Who’s in hospitals? Who’s suffering from PTSD? And was it worth it? Now, there will be plenty of people who are going to say, “Absolutely, it was worth it. We overthrew this dictator.” But I hope and pray that there will be many others who will make the argument that it wasn’t worth it.

It was a fundamental mistake. It never should have been undertaking. And we’re never going to do this kind of thing again. And that might be the moment when we look ourselves in the mirror. And we see what we have become. And perhaps undertake an effort to make those changes in the American way of life that will enable us to preserve for future generations that which we value most about the American way of life.

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Some of the back and forth between the Obama and McCain campaigns is listed here, and Robert Amsterdam has a great editorial on the subject:

It is a great pity that while thousands die in Georgia, so many Americans can only see the issue for how it can help put their horse ahead. Having McCain and Obama fighting about this is pushing many parties into the margins, and does not contribute whatsoever to the preparation of an intelligent and effective response.

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South Ossetian Autonomous Region

April 16, 2008, 05:45
Welcome to Tbilisi, gentlemen – I hope you got some shuteye on the flight from Bragg, because now that we’re here we’ve got a lot of work to do.

Here’s the situation: We’ve been deployed at the request of the Georgian government to help them deal with rebels on their Russian border. Our area of operations will be the South Ossetian Autonomous region – 1500 square miles of small villages and rugged backcountry. The Ossetians have been skirmishing with the Georgian army for years, but lately the attacks have escalated to the verge of all-out war. Washington thinks that the Russians have engineered the current flare-up as an excuse to step in and annex the whole region. Our job is to cut the legs out from under the revolution before that can happen.

Did anyone else play Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon? It’s one of my favorite games for Playstation2. The plot involves a group of hardcore Russian nationalists who seize power in Moscow with the intent of reviving the Soviet Union. You lead a U.S. Special Forces squad through several missions in Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and eventually Russia, where, in true Tom Clancy style, you gun down Russian fighters in Red Square.

Unfortunately for Saakashvili, though, there won’t be any Ghosts in Georgia, no matter how much he pleads for assistance from the United States.

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