North Korean children
skating in capital square;
images on TV that night showed tanks;
photo by Patrick Thornquist @NPR
We were warned that
three more false flags would appear before “The Event”. I suspect this is one.
You? What happened to the April 10th deadline?
I think the media is
having a field day with current events right now. I was temping in a CPA office
yesterday and they had a news station on the television in the waiting area for
clients. I only heard snatches of the ‘news’—and I use that term loosely—but it
seemed to me that all of it was negative, fear-mongering, agenda-ridden, and
meant to render us feeling disempowered.
Now that I know the
lamestream media is not to be trusted in the least, if I do tune in at all it’s
for entertainment purposes. It’s laughable what they pass off as news and a
true representation of world events, isn’t it? Some of it’s preposterous, but
nonetheless, amusing. If this North Korea tank issue is true, it wouldn’t be
the first time we were fed fake footage in a newscast.
Here’s a more
level-headed take on the situation…
As I wrapped up a
meeting last night and sat at the bar sipping club soda while debriefing with
parties involved, the conversation turned to current events and the question
was asked:
“So… North Korea… how
scared do you think we should be?”
Turns out this is the
big fat old elephant in the middle of many people’s living rooms, one the media
has been somewhat tip-toeing around, and it merits, at this stage of the
sabre-rattling game, at least some analysis.
I was originally
compelled to write about this the other day, when I ran across a piece at NPR that just knocked
my socks off. But let me set it up:
The Daily Beast ran a story
today asking the same question my colleague asked – just how scared should we
be about North Korea – and while there are many salient points to discuss on
the topic, let’s start with the one that connects to the NPR piece. What seems
clear in looking for general consensus on just how scary North Korea and their
Boy Leader, Kim Jong Un, are, is that there is none. Or at least not much. One
of the reasons? Lack of good intelligence. From the Daily Beast piece:
Inside the U.S.
intelligence community, the issue of North Korea’s progress is hotly debated.
One problem is that while U.S. spy satellites can monitor the country from
overhead, most of North Korea’s nuclear work is done underground. North Korea
is so closed off that the CIA has also had trouble recruiting high-level spies
inside the country.
Now hold that thought.
We’ll switch over to NPR
at this point. So while the CIA can’t seem to cobble a decent spy network
together, American tourists are
still finding their way into the country and what they’re seeing is bizarre.
Now, one might question the sanity of a westerner choosing North Korea as a
destination vacation but tourism remains a vibrant industry there. And what, at
least some, of the tourists have found is not necessarily in lock-step with
information the media is trumpeting in terms of what, exactly, is going on in
this looming country.
International TV
broadcasters have been repeatedly showing tanks trundling through Pyongyang’s
Kim Il Sung Square in a demonstration of North Korean national power.
But when Patrick
Thornquist, a Chicago teacher visiting the North Korean capital at the end of
last week, arrived in the square, he was surprised by what he saw. This iconic
square — Pyongyang’s political, military and symbolic heart — was full of
children rollerblading and shouting with joy.
One of leader Kim Jong
Un’s contributions to the nation has been building roller-skating parks and
promoting entertainment facilities. And Thornquist was struck by the fact that,
on watching the news later that day, it was still featuring footage of tanks.
“It was definitely
interesting to see tanks on BBC in the hotel, as if that was that day, when
we’d been in that square a couple of hours earlier and nothing like that was
happening,” he says.
I found this stunning.
While one can extrapolate that even if children were skating in the square
their intrepid leader could be behind the scenes (or underground, as it were)
like a pudgy Dr. Evil setting inexorable doom into motion, the point made by
Mr. Thornquist speaks volumes about just how manipulative the media can be in
reporting the story. Of course, it’s possible the BBC is an unwitting dupe in
this chicanery, but, nonetheless, it makes it clear that … not much is clear.
Which is why experts in
the military and intelligence communities are in a bit of a conundrum about
projecting just how much alarm to trumpet. North Korea has tested nuclear
devices three times in the last seven years but it’s still a stretch from there
to launching a true and planet-shattering nuclear missile. And when the
military and intelligence communities are looked to for clarity on just how
close we are, just how realistic it is to expect that Jong-un would actually
get to that terrifying point, that is where things get muddy, where the team is divided.
Bruce Bennett, an expert
on North Korea’s military at the RAND Corporation]says he doesn’t know whether
North Korea could place a nuclear warhead on a missile, but that South Korean
defense experts think it’s possible. “Many of my South Korean colleagues argue
they can put a warhead on a missile and may have done so already,” Bennett
says. “I don’t know for sure, but my guessing based on what my South Korean
colleagues are telling me is that they can.”
So that’s Mr. Bennett’s
opinion, certainly a qualified one. Then there’s A.Q. Khan, called the “father of the Pakistani nuclear program,” who went to a
North Korean nuclear facility in 1999 and told Simon Henderson, a British
journalist, that he had witnessed their possession of boxes of components for
“three finished warheads that could be assembled within an hour.”
Henderson, now an
analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said, “Khan holds
the abilities of North Korean scientists and engineers in high regard. Although
lacking the best technical equipment, they are well trained and determined. I
fear Khan was telling the truth about what he saw in North Korea in 1999.”
So that’s Mr. Kahn’s
opinion as translated by Mr. Henderson. Then we move to a Charles Ferguson,
president of the Federation of American Scientists, who saw “no definitive evidence” that North Korea had developed
their technology to the point that they could miniaturize it enough to create a
transportable warhead.
Ferguson said that to
date the North Koreans have also not developed a missile capable of reentering
earth’s atmosphere from space, something needed for multistaged long-range
missiles capable of hitting the U.S.
Both Ferguson and Simon
Henderson addressed the issue of whether or not Iran and North Korea are in the
process of sharing technology as a way to get both their countries up-to-speed
more quickly than expected, a daunting prospect considered when President Obama
was visiting Israel. Here, again, we have conflicting opinions. Henderson made
this point:
“We know that the North
Koreans have shared missile technology with the Iranians,” Henderson said. “In
light of evidence to the contrary, it would be irresponsible not to assume they
have also shared nuclear-weapons technology and possibly centrifuge technology
with Iran.”
But Charles Ferguson is
far less convinced:
“On the nuclear-warhead
front, I am not aware of significant evidence there has been cooperation
between the two countries, but I cannot rule it out either,” he said.
Are you confused yet?
Brushing off your Cold War drills, cleaning out the bomb shelter, stocking up
on duct tape? Or are you seriously and bonafidedly terrified? The problem is,
no one seems to have a definitive answer of just what you should feel. Which
brings us back to American tourist in North Korea, Patrick Thornquist:
“At the beginning, I was
a little bit nervous,” he says. “But one of the guides said, ‘Calm down, we’re
all people.’ … What surprised me most is how there really wasn’t any
anti-American talk directly to me.”
The message to the
domestic audience is that the outside world is bullying North Korea, and its
very existence is threatened. This has the effect of uniting its citizens
behind their young new leader, no matter how much hardship they’re facing.
The dueling realities
have left Thornquist completely baffled after his trip.
“You try to grasp what
is real and what is not. You’re trying to find that balance between what your
media tells you and what they’re telling you because they’re very far off,” he
says. “It’s crazy.”
Yes, it is. And it
leaves us struggling to ascertain the true, honest, un-spun threat level.
So this is what I told
my friend sitting at that bar discussing current events last night: pay
attention, keep an eye on the story, but until there’s more to worry about,
don’t worry. If this is
the calm before the storm, we’ll know soon enough. Until then, the kids are
skating in the plaza and the rest of us have work to do.
