'Dear Leader' Not Showing The Love

I wonder what the penalty for crashing a party is?

A NUMBER of North Koreans have been arrested and could face execution for leaking information on the movements of leader Kim Jong-Il to South Korean news media, reports and sources say.
Dong-A Ilbo newspaper, quoting sources in the communist state, said today "many North Korean residents'' in the northeastern city of Hoeryong have been charged with espionage.

It said they were accused of leaking information on Kim's February 24 "field guidance'' trip to the city to a South Korean internet newspaper and may face execution.

Apparently "Dear Leader" doesn't like folks to know where he is. If he is so loved by all of his people why is this such a concern? I think the real culprit is revealed a little later in the article.

"A different group of North Korean residents who had worked for another Seoul-based civilian organisation were caught using unauthorised mobiles in Hoeryong,'' Shin Ju-Hyun, a Daily NK journalist, said.

If there is one thing Kim Done Gone Batty won't allow, it is contact with the outside world. To the average North Korean they think the rest of the world lives exactly the same as they do.

Al Gore's Reporters Facing Harsh Time in North Korean Prison Camp

Strangely enough, the former Vice President still hasn't commented publicly about his employees being detained in North Korea. Whatever the case, these two may never again see the light of day.

In a state “guest house” on the outskirts of Pyongyang, Laura Ling and Euna Lee have been held for more than a month: valuable pawns in an growing international nuclear stand-off.

Hanging over the heads of the American journalists is the possibility of a show trial and ten years in a notoriously harsh North Korean prison camp. The outside world knows little about how they are holding up — because North Korea is not saying and the United States, while trying to free them through diplomacy, has tried to impose a blanket of silence.

The signs, though, are not good for the employees of Current TV, a web-based television channel founded by Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, because their future appears bound up in the widening rift between Pyongyang and much of the rest of the world over its recent missile launch. The reclusive regime of Kim Jong Il has halted all talks and expelled international experts monitoring its nuclear activities after the United Nations condemned its decision to fire a rocket over Japan.
...
The US State Department has said that it is making every diplomatic effort to free the two women and Mr Gore is said to have contacted Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, to ask for her assistance. The US has no embassy in North Korea but a representative of the Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang is said to have seen the journalists at the end of last month.

Koh Yu Hwan, a professor at Dongguk University in Seoul, said that Pyongyang was unlikely to release the journalists soon. Having two Americans was like having a “piece of rice cake rolling in for free”, he said.

“They’re going to make maximum use of this for multiple purposes. Rather than a trial by a criminal code, it will be a political trial.”

Between this and Roxana Saberi, I suspect our enemies sense weakness in our current leadership and their smart diplomacy.

Almost Lifelike Kim Jong Il Reappears, Coasts to 'Re-election'

Rooking Good

In other news, the Congressional Black Caucus announced plans to visit the Dear Leader, look into his eyes and find out how much he wants to help President Obama.

Kim Jong Il laid to rest speculation about his health with a triumphant return to parliament Thursday for his appointment to a third term as North Korea's supreme leader.

Kim, solemnly presiding over the opening session of the reclusive communist country's rubber-stamp legislature, was making his first major public appearance since reportedly suffering a stroke last August. He appeared considerably thinner and older than nine months ago.

His appearance came on the heels of a rocket launch heralded by North Korea as "historic" but assailed elsewhere as provocative.

Limping ever so slightly as he arrived to a standing ovation from fellow deputies to the 687-seat Supreme People's Assembly, he returned their applause by clapping, then motioned for them to be seated, footage broadcast on state TV Thursday evening showed.

Legislators approved Kim as chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission, an appointment that under the constitution makes him the nation's top leader while his father, late North Korea founder Kim Il Sung, remains "eternal president."

"Having comrade Kim Jong Il at the highest post of our country again is a great honor and happiness for our military and people and a great happy event for all Korean people," a newscaster said on state TV.

The appearance may put to rest some questions about whether Kim, 67, has recuperated from a stroke that U.S. and South Korean officials say he suffered in mid-August.

Curiously, Al Gore still hasn't commented publicly about his employees held captive by the Nort Koreans. Guess he has more urgent prioroties.

Breaking News: Communists Lie

If you ask me, he looks perfectly healthy.

But stunning, isn't it, that Communists would lie to us?

The 66-year-old man in the photos appeared the picture of health, full of vigor despite reports he underwent brain surgery less than two months ago.

He was surrounded by serious, crisply uniformed soldiers and in the background there was plenty of verdant greenery, more reminiscent of summer than mid-autumn in a temperate clime.

To seasoned North Korea watchers, the country's weekend release of photos of leader Kim Jong Il for the first time since the middle of August are raising a host of questions about his health — as well as the motive and timing behind their publication.

The images came less than 24 hours before the United States on Saturday removed North Korea from Washington's terrorism blacklist, dousing rising tensions over North Korea's nuclear development.

Excuse me for being naive, but how is it we're to believe them when they say they'll disarm?

They were the first photos of the "Dear Leader," as he is known in North Korea, available since Aug. 14.

That is the date around which Kim — believed to have long had diabetes and heart disease — is thought to have suffered a stroke and then underwent brain surgery, according to South Korean and U.S. officials. North Korea has denied Kim is ill.

Kim Jong Il Near Death?

Could well be.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il may be gravely ill, perhaps the victim of a stroke, U.S. and other Western officials said Tuesday after he failed to appear for a major national parade. If so, it could jeopardize the already troubled international effort to get his nation to abandon nuclear weapons.

Kim's absence from a military parade for the country's 60th anniversary lent credence to reports that the man North Koreans call the "Dear Leader" had been incapacitated during the past few weeks.

The 66-year-old Kim, who has been rumored to be in varying degrees of ill health for years, has not been seen since mid-August. Though he appears rarely in public and his voice is seldom broadcast, Kim has shown up for previous landmark celebrations.

"There is reason to believe Kim Jong Il has suffered a serious health setback, possibly a stroke," one Western intelligence official said. A senior U.S. official said fresh rumors had been circulating about Kim's health and his control over North Korea's highly centralized government.

A former CIA official with recent access to intelligence on North Korea said that even before Tuesday the agency was confident that reports of a health crisis were accurate.

It was just a couple days ago a report surfaced saying he actually died in 2003.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has been out of the public eye recently and one expert on the country says he has a very good reason -- he died five years ago.

And, says Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor at Japan's Waseda University, his place has been taken by several stand-ins controlled by four high-ranking "puppet-masters."

Kim, a former smoker and heavy drinker, died in 2003 from diabetes, said Prof. Shigemura in a new book The True Character of Kim Jong Il.

Prof. Shigemura's theory received wide publicity yesterday while other reports were circulating that the North Korean leader was believed to be very ill.

I suspect we won't be seeing much of this freak again.

I wonder if his pals Jimmy Carter and Madeleine Albright will travel over to pay their respects?

Bad Deal With North Korea

According to John Podhoretz, the deal negotiated with North Korea is a putrid payoff. Of course, we have reason to be skeptical, because you cannot take the North Koreans seriously when it comes to believing anything they say.

FOR decades, intelligence agencies have assured the world that Kim Jong Il, the dictator of North Korea, is a psychopathic lunatic with a massive collection of pornography and a habit of kidnapping people from Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea to serve his whims.

He has made decisions about where to spend his government's money in a time of government-made famine that has caused the deaths of at least 1 million of his countrymen and women. He has built giant skyscrapers that are so structurally unsound they cannot be inhabited.

Psychopathic monster he almost certainly is. Almost everyone who has spent time in North Korea reports that it is, without question, the most horrifying place on this planet - a world in which the totalitarian fantasy imagined by Madeline L'Engle in the great 1962 children's book "A Wrinkle in Time" has been made flesh and bone.

But a lunatic Kim is not. He is a master geopolitician. Though we don't yet know the terms of the tentative deal announced yesterday under which North Korea has supposedly agreed to end its nuclear program, chances are very good that once again Kim has forced the world's powers - including the United States - to pay him a massive bribe that will help him maintain his stranglehold on power.

Since 1985, North Korea has used its reputation for insanity to manipulate not only the United States, but even the Evil Empire to its West. In that year, the Soviet Union agreed to provide the North Koreans with light nuclear reactors if the Norks agreed to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Showing stunning sangfroid against the ruthless bunch in Moscow, Kim's father signed the treaty and then simply refused to abide by any of its provisions. He spent five years refusing to allow a single inspector into the country, and when he did finally allow their entry in 1990, he deceived them and lied to them.

Read the rest. Also check out Claudia Rosett's Creepy Kim's Criminal Cash.

For years, the North Korean state has been raking in money from the illicit, international sale of drugs, ranging from heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines to fake Viagra. A North Korean defector testified to Congress in 2003 that the mass production and sale of narcotics was official state policy. In the tightly controlled North Korean state, factories turning out fake pharmaceuticals are part of Kim's plan. Some of these drugs have been peddled out of North Korean embassies by official staff.

According to congressional research reports, this has resulted in more than 50 verifiable drug busts in more than 20 countries, most of them since Kim Jong Il took over from his late father in 1994. North Korea's illicit activities also include gun-running, illegal fishing, a dash of alleged insurance fraud and the counterfeiting of cigarettes and U.S. currency.