S. Korea, United States To Conduct War Games

By JUNG SUNG-KI, Defense News, July 25, 2009

SEOUL - South Korea and the United States will kick off their annual computerized joint military exercise aimed at improving interoperability next month, the Combine Forces Command (CFC) here said July 24.

The Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG), formerly known as Ulchi Focus Lens, will be held from Aug. 17-27, the command said in a news release.

About 56,000 South Korean troops and 10,000 American troops will take part in the command and control, war-fighting exercise, a CFC spokesman said. (Some 30,000 U.S. troops are currently stationed in S. Korea -ACFJ)

The forthcoming exercise will be the second one in which South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff will serve in a leading role with the U.S. Forces Korea serving in a supporting role, in rehearsal training for the planned transition of wartime operational control from the U.S. military to Korean commanders.

Under a 2007 agreement on command rearrangements, the U.S.-led CFC will be deactivated in April 17, 2012. The militaries will then launch separate theater commands.

"UFG 09, as with all other CFC exercises, is a defense oriented exercise designed to improve the alliance's ability to defend the ROK against external aggression," the release said. "United Nations Command has informed the Korean People's Army in North Korea about UFG 09 and assured them that this is a defensive military readiness exercise, and that is not meant to be provocative in any way."

North Korea regularly denounces joint military drills by South Korea and the United States, calling them as a rehearsal for invasion.

Korea’s defense & U.S. belligerence

Editorial, Workers World, June 4, 2009 issue

Anyone in the United States who pays attention to the corporate news media must think that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea just violated the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Right?

Except that no such treaty exists.

Some 180 countries have signed it, but only 148 have ratified it. According to the Web site of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, “All 44 States specifically listed in the Treaty—those with nuclear technology capabilities at the time of the final Treaty negotiations in 1996—must sign and ratify before the CTBT can enter into force.” (ctbto.org)

Nine out of those 44 nuclear states have not ratified the treaty, despite having signed it some 13 years ago. Therefore, the treaty is not and has never been in force.

The government that seems to protest the most when a country like the DPRK conducts tests sits in Washington. But guess what? The U.S. Senate has not ratified the treaty. In fact, it is Washington’s refusal that is the main obstacle to the CTBT treaty taking effect.

The U.S. tested the world’s first atomic bombs in 1945 and almost immediately dropped two of them on Japanese cities, killing 220,000 people on the spot and leaving another 200,000 so poisoned by radiation that they died soon after. From that time until it signed the treaty in 1996, the U.S. had tested 1,032 nuclear weapons.

That is more nuke tests than have been carried out by all the rest of the countries in the world combined, right up to the present.

So how can the world have any confidence in a nuclear test ban treaty if the country that has tested such a hugely disproportionate number of weapons won’t ratify it?

The DPRK has successfully conducted two underground tests of nuclear devices, one in 2006 and another on May 25. It has not dropped any bombs on anyone. In fact, its troops have never fought anywhere except in Korea, and then it was to expel foreign invaders.

The DPRK’s determination to devote substantial resources to building a nuclear deterrent reflects Korea’s tragic history. First invaded and annexed by colonial Japan, then occupied by U.S. troops at the end of World War II, Korea suffered enormously from the rise of imperialism in the 20th century.

The U.S. created a puppet military dictatorship in the south, which in 1948 declared itself the Republic of Korea. It was only then that the revolutionary forces, who had liberated the northern part of Korea from Japan’s iron grip, responded by declaring the establishment of the DPRK, not as a permanent state that would ratify the division of Korea, but as a recognition of reality. The goal of the DPRK, and of the Korean people as a whole, has always been to reunite the country. Within two years, however, the DPRK was fighting a new war against imperialist invaders—this time hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops.

Several million Koreans, civilians and soldiers, were killed in the 1950-53 war. Some 53,000 U.S. soldiers died. Though the war ended in a ceasefire with the two sides roughly where they had been at the start, the U.S. occupiers of southern Korea refused to sign a peace treaty with the DPRK. And that’s where things have stood ever since, with between 30,000 and 40,000 U.S. troops occupying the south at any one time.

Many countries—first among them the United States—have declared they had to have nuclear weapons for self-defense. None has a stronger claim to a nuclear deterrent than the DPRK, which for more than half a century has faced the constant threat of new aggression from the world’s most heavily armed imperialist superpower.

If Washington were sincere about wanting to move toward a nuclear-free world, it would start by signing a peace treaty with the DPRK, ratifying the CTBT and removing its occupation troops from Korea.

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Casey: Army would have to ‘shift gears’ for N. Korea battle

By Jeff Schogol, Stars and Stripes, Pacific edition, May 30, 2009

WASHINGTON – It would take the Army time to "shift gears" if it needed to fight against North Korea, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said Thursday.

Right now, the Army is focused on the counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but North Korea’s recent saber rattling has raised the prospect that the Army might be called upon to fight a conventional war.

"I have said publicly for some time that if we had to shift gears, it would probably take us about 90 days or so to shift our gears and to train the folks up that were preparing to go to Iraq and Afghanistan to go someplace else," Casey said after a speech at a Washington think tank.

That doesn’t mean that it would take at least 90 days to send reinforcements to U.S. troops in South Korea, Casey said.

"We would move forces as rapidly as we could get them prepared," he said.

Casey declined to say how fast the Army could mobilize to meet a threat from North Korea, but he stressed the Army is "combat seasoned" and can move quickly.

"The mechanical skills of artillery gunnery and tank gunnery come back very, very quickly," he said. "The harder part is the integration — that really brigade level and above of massing fires and effects in a very constricted period of time as opposed to what you do in a counterinsurgency over a much longer extended period of time."

Looking to the future, Casey said he expects conflicts this century to look a lot like the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Israeli war with Hezbollah in 2006.

Regarding the latter, Casey noted that the key lesson the Israelis learned was that they were too focused on irregular warfare.

"They were working so much in the West Bank and conducting counterinsurgency-like operations that they lost their combined arms skills, the ability to integrate fires in air and tanks and artillery," he said.

The U.S. Army needs to be prepared for the "full spectrum" operations ranging from offensive, defensive and stability operations, he said.

Casey expressed confidence that the U.S. Army can fight and win a conventional war against North Korea given its experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I’m not afraid of putting this force in the field against anybody," he said.

US Army moves to DEFCON 2

Macedonian International News Agency, May 28, 2009

Sources close to MiNa claim the US Army has moved their alert level to Defcon 2. This was initiated by the alarming situation in North Korea. The US Army has over 35,000 troops stationed in South Korea, well within reach of North Korean conventional weapons.

North Korea has the largest artillery force (can be equipped with nuclear warheads) in the world, which adds more to the already tense situation.

Earlier today, N. Korea's leader Kim Jong issued threats to the South Korean and US Navy ships for coming too close to North Korea's territorial waters. The South Koreans and the Americans, may be positioning themselves for a preemptive strike.

What is DEFCON?

The defense readiness condition (DEFCON) is a measure of the activation and readiness level of the United States Armed Forces. It describes progressive postures for use between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commanders of unified commands. DEFCONs are matched to the situations of military severity.

Standard peacetime protocol is DEFCON 5, descending in increasingly severe situations. DEFCON 1 represents expectation of actual imminent attack, and is not known to have ever been declared. During the Cold War, DEFCON 1 was feared because it would most likely precede an all-out nuclear war.

In a national state of emergency, seven different alert conditions known as LERTCONs can be issued. They consist of five Defense Conditions and two Emergency Conditions (EMERGCONs).

DEFCON 5
This is the condition used to designate normal peacetime military readiness. An upgrade in military preparedness is typically made by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and announced by the United States Secretary of Defense.

DEFCON 4
This refers to normal, increased intelligence and the heightening of national security measures.

DEFCON 3
This refers to an increase to force readiness above normal. Radio call signs used by American forces change to currently classified call signs. This was reached after 9/11.

DEFCON 2
This refers to a further increase in force readiness just below maximum readiness. The most notable time it was declared was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, although the declaration was limited to Strategic Air Command. It is not certain how many times this level of readiness has been reached.

DEFCON 1
This refers to maximum readiness. It is not certain whether this has ever been used, but it is reserved for imminent or ongoing attack on US military forces or US territory by a foreign military power.

South Korea and U.S. Raise Alert Level

By CHOE SANG-HUN, The New York Times, May 27, 2009

SEOUL, South Korea — One day after North Korea warned of a possible attack against the South, the United States and South Korea ordered their forces here to their highest alert for three years, increasing surveillance flights and satellite reconnaissance to counter what officials termed a “grave threat.”

The move was the latest sign of escalating tensions on the Korean peninsula after North Korea conducted its second nuclear test on Monday, sparking a confrontation with South Korea and the international community that has built into ever more bellicose rhetoric. North Korea reinforced its menacing language by test-firing six short-range missiles earlier in the week.

The South Korean Defense Ministry said allied troops, including, 28,000 U.S. soldiers based in South Korea, raised their Watch Condition, or Watchcon, to the second-highest level from Watchcon 3 to Watchcon 2.

South Korea has put its military on such a high level of alert only five times since hostilities in the three-year Korean War ended in an armistice in 1953, most recently when North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in October 2006.

The upgraded alert provides for a significant increase in the use of reconnaissance planes and spy satellites, as well as a more vigorous gathering and analysis of electronic signals from the North, ministry officials said.

The Defense Ministry declined to confirm South Korean news reports that its military has moved or planned to move warships and artillery to islands near the western sea border with North Korea. But a South Korean military official said that in recent months, North Korea has increased training exercises among its coastal artillery units opposite the South Korean islands.

The North’s state-controlled media warned on Thursday that “even a minor accidental clash could lead to nuclear war.”

“It’s a matter of time when a fuse for war is triggered,” the North Korean government’s official newspaper, Minju Joseon, said in a commentary carried by the state-run news agency KCNA.

As the South Korean government urged its people to remain calm, there was no sign of anxiety among villagers along the border. In Seoul, with a population of 10.4 million and just 35 miles from the border, preparations continued for the funeral on Friday of former President Roh Moo-hyun who committed suicide last Saturday.

North Korea intensified its threats against South Korea and the United States on Wednesday with warnings of a “powerful military strike” if any North Korean ships were stopped or searched as part of an American-led operation to intercept vessels suspected of carrying unconventional weapons.

South Korea agreed to join the operation after North Korea’s nuclear test on Monday. The North had earlier warned the South not to participate in the operation, known as the Proliferation Security Initiative.

In their Wednesday statement, the North Koreans also said that they “no longer feel bound” by the 1953 armistice. Technically, the two Koreas have remained at war for more than 50 years, because the 1953 armistice was never replaced with a final peace treaty. The North Koreans had previously called the armistice a “useless piece of paper” and declared that they no longer felt bound by it. Washington and Seoul consider such North Korean statements a gambit to raise tension and draw the United States to bilateral talks.

In Washington, Secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton said, “North Korea continues to act in a provocative and belligerent manner toward its neighbors.”

“There are consequences to such actions,” she said, adding that discussions were under way at the United Nations “to add to the consequences North Korea will face.”

Diplomats said American and Japanese officials were drafting a Security Council resolution that would concentrate on five or six ways to flesh out existing sanctions against North Korea that had never been enforced. Although China supports the idea of sanctions, it wants to work slowly and to bolster measures first passed in 2006 rather than creating new ones, they said.

The proposals include banning imports and exports of all arms — only heavy weapons are restricted now. “We want to dry out their resources for the military,” said a senior Western diplomat, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.

Since inter-Korean relations began deteriorating a year ago, analysts at government-run and private policy institutes in South Korea have often warned of a possible naval skirmish. In interviews in recent weeks, they have said that if South Korea joined the global interdiction program, the chances of a North Korean provocation would increase.

The analysts said North Korea might stage a limited armed provocation along the disputed western sea border, where the two navies clashed in skirmishes in June 1999 and June 2002 during the crabbing season. Any clash between the Koreas would probably be on a similarly limited scale, the analysts said.

South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, lauded his people on Wednesday for their “mature response” to the North’s behavior. He noted that the North’s nuclear test and its subsequent missile launchings did not affect stock indexes and foreign exchange markets beyond initial jitters.

Seoul, the South Korean capital, with a population of 10.4 million, is just 35 miles from the North Korean border and well within the range of North Korean missiles and artillery. But most South Koreans and foreign investors here are accustomed to threats from the North.

Meanwhile, analysts said, South Korea’s decision to join the antiproliferation initiative — a global effort that seeks to interrupt air and sea deliveries of nuclear and other unconventional weapons, missile parts and delivery systems — is largely symbolic. Seoul has said that it will stop only suspicious ships in its own territorial waters, a sovereign right it already has. In addition, the chance that the North would send ships carrying such materials into South Korean waters is low.

Reporting was contributed by Mark McDonald from Hong Kong, Thom Shanker from Washington, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations. Alan Cowell contributed from Paris.

Clinton: N. Korea to face 'consequences'

AP, USA Today, May 27, 2009

SEOUL (AP) — North Korea threatened military action Wednesday against U.S. and South Korean warships plying the waters near the Koreas' disputed maritime border, raising the specter of a naval clash just days after the regime's underground nuclear test.

In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned that Pyongyang faced unspecified consequences because of its "provocative and belligerent" acts.

Pyongyang, reacting angrily to Seoul's decision to join an international program to intercept ships suspected of aiding nuclear proliferation, called South Korea's decision tantamount to a declaration of war.

"Now that the South Korean puppets were so ridiculous as to join in the said racket and dare declare a war against compatriots," North Korea is "compelled to take a decisive measure," the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said in a statement carried by state media.

The North Korean army called it a violation of the armistice the two Koreas signed in 1953 to end their three-year war, and said it would no longer honor the treaty.

South Korea's military said Wednesday it was prepared to "respond sternly" to any North Korean provocation.

Clinton said "there are consequences to such actions," referring to discussions in the United Nations meant to punish North Korea for its nuclear and missile tests.

She also underscored the firmness of the U.S. treaty commitment to defend South Korea and Japan, U.S. allies in easy reach of North Korean missiles.

North Korea's latest belligerence comes as the U.N. Security Council debates how to punish the regime for testing a nuclear bomb Monday in what President Obama called a "blatant violation" of international law.

Ambassadors from the five permanent veto-wielding council members — the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France— as well as Japan and South Korea were working out the details of a new resolution.

The success of any new sanctions would depend on how aggressively China, one of North Korea's only allies, implements them.

"It's not going too far to say that China holds the keys on sanctions," said Kim Sung-han, an international relations professor at Seoul's Korea University.

South Korea, divided from the North by a heavily fortified border, had responded to the nuclear test by joining the Proliferation Security Initiative, a U.S.-led network of nations seeking to stop ships from transporting the materials used in nuclear bombs.

Seoul previously resisted joining the PSI in favor of seeking reconciliation with Pyongyang, but pushed those efforts aside Monday after the nuclear test in the northeast.

North Korea warned Wednesday that any attempt to stop, board or inspect its ships would constitute a "grave violation."

The regime also said it could no longer promise the safety of U.S. and South Korean warships and civilian vessels in the waters near the Korea's western maritime border.

"They should bear in mind that the (North) has tremendous military muscle and its own method of strike able to conquer any targets in its vicinity at one stroke or hit the U.S. on the raw, if necessary," the army said in a statement carried by state media.

The maritime border has long been a flashpoint between the two Koreas. North Korea disputes the line unilaterally drawn by the United Nations at the end of the Koreas' three-year war in 1953, and has demanded it be redrawn further south.

The truce signed in 1953 and subsequent military agreements call for both sides to refrain from warfare, but doesn't cover the waters off the west coast.

North Korea has used the maritime border dispute to provoke two deadly naval skirmishes — in 1999 and 2002.

On Wednesday, the regime promised "unimaginable and merciless punishment" for anyone daring to challenge its ships.

Pyongyang also reportedly restarted its weapons-grade nuclear plant, South Korean media said.

The Chosun Ilbo newspaper said U.S. spy satellites detected signs of steam at the North's Yongbyon nuclear complex, an indication it may have started reprocessing nuclear fuel. The report, which could not be confirmed, quoted an unidentified government official. South Korea's Yonhap news agency also carried a similar report.

The move would be a major setback for efforts aimed at getting North Korea to disarm.

North Korea had stopped reprocessing fuel rods as part of an international deal. In 2007, it agreed to disable the Yongbyon reactor in exchange for aid and demolished a cooling tower at the complex.

The North has about 8,000 spent fuel rods which, if reprocessed, could allow it to harvest 13 to 18 pounds (six to eight kilograms) of plutonium — enough to make at least one nuclear bomb, experts said. North Korea is believed to have enough plutonium for at least a half dozen atomic bombs.

Further ratcheting up tensions, North Korea test-fired five short-range missiles over the past two days, South Korean officials confirmed.

Russia's foreign minister said world powers must be firm with North Korea but take care to avoid inflaming tensions further.

The world "must not rush to punish North Korea just for punishment's sake," Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, adding that Russia wants a Security Council resolution that will help restart stalled six-nation talks over North Korea's nuclear programs and will not provoke Pyongyang into even more aggressive activity.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak urged officials to "remain calm" in the face of North Korean threats, said Lee Dong-kwan, his spokesman.

Pyongyang isn't afraid of any repercussions for its actions, a North Korean newspaper, the Minju Joson, said Wednesday.

"It is a laughable delusion for the United States to think that it can get us to kneel with sanctions," it said in an editorial. "We've been living under U.S. sanctions for decades, but have firmly safeguarded our ideology and system while moving our achievements forward. The U.S. sanctions policy toward North Korea is like striking a rock with a rotten egg."

Korea warns of attack if ships held

Paul Koring, The Globe & Mail, May 27, 2009

Washington - North Korea threatened Wednesday to attack U.S. warships cruising near its coasts in an escalation of tensions after threats by the major powers to slap tougher sanctions on Pyongyang for testing nuclear weapons.

The neo-Stalinist regime also issued an official declaration claiming it was ripping up the 1953 armistice agreement that ended the Korean War.

“We’re certainly concerned and take any threat seriously,” President Barack Obama’s spokesman Robert Gibbs said. But he suggested the unpredictable regime led by the ailing and reclusive Kim Jong-il was “trying to get renewed attention through sabre-rattling and bluster and threats.”

At the United Nations in New York, the Security Council grappled with North Korea’s open defiance and diplomats from the major powers gathered to hammer out a new round of sanctions to impose on Pyongyang.

“We are going to add to the consequences that North Korea will face,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Washington.

North Korea fired off a new salvo of threats Wednesday after South Korea announced its warships would join a U.S.-led naval effort to shadow and – if necessary – seize freighters suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction.

Seoul’s government announced it was joining the 95-nation Proliferation Security Initiative (which includes Canada) aimed at interdicting nuclear, chemical and biological weapons shipments.

South Korea’s decision “dragged the Korean peninsula into the state of war,” said an official military statement circulated by North Korea’s state-controlled news agency.

“Any hostile act against our peaceful vessels including search and seizure will be considered an unpardonable infringement on our sovereignty and we will immediately respond with a powerful military strike,” it added.

Even as it said it was taking the threats seriously and vowed to defend its allies – South Korea and Japan – from North Korean attack, the Obama administration suggested Pyongyang was indulging itself in attention-getting.

“Threats won’t get North Korea the attention it craves,” Mr. Gibbs said, adding, “This is the fifth time in 15 years that they’ve sought to nullify the armistice.”

The ceasefire that ended the three-year war was never followed by a peace treaty and the heavily fortified zone dividing the two Koreas remains tense.

North Korea’s blunt rejection of Mr. Obama’s offer to open talks has created the first simmering foreign policy crisis for the new President.

Although Pyongyang often resorts to bellicose rhetoric, it has also backed up its threats on occasion. Twice in the past 10 years, it has sent warships to ambush South Korean vessels. The last naval skirmish left two vessels severely damaged and more than 40 sailors killed or injured.

Although U.S. warships routinely operate in international waters off the Korean Peninsula and the Pentagon has ordered specially equipped surveillance aircraft into the region to attempt to capture traces of fallout from the North Korean nuclear test, the Pentagon said there had been no buildup of forces or increase in the state of alert for the U.S. military in the area.

Washington wants North Korea to return to what were dubbed the “six-party” talks, which include China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. Pyongyang, which some analysts believe is in the throes of a succession crisis that could establish one of Kim Jong-il sons as the third-generation of the family to run the impoverished totalitarian state, has long demanded bilateral talks with Washington.

North Korea has repeatedly made and broken non-proliferation pacts and pledged to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in return for massive aid and donated nuclear reactors. However the latest test – three years after an initial, only partially-successful nuclear detonation – has established North Korea as an undisputed nuclear-weapons state. Last month, it test fired a multistage ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead thousands of kilometres.

Most military analysts, however, believe it has not yet managed to make a nuclear warhead small enough and light enough to sit atop a missile.

Still, the efforts of three successive U.S. presidents to keep North Korea out of the nuclear weapons club have failed.

Meanwhile, unconfirmed South Korean media reports say North Korea had restarted its nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, which was supposed to be permanently shut down and dismantled.

AP IMPACT: US wavered over S. Korean executions

CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG, AP, July 6, 2008

SEOUL, South Korea - The American colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to stall at first. But the declassified record shows he finally told his South Korean counterpart it "would be permitted" to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces.

In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, in a few weeks in mid-1950.

Extensive archival research by The Associated Press has found no indication Far East commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur took action to stem the summary mass killing, knowledge of which reached top levels of the Pentagon and State Department in Washington, where it was classified "secret" and filed away.

Now, a half-century later, the South Korean government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating what happened in that summer of terror, a political bloodbath largely hidden from history, unlike the communist invaders' executions of southern rightists, which were widely publicized and denounced at the time.

In the now-declassified record at the U.S. National Archives and other repositories, the Korean investigators will find an ambivalent U.S. attitude in 1950 — at times hands-off, at times disapproving.

"The most important thing is that they did not stop the executions," historian Jung Byung-joon, a member of the 2-year-old commission, said of the Americans. "They were at the crime scene, and took pictures and wrote reports."

They took pictures in July 1950 at the slaughter of dozens of men at one huge killing field outside the central city of Daejeon. Between 3,000 and 7,000 South Koreans are believed to have been shot there by their own military and police, and dumped into mass graves, said Kim Dong-choon, the commission member overseeing the investigation of these government killings.

The bones of Koh Chung-ryol's father are there somewhere, and the 57-year-old woman believes South Koreans alone are not to blame.

"Although we can't present concrete evidence, we bereaved families believe the United States has some responsibility for this," she told the AP, as she visited one of the burial sites in the quiet Sannae valley.

Frank Winslow, a military adviser at Daejeon in those desperate days long ago, is one American who feels otherwise.

The Koreans were responsible for their own actions, said the retired Army lieutenant colonel, 81. "The Koreans were sovereign. To me, there was never any question that the Koreans were in charge," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Bellingham, Wash.

The brutal, hurried elimination of tens of thousands of their countrymen, subject of a May 19 AP report, was the climax to a years-long campaign by South Korea's right-wing leaders.

In 1947, two years after Washington and Moscow divided Korea into southern and northern halves, a U.S. military government declared the Korean Labor Party, the southern communists, to be illegal. President Syngman Rhee's southern regime, gaining sovereignty in 1948, suppressed all leftist political activity, put down a guerrilla uprising and held up to 30,000 political prisoners by the time communist North Korea invaded on June 25, 1950.

As war broke out, southern authorities also rounded up members of the 300,000-strong National Guidance Alliance, a "re-education" body to which they had assigned leftist sympathizers, and whose membership quotas also were filled by illiterate peasants lured by promises of jobs and other benefits.

Commission investigators, extrapolating from initial evidence and surveys of family survivors, believe most alliance members were killed in the wave of executions.

On June 29, 1950, as the southern army and its U.S. advisers retreated southward, reports from Seoul said the conquering northerners had emptied the southern capital's prisons, and ex-inmates were reinforcing the new occupation regime.

In a confidential narrative he later wrote for Army historians, Lt. Col. Rollins S. Emmerich, a senior U.S. adviser, described what then happened in the southern port city of Busan, formerly known as Pusan.

Emmerich was told by a subordinate that a South Korean regimental commander, determined to keep Busan's political prisoners from joining the enemy, planned "to execute some 3500 suspected peace time Communists, locked up in the local prison," according to the declassified 78-page narrative, first uncovered by the newspaper Busan Ilbo at the U.S. National Archives.

Emmerich wrote that he summoned the Korean, Col. Kim Chong-won, and told him the enemy would not reach Busan in a few days as Kim feared, and that "atrocities could not be condoned."

But the American then indicated conditional acceptance of the plan.

"Colonel Kim promised not to execute the prisoners until the situation became more critical," wrote Emmerich, who died in 1986. "Colonel Kim was told that if the enemy did arrive to the outskirts of (Busan) he would be permitted to open the gates of the prison and shoot the prisoners with machine guns."

This passage, omitted from the published Army history, is the first documentation unearthed showing advance sanction by the U.S. military for such killings.

"I think his (Emmerich's) word is so significant," said Park Myung-lim, a South Korean historian of the war and adviser to the investigative commission.

As that summer wore on, and the invaders pressed their attack on the southern zone, Busan-area prisoners were shot by the hundreds, Korean and foreign witnesses later said.

Emmerich wrote that soon after his session with Kim, he met with South Korean officials in Daegu, 55 miles north of Busan, and persuaded them "at that time" not to execute 4,500 prisoners immediately, as planned. Within weeks, hundreds were being executed in the Daegu area.

The bloody anticommunist purge, begun immediately after the invasion, is believed by the fall of 1950 to have filled some 150 mass graves in secluded spots stretching to the peninsula's southernmost counties. Commissioner Kim said the commission's estimate of 100,000 dead is "very conservative." The commission later this month will resume excavating massacre sites, after having recovered remains of more than 400 people at four sites last year.

The AP has extensively researched U.S. military and diplomatic archives from the Korean War in recent years, at times relying on once-secret documents it obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and declassification reviews. The declassified U.S. record and other sources offer further glimpses of the mass killings.

A North Korean newspaper said 1,000 prisoners were slain in Incheon, just west of Seoul, in late June 1950 — a report partly corroborated by a declassified U.S. Eighth Army document of July 1950 saying "400 Communists" had been killed in Incheon. The North Korean report claimed a U.S. military adviser had given the order.

As the front moved south, in July's first days, Air Force intelligence officer Donald Nichols witnessed and photographed the shooting of an estimated 1,800 prisoners in Suwon, 20 miles south of Seoul, Nichols reported in a little-noted memoir in 1981, a decade before his death.

Around the same time, farther south, the Daejeon killings began.

Winslow recalled he declined an invitation to what a senior officer called the "turkey shoot" outside the city, but other U.S. officers did attend, taking grisly photos of the human slaughter that would be kept classified for a half-century.

Journalist Alan Winnington, of the British communist Daily Worker newspaper, entered Daejeon with North Korean troops after July 20 and reported that the killings were carried out for three days in early July and two or three days in mid-July.

He wrote that his witnesses claimed jeeploads of American officers "supervised the butchery." Secret CIA and Army intelligence communications reported on the Daejeon and Suwon killings as early as July 3, but said nothing about the U.S. presence or about any U.S. oversight.

In mid-August, MacArthur, in Tokyo, learned of the mass shooting of 200 to 300 people near Daegu, including women and a 12- or 13-year-old girl. A top-secret Army report from Korea, uncovered by AP research, told of the "extreme cruelty" of the South Korean military policemen. The bodies fell into a ravine, where hours later some "were still alive and moaning," wrote a U.S. military policeman who happened on the scene.

Although MacArthur had command of South Korean forces from early in the war, he took no action on this report, other than to refer it to John J. Muccio, U.S. ambassador in South Korea. Muccio later wrote that he urged South Korean officials to stage executions humanely and only after due process of law.

The AP found that during this same period, on Aug. 15, Brig. Gen. Francis W. Farrell, chief U.S. military adviser to the South Koreans, recommended the U.S. command investigate the executions. There was no sign such an inquiry was conducted. A month later, the Daejeon execution photos were sent to the Pentagon in Washington, with a U.S. colonel's report that the South Koreans had killed "thousands" of political prisoners.

The declassified record shows an equivocal U.S. attitude continuing into the fall, when Seoul was retaken and South Korean forces began shooting residents who collaborated with the northern occupiers.

When Washington's British allies protested, Dean Rusk, assistant secretary of state, told them U.S. commanders were doing "everything they can to curb such atrocities," according to a Rusk memo of Oct. 28, 1950.

But on Dec. 19, W.J. Sebald, State Department liaison to MacArthur, cabled Secretary of State Dean Acheson to say MacArthur's command viewed the killings as a South Korean "internal matter" and had "refrained from taking any action."

It was the British who took action, according to news reports at the time. On Dec. 7, in occupied North Korea, British officers saved 21 civilians lined up to be shot, by threatening to shoot the South Korean officer responsible. Later that month, British troops seized "Execution Hill," outside Seoul, to block further mass killings there.

To quiet the protests, the South Koreans barred journalists from execution sites and the State Department told diplomats to avoid commenting on atrocity reports. Earlier, the U.S. Embassy in London had denounced as "fabrication" Winnington's Daily Worker reporting on the Daejeon slaughter. The Army eventually blamed all the thousands of Daejeon deaths on the North Koreans, who in fact had carried out executions of rightists there and elsewhere.

An American historian of the Korean War, the University of Chicago's Bruce Cumings, sees a share of U.S. guilt in what happened in 1950.

"After the fact — with thousands murdered — the U.S. not only did nothing, but covered up the Daejeon massacres," he said.

Another Korean War scholar, Allan R. Millett, an emeritus Ohio State professor, is doubtful. "I'm not sure there's enough evidence to pin culpability on these guys," he said, referring to the advisers and other Americans.

The swiftness and nationwide nature of the 1950 roundups and mass killings point to orders from the top, President Rhee and his security chiefs, Korean historians say. Those officials are long dead, and Korean documentary evidence is scarce.

To piece together a fuller story, investigators of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission will sift through tens of thousands of pages of declassified U.S. documents.

The commission's mandate extends to at least 2010, and its president, historian Ahn Byung-ook, expects to turn then to Washington for help in finding the truth.

"Our plan is that when we complete our investigation of cases involving the U.S. Army, we'll make an overall recommendation, a request to the U.S. government to conduct an overall investigation," he said.
___

Associated Press investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.
___

On the Net:

South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission:

http://www.jinsil.go.kr/English/index.asp

Syria denies U.S. accusation over nuclear reactor

Samia Nakhoul, Reuters, April 24, 2008

LONDON (Reuters) - Syria on Thursday dismissed U.S. accusations that North Korea was helping it build a nuclear reactor that could produce plutonium.

Syria's ambassador to Britain, Sami al-Khiyami, told Reuters that the accusation, which President George W. Bush's administration was expected to lay out to lawmakers on Thursday, was to put pressure on North Korea in talks about Pyongyang's nuclear program.

"This has nothing to do with North Korea and Syria. They just want to exert more pressure on North Korea. This is why they are coming up with this story," Khiyami said.

"The cooperation between North Korea and Syria has nothing to do with (building) a nuclear facility. Cooperation is mainly economic.

"This is political manipulation ahead of the talks with North Korea to exert more pressure on them," he said.

Khiyami was speaking before what a U.S. official said would be evidence regarding Syria-North Korea nuclear cooperation to be put to lawmakers in Washington on Thursday.

The White House has said little about the possibility of such cooperation between the two since Israel conducted a mysterious September 6 air strike on Syria that media reports said targeted a nuclear site being built with Pyongyang's help.

The presentation to U.S. lawmakers was expected to include still photographs taken from videotape recorded inside the Syrian facility, another U.S. official said.

"Unfortunately the scenario of taking and retaking pictures looks like what happened before the Iraq war, when the U.S. administration was trying to convince the world that Iraq had nuclear weapons," Khiyami said.

"Instead of coming up with these ridiculous photos I think the U.S. administration should put all their effort into clearing the Middle East region of all weapons of mass destruction, starting with its closest ally Israel."

Israel is widely believed to have assembled the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal at Dimona, a plant out of bounds to foreign inspection.

(Editing by Charles Dick)

A Strike in the Dark

What did Israel bomb in Syria?
by Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, Feb. 11, 2008 edition

Israel and the U.S. have avoided comment on press reports about a nuclear facility.

Sometime after midnight on September 6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force fighters crossed into Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing mission on the banks of the Euphrates River, about ninety miles north of the Iraq border. The seemingly unprovoked bombing, which came after months of heightened tension between Israel and Syria over military exercises and troop buildups by both sides along the Golan Heights, was, by almost any definition, an act of war. But in the immediate aftermath nothing was heard from the government of Israel. In contrast, in 1981, when the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, the Israeli government was triumphant, releasing reconnaissance photographs of the strike and permitting the pilots to be widely interviewed.

Within hours of the attack, Syria denounced Israel for invading its airspace, but its public statements were incomplete and contradictory—thus adding to the mystery. A Syrian military spokesman said only that Israeli planes had dropped some munitions in an unpopulated area after being challenged by Syrian air defenses, “which forced them to flee.” Four days later, Walid Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister, said during a state visit to Turkey that the Israeli aircraft had used live ammunition in the attack, but insisted that there were no casualties or property damage. It was not until October 1st that Syrian President Bashar Assad, in an interview with the BBC, acknowledged that the Israeli warplanes had hit their target, which he described as an “unused military building.” Assad added that Syria reserved the right to retaliate, but his comments were muted.

Despite official silence in Tel Aviv (and in Washington), in the days after the bombing the American and European media were flooded with reports, primarily based on information from anonymous government sources, claiming that Israel had destroyed a nascent nuclear reactor that was secretly being assembled in Syria, with the help of North Korea. Beginning construction of a nuclear reactor in secret would be a violation of Syria’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and could potentially yield material for a nuclear weapon.

The evidence was circumstantial but seemingly damning. The first reports of Syrian and North Korean nuclear coöperation came on September 12th in the Times and elsewhere. By the end of October, the various media accounts generally agreed on four points: the Israeli intelligence community had learned of a North Korean connection to a construction site in an agricultural area in eastern Syria; three days before the bombing, a “North Korean ship,” identified as the Al Hamed, had arrived at the Syrian port of Tartus, on the Mediterranean; satellite imagery strongly suggested that the building under construction was designed to hold a nuclear reactor when completed; as such, Syria had crossed what the Israelis regarded as the “red line” on the path to building a bomb, and had to be stopped. There were also reports—by ABC News and others—that some of the Israeli intelligence had been shared in advance with the United States, which had raised no objection to the bombing.

The Israeli government still declined to make any statement about the incident. Military censorship on dispatches about the raid was imposed for several weeks, and the Israeli press resorted to recycling the disclosures in the foreign press. In the first days after the attack, there had been many critical stories in the Israeli press speculating about the bombing, and the possibility that it could lead to a conflict with Syria. Larry Derfner, a columnist writing in the Jerusalem Post, described the raid as “the sort of thing that starts wars.” But, once reports about the nuclear issue and other details circulated, the domestic criticism subsided.

At a news conference on September 20th, President George W. Bush was asked about the incident four times but said, “I’m not going to comment on the matter.” The lack of official statements became part of the story. “The silence from all parties has been deafening,” David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post, “but the message to Iran”—which the Administration had long suspected of pursuing a nuclear weapon—“is clear: America and Israel can identify nuclear targets and penetrate air defenses to destroy them.”

It was evident that officials in Israel and the United States, although unwilling to be quoted, were eager for the news media to write about the bombing. Early on, a former officer in the Israel Defense Forces with close contacts in Israeli intelligence approached me, with a version of the standard story, including colorful but, as it turned out, unconfirmable details: Israeli intelligence tracking the ship from the moment it left a North Korean port; Syrian soldiers wearing protective gear as they off-loaded the cargo; Israeli intelligence monitoring trucks from the docks to the target site. On October 3rd, the London Spectator, citing much of the same information, published an overheated account of the September 6th raid, claiming that it “may have saved the world from a devastating threat,” and that “a very senior British ministerial source” had warned, “If people had known how close we came to World War Three that day there’d have been mass panic.”

However, in three months of reporting for this article, I was repeatedly told by current and former intelligence, diplomatic, and congressional officials that they were not aware of any solid evidence of ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syria. It is possible that Israel conveyed intelligence directly to senior members of the Bush Administration, without it being vetted by intelligence agencies. (This process, known as “stovepiping,” overwhelmed U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq.) But Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations group responsible for monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, said, “Our experts who have carefully analyzed the satellite imagery say it is unlikely that this building was a nuclear facility.”

Joseph Cirincione, the director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told me, “Syria does not have the technical, industrial, or financial ability to support a nuclear-weapons program. I’ve been following this issue for fifteen years, and every once in a while a suspicion arises and we investigate and there’s nothing. There was and is no nuclear-weapons threat from Syria. This is all political.” Cirincione castigated the press corps for its handling of the story. “I think some of our best journalists were used,” he said.

A similar message emerged at briefings given to select members of Congress within weeks of the attack. The briefings, conducted by intelligence agencies, focussed on what Washington knew about the September 6th raid. One concern was whether North Korea had done anything that might cause the U.S. to back away from ongoing six-nation talks about its nuclear program. A legislator who took part in one such briefing said afterward, according to a member of his staff, that he had heard nothing that caused him “to have any doubts” about the North Korean negotiations—“nothing that should cause a pause.” The legislator’s conclusion, the staff member said, was “There’s nothing that proves any perfidy involving the North Koreans.”

Morton Abramowitz, a former Assistant Secretary of State for intelligence and research, told me that he was astonished by the lack of response. “Anytime you bomb another state, that’s a big deal,” he said. “But where’s the outcry, particularly from the concerned states and the U.N.? Something’s amiss.”

Israel could, of course, have damning evidence that it refuses to disclose. But there are serious and unexamined contradictions in the various published accounts of the September 6th bombing.

The main piece of evidence to emerge publicly that Syria was building a reactor arrived on October 23rd, when David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security, a highly respected nonprofit research group, released a satellite image of the target. The photograph had been taken by a commercial satellite company, DigitalGlobe, of Longmont, Colorado, on August 10th, four weeks before the bombing, and showed a square building and a nearby water-pumping station. In an analysis released at the same time, Albright, a physicist who served as a weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that the building, as viewed from space, had roughly the same length and width as a reactor building at Yongbyon, North Korea’s main nuclear facility. “The tall building in the image may house a reactor under construction and the pump station along the river may have been intended to supply cooling water to the reactor,” Albright said. He concluded his analysis by posing a series of rhetorical questions that assumed that the target was a nuclear facility:

How far along was the reactor construction project when it was bombed? What was the extent of nuclear assistance from North Korea? Which reactor components did Syria obtain from North Korea or elsewhere, and where are they now?

He was later quoted in the Washington Post saying, “I’m pretty convinced that Syria was trying to build a nuclear reactor.”

When I asked Albright how he had pinpointed the target, he told me that he and a colleague, Paul Brannan, “did a lot of hard work”—culling press reports and poring over DigitalGlobe imagery—“before coming up with the site.” Albright then shared his findings with Robin Wright and other journalists at the Post, who, after checking with Administration officials, told him that the building was, indeed, the one targeted by the Israelis. “We did not release the information until we got direct confirmation from the Washington Post,” he told me. The Post’s sources in the Administration, he understood, had access to far more detailed images obtained by U.S. intelligence satellites. The Post ran a story, without printing the imagery, on October 19th, reporting that “U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the aftermath of the attack” had concluded that the site had the “signature,” or characteristics, of a reactor “similar in structure to North Korea’s facilities”—a conclusion with which Albright then agreed. In other words, the Albright and the Post reports, which appeared to independently reinforce each other, stemmed in part from the same sources.

Albright told me that before going public he had met privately with Israeli officials. “I wanted to be sure in my own mind that the Israelis thought it was a reactor, and I was,” he said. “They never explicitly said it was nuclear, but they ruled out the possibility that it was a missile, chemical-warfare, or radar site. By a process of elimination, I was left with nuclear.”

Two days after his first report, Albright released a satellite image of the bombed site, taken by DigitalGlobe on October 24th, seven weeks after the bombing. The new image showed that the target area had been levelled and the ground scraped. Albright said that it hinted of a coverup—cleansing the bombing site could make it difficult for weapons inspectors to determine its precise nature. “It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” he told the Times. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.” This assessment was widely shared in the press. (In mid-January, the Times reported that recent imagery from DigitalGlobe showed that a storage facility, or something similar, had been constructed, in an obvious rush, at the bombing site.)

Proliferation experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency and others in the arms-control community disputed Albright’s interpretation of the images. “People here were baffled by this, and thought that Albright had stuck his neck out,” a diplomat in Vienna, where the I.A.E.A. is headquartered, told me. “The I.A.E.A. has been consistently telling journalists that it is skeptical about the Syrian nuclear story, but the reporters are so convinced.”

A second diplomat in Vienna acidly commented on the images: “A square building is a square building.” The diplomat, who is familiar with the use of satellite imagery for nuclear verification, added that the I.A.E.A. “does not have enough information to conclude anything about the exact nature of the facility. They see a building with some geometry near a river that could be identified as nuclear-related. But they cannot credibly conclude that is so. As far as information coming from open sources beyond imagery, it’s a struggle to extract information from all of the noise that comes from political agendas.”

Much of what one would expect to see around a secret nuclear site was lacking at the target, a former State Department intelligence expert who now deals with proliferation issues for the Congress said. “There is no security around the building,” he said. “No barracks for the Army or the workers. No associated complex.” Jeffrey Lewis, who heads the non-proliferation program at the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington, told me that, even if the width and the length of the building were similar to the Korean site, its height was simply not sufficient to contain a Yongbyon-size reactor and also have enough room to extract the control rods, an essential step in the operation of the reactor; nor was there evidence in the published imagery of major underground construction. “All you could see was a box,” Lewis said. “You couldn’t see enough to know how big it will be or what it will do. It’s just a box.”

A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, said, “We don’t have any proof of a reactor—no signals intelligence, no human intelligence, no satellite intelligence.” Some well-informed defense consultants and former intelligence officials asked why, if there was compelling evidence of nuclear cheating involving North Korea, a member of the President’s axis of evil, and Syria, which the U.S. considers a state sponsor of terrorism, the Bush Administration would not insist on making it public.

When I went to Israel in late December, the government was still maintaining secrecy about the raid, but some current and former officials and military officers were willing to speak without attribution. Most were adamant that Israel’s intelligence had been accurate. “Don’t you write that there was nothing there!” a senior Israeli official, who is in a position to know the details of the raid on Syria, said, shaking a finger at me. “The thing in Syria was real.”

Retired Brigadier General Shlomo Brom, who served as deputy national-security adviser under Prime Minister Ehud Barak, told me that Israel wouldn’t have acted if it hadn’t been convinced that there was a threat. “It may have been a perception of a conviction, but there was something there,” Brom said. “It was the beginning of a nuclear project.” However, by the date of our talk, Brom told me, “The question of whether it was there or not is not that relevant anymore.”

Albright, when I spoke to him in December, was far more circumspect than he had been in October. “We never said ‘we know’ it was a reactor, based on the image,” Albright said. “We wanted to make sure that the image was consistent with a reactor, and, from my point of view, it was. But that doesn’t confirm it’s a reactor.”

The journey of the Al Hamed, a small coastal trader, became a centerpiece in accounts of the September 6th bombing. On September 15th, the Washington Post reported that “a prominent U.S. expert on the Middle East” said that the attack “appears to have been linked to the arrival . . . of a ship carrying material from North Korea labeled as cement.” The article went on to cite the expert’s belief that “the emerging consensus in Israel was that it delivered nuclear equipment.” Other press reports identified the Al Hamed as a “suspicious North Korean” ship.

But there is evidence that the Al Hamed could not have been carrying sensitive cargo—or any cargo—from North Korea. International shipping is carefully monitored by Lloyd’s Marine Intelligence Unit, which relies on a network of agents as well as on port logs and other records. In addition, most merchant ships are now required to operate a transponder device called an A.I.S., for automatic identification system. This device, which was on board the Al Hamed, works in a manner similar to a transponder on a commercial aircraft—beaming a constant, very high-frequency position report. (The U.S. Navy monitors international sea traffic with the aid of dedicated satellites, at a secret facility in suburban Washington.)

According to Marine Intelligence Unit records, the Al Hamed, which was built in 1965, had been operating for years in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, with no indication of any recent visits to North Korea. The records show that the Al Hamed arrived at Tartus on September 3rd—the ship’s fifth visit to Syria in five months. (It was one of eight ships that arrived that day; although it is possible that one of the others was carrying illicit materials, only the Al Hamed has been named in the media.) The ship’s registry was constantly changing. The Al Hamed flew the South Korean flag before switching to North Korea in November of 2005, and then to Comoros. (Ships often fly flags of convenience, registering with different countries, in many cases to avoid taxes or onerous regulations.) At the time of the bombing, according to Lloyd’s, it was flying a Comoran flag and was owned by four Syrian nationals. In earlier years, under other owners, the ship seems to have operated under Russian, Estonian, Turkish, and Honduran flags. Lloyd’s records show that the ship had apparently not passed through the Suez Canal—the main route from the Mediterranean to the Far East—since at least 1998.

Among the groups that keep track of international shipping is Greenpeace. Martini Gotjé, who monitors illegal fishing for the organization and was among the first to raise questions about the Al Hamed, told me, “I’ve been at sea for forty-one years, and I can tell you, as a captain, that the Al Hamed was nothing—in rotten shape. You wouldn’t be able to load heavy cargo on it, as the floorboards wouldn’t be that strong.”

If the Israelis’ target in Syria was not a nuclear site, why didn’t the Syrians respond more forcefully? Syria complained at the United Nations but did little to press the issue. And, if the site wasn’t a partially built reactor, what was it?

During two trips to Damascus after the Israeli raid, I interviewed many senior government and intelligence officials. None of President Assad’s close advisers told me the same story, though some of the stories were more revealing—and more plausible—than others. In general, Syrian officials seemed more eager to analyze Israel’s motives than to discuss what had been attacked. “I hesitate to answer any journalist’s questions about it,” Faruq al-Shara, the Syrian Vice-President, told me. “Israel bombed to restore its credibility, and their objective is for us to keep talking about it. And by answering your questions I serve their objective. Why should I volunteer to do that?” Shara denied that his nation has a nuclear-weapons program. “The volume of articles about the bombing is incredible, and it’s not important that it’s a lie,” he said.

One top foreign-ministry official in Damascus told me that the target “was an old military building that had been abandoned by the Syrian military” years ago. But a senior Syrian intelligence general gave me a different account. “What they targeted was a building used for fertilizer and water pumps,” he said—part of a government effort to revitalize farming. “There is a large city”— Dayr az Zawr—“fifty kilometres away. Why would Syria put nuclear material near a city?” I interviewed the intelligence general again on my second visit to Damascus, and he reiterated that the targeted building was “at no time a military facility.” As to why Syria had not had a more aggressive response, if the target was so benign, the general said, “It was not fear—that’s all I’ll say.” As I left, I asked the general why Syria had not invited representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the bombing site and declare that no nuclear activity was taking place there. “They did not ask to come,” he said, and “Syria had no reason to ask them to come.”

An I.A.E.A. official dismissed that assertion when we spoke in Vienna a few days later. “The I.A.E.A. asked the Syrians to allow the agency to visit the site to verify its nature,” the I.A.E.A. official said. “Syria’s reply was that it was a military, not a nuclear, installation, and there would be no reason for the I.A.E.A. to go there. It would be in their and everyone’s interest to have the I.A.E.A. visit the site. If it was nuclear, it would leave fingerprints.”

In a subsequent interview, Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador to Washington, defended Syria’s decision not to invite the I.A.E.A. inspectors. “We will not get into the game of inviting foreign experts to visit every site that Israel claims is a nuclear facility,” Moustapha told me. “If we bring them in and they say there is nothing there, then Israel will say it made a mistake and bomb another site two weeks later. And if we then don’t let the I.A.E.A. in, Israel will say, ‘You see?’ This is nonsense. Why should we have to do this?”

Even if the site was not a nuclear installation, it is possible that the Syrians feared that an I.A.E.A. inquiry would uncover the presence of North Koreans there. In Syria, I was able to get some confirmation that North Koreans were at the target. A senior officer in Damascus with firsthand knowledge of the incident agreed to see me alone, at his home; my other interviews in Damascus took place in government offices. According to his account, North Koreans were present at the site, but only as paid construction workers. The senior officer said that the targeted building, when completed, would most likely have been used as a chemical-warfare facility. (Syria is not a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention and has been believed, for decades, to have a substantial chemical-weapons arsenal.)

The building contract with North Korea was a routine business deal, the senior officer said—from design to construction. (North Korea may, of course, have sent skilled technicians capable of doing less routine work.) Syria and North Korea have a long-standing partnership on military matters. “The contract between Syria and North Korea was old, from 2002, and it was running late,” the senior officer told me. “It was initially to be finished in 2005, and the Israelis might have expected it was further along.”

The North Korean laborers had been coming and going for “maybe six months” before the September bombing, the senior officer said, and his government concluded that the Israelis had picked up North Korean telephone chatter at the site. (This fit the timeline that Israeli officials had given me.) “The Israelis may have their own spies and watched the laborers being driven to the area,” the senior officer said. “The Koreans were not there at night, but slept in their quarters and were driven to the site in the morning. The building was in an isolated area, and the Israelis may have concluded that even if there was a slight chance”—of it being a nuclear facility—“we’ll take that risk.”

On the days before the bombing, the Koreans had been working on the second floor, and were using a tarp on top of the building to shield the site from rain and sun. “It was just the North Korean way of working,” the Syrian senior officer said, adding that the possibility that the Israelis could not see what was underneath the tarp might have added to their determination.

The attack was especially dramatic, the Syrian senior officer said, because the Israelis used bright magnesium illumination flares to light up the target before the bombing. Night suddenly turned into day, he told me. “When the people in the area saw the lights and the bombing, they thought there would be a commando raid,” the senior officer said. The building was destroyed, and his government eventually concluded that there were no Israeli ground forces in the area. But if Israelis had been on the ground seeking contaminated soil samples, the senior officer said, “they found only cement.”

A senior Syrian official confirmed that a group of North Koreans had been at work at the site, but he denied that the structure was related to chemical warfare. Syria had concluded, he said, that chemical warfare had little deterrent value against Israel, given its nuclear capability. The facility that was attacked, the official said, was to be one of a string of missile-manufacturing plants scattered throughout Syria—“all low tech. Not strategic.” (North Korea has been a major exporter of missile technology and expertise to Syria for decades.) He added, “We’ve gone asymmetrical, and have been improving our capability to build low-tech missiles that will enable us to inflict as much damage as possible without confronting the Israeli Army. We now can hit all of Israel, and not just the north.”

Whatever was under construction, with North Korean help, it apparently had little to do with agriculture—or with nuclear reactors—but much to do with Syria’s defense posture, and its military relationship with North Korea. And that, perhaps, was enough to silence the Syrian government after the September 6th bombing.

It is unclear to what extent the Bush Administration was involved in the Israeli attack. The most detailed report of coöperation was made in mid-October by ABC News. Citing a senior U.S. official, the network reported that Israel had shared intelligence with the United States and received satellite help and targeting information in response. At one point, it was reported, the Bush Administration considered attacking Syria itself, but rejected that option. The implication was that the Israeli intelligence about the nuclear threat had been vetted by the U.S., and had been found to be convincing.

Yet officials I spoke to in Israel heatedly denied the notion that they had extensive help from Washington in planning the attack. When I told the senior Israeli official that I found little support in Washington for Israel’s claim that it had bombed a nuclear facility in Syria, he responded with an expletive, and then said, angrily, “Nobody helped us. We did it on our own.” He added, “What I’m saying is that nobody discovered it for us.” (The White House declined to comment on this story.)

There is evidence to support this view. The satellite operated by DigitalGlobe, the Colorado firm that supplied Albright’s images, is for hire; anyone can order the satellite to photograph specific coördinates, a process that can cost anywhere from several hundred to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company displays the results of these requests on its Web page, but not the identity of the customer. On five occasions between August 5th and August 27th of last year—before the Israeli bombing—DigitalGlobe was paid to take a tight image of the targeted building in Syria.

Clearly, whoever ordered the images likely had some involvement in plans for the attack. DigitalGlobe does about sixty per cent of its business with the U.S. government, but those contracts are for unclassified work, such as mapping. The government’s own military and intelligence satellite system, with an unmatched ability to achieve what analysts call “highly granular images,” could have supplied superior versions of the target sites. Israel has at least two military satellite systems, but, according to Allen Thomson, a former C.I.A. analyst, DigitalGlobe’s satellite has advantages for reconnaissance, making Israel a logical customer. (“Customer anonymity is crucial to us,” Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe, said. “I don’t know who placed the order and couldn’t disclose it if I did.”) It is also possible that Israel or the United States ordered the imagery in order to have something unclassified to pass to the press if needed. If the Bush Administration had been aggressively coöperating with Israel before the attack, why would Israel have to turn to a commercial firm?

Last fall, aerospace industry and military sources told Aviation Week & Space Technology, an authoritative trade journal, that the United States had provided Israel with advice about “potential target vulnerabilities” before the September 6th attack, and monitored the radar as the mission took place. The magazine reported that the Israeli fighters, prior to bombing the target on the Euphrates, struck a Syrian radar facility near the Turkish border, knocking the radar out of commission and permitting them to complete their mission without interference.

The former U.S. senior intelligence official told me that, as he understood it, America’s involvement in the Israeli raid dated back months earlier, and was linked to the Administration’s planning for a possible air war against Iran. Last summer, the Defense Intelligence Agency came to believe that Syria was installing a new Russian-supplied radar-and-air-defense system that was similar to the radar complexes in Iran. Entering Syrian airspace would trigger those defenses and expose them to Israeli and American exploitation, yielding valuable information about their capabilities. Vice-President Dick Cheney supported the idea of overflights, the former senior intelligence official said, because “it would stick it to Syria and show that we’re serious about Iran.” (The Vice-President’s office declined to comment.) The former senior intelligence official said that Israeli military jets have flown over Syria repeatedly, without retaliation from Syria. At the time, the former senior intelligence official said, the focus was on radar and air defenses, and not on any real or suspected nuclear facility. Israel’s claims about the target, which emerged later, caught many in the military and intelligence community—if not in the White House—by surprise.

The senior Israeli official, asked whether the attack was rooted in his country’s interest in Syria’s radar installations, told me, “Bullshit.” Whatever the Administration’s initial agenda, Israel seems to have been after something more.

The story of the Israeli bombing of Syria, with its mixture of satellite intelligence, intercepts, newspaper leaks, and shared assumptions, reminded some American diplomats and intelligence officials of an incident, ten years ago, involving North Korea. In mid-1998, American reconnaissance satellites photographed imagery of a major underground construction project at Kumchang-ri, twenty-five miles northwest of Yongbyon. “We were briefed that, without a doubt, this was a nuclear-related facility, and there was signals intelligence linking the construction brigade at Kumchang-ri to the nuclear complex at Yongbyon,” the former State Department intelligence expert recalled.

Charles Kartman, who was President Bill Clinton’s special envoy for peace talks with Korea, told me that the intelligence was considered a slam dunk by analysts in the Defense Intelligence Agency, even though other agencies disagreed. “We had a debate going on inside the community, but the D.I.A. unilaterally took it to Capitol Hill,” Kartman said, forcing the issue and leading to a front-page Times story.

After months of negotiations, Kartman recalled, the North Koreans agreed, under diplomatic pressure, to grant access to Kumchang-ri. In return, they received aid, including assistance with a new potato-production program. Inspectors found little besides a series of empty tunnels. Robert Carlin, an expert on North Korea who retired in 2005 after serving more than thirty years with the C.I.A. and the State Department’s intelligence bureau, told me that the Kumchang-ri incident highlighted “an endemic weakness” in the American intelligence community. “People think they know the ending and then they go back and find the evidence that fits their story,” he said. “And then you get groupthink—and people reinforce each other.”

It seems that, as with Kumchang-ri, there was a genuine, if not unanimous, belief by Israeli intelligence that the Syrians were constructing something that could have serious national-security consequences. But why would the Israelis take the risk of provoking a military response, and perhaps a war, if there was, as it seems, no smoking gun? Mohamed ElBaradei, expressing his frustration, said, “If a country has any information about a nuclear activity in another country, it should inform the I.A.E.A.—not bomb first and ask questions later.”

One answer, suggested by David Albright, is that Israel did not trust the international arms-control community. “I can understand the Israeli point of view, given the history with Iran and Algeria,” Albright said. “Both nations had nuclear-weapons programs and, after being caught cheating, declared their reactors to be civil reactors, for peacetime use. The international groups, like the U.N. and the I.A.E.A, never shut them down.” Also, Israel may have calculated that risk of a counterattack was low: President Assad would undoubtedly conclude that the attack had the support of the Bush Administration and, therefore, that any response by Syria would also engage the U.S. (My conversations with officials in Syria bore out this assumption.)

In Tel Aviv, the senior Israeli official pointedly told me, “Syria still thinks Hezbollah won the war in Lebanon”—referring to the summer, 2006, fight between Israel and the Shiite organization headed by Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. “Nasrallah knows how much that war cost—one-third of his fighters were killed, infrastructure was bombed, and ninety-five per cent of his strategic weapons were wiped out,” the Israeli official said. “But Assad has a Nasrallah complex and thinks Hezbollah won. And, ‘If he did it, I can do it.’ This led to an adventurous mood in Damascus. Today, they are more sober.”

That notion was echoed by the ambassador of an Israeli ally who is posted in Tel Aviv. “The truth is not important,” the ambassador told me. “Israel was able to restore its credibility as a deterrent. That is the whole thing. No one will know what the real story is.”

There is evidence that the preëmptive raid on Syria was also meant as a warning about—and a model for—a preëmptive attack on Iran. When I visited Israel this winter, Iran was the overriding concern among political and defense officials I spoke to—not Syria. There was palpable anger toward Washington, in the wake of a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded, on behalf of the American intelligence community, that Iran is not now constructing a nuclear weapon. Many in Israel view Iran’s nuclear ambitions as an existential threat; they believe that military action against Iran may be inevitable, and worry that America may not be there when needed. The N.I.E. was published in November, after a yearlong standoff involving Cheney’s office, which resisted the report’s findings. At the time of the raid, reports about the forthcoming N.I.E. and its general conclusion had already appeared.

Retired Major General Giora Eiland, who served as the national-security adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told me, “The Israeli military takes it as an assumption that one day we will need to have a military campaign against Iran, to slow and eliminate the nuclear option.” He added, “Whether the political situation will allow this is another question.”

In the weeks after the N.I.E.’s release, Bush insisted that the Iranian nuclear-weapons threat was as acute as ever, a theme he amplified during his nine-day Middle East trip after the New Year. “A lot of people heard that N.I.E. out here and said that George Bush and the Americans don’t take the Iranian threat seriously,” he told Greta Van Susteren, of Fox News. “And so this trip has been successful from the perspective of saying . . . we will keep the pressure on.”

Shortly after the bombing, a Chinese envoy and one of the Bush Administration’s senior national-security officials met in Washington. The Chinese envoy had just returned from a visit to Tehran, a person familiar with the discussion told me, and he wanted the White House to know that there were moderates there who were interested in talks. The national-security official rejected that possibility and told the envoy, as the person familiar with the discussion recalled, “‘You are aware of the recent Israeli statements about Syria. The Israelis are extremely serious about Iran and its nuclear program, and I believe that, if the United States government is unsuccessful in its diplomatic dealings with Iran, the Israelis will take it out militarily.’ He then told the envoy that he wanted him to convey this to his government—that the Israelis were serious.

“He was telling the Chinese leadership that they’d better warn Iran that we can’t hold back Israel, and that the Iranians should look at Syria and see what’s coming next if diplomacy fails,” the person familiar with the discussion said. “His message was that the Syrian attack was in part aimed at Iran.” ♦

Aug. 23 "Kill 'em All" film screening

7:30pm

Charlotte Energy Solutions
337 Bladwin Ave
Charlotte, NC 28204

Kill 'em All': The American Military in Korea
By Jeremy Williams

In September 1999 an investigative team from the Associated Press broke a story that shocked America. Fifty years before, they claimed, refugees caught up in the Korean War were shot and strafed by US forces. Jeremy Williams explores the repercussions of a brutal episode in Cold War history.

The Forgotten War

The Korean War was a bloody conflict. It left Korea, North and South, with several million dead and the UN forces involved in the fighting with over 100,000 casualties. But despite fighting as intense and as violent as any other conflict since World War Two, Korea has always been history's 'Forgotten War'.

'...US commanders repeatedly, and without ambiguity, ordered forces under their control to target and kill Korean refugees caught on the battlefield.'

While atrocities conducted both by North and South Korean forces have already been documented, recently a much darker side to the US involvement in the Korean War has begun to emerge. It casts a shadow over the conduct of US forces during the conflict, particularly of officers and generals in command. Declassified military documents recently found in the US National Archives show clearly how US commanders repeatedly, and without ambiguity, ordered forces under their control to target and kill Korean refugees caught on the battlefield. More disturbing still have been the published testimonies of Korean survivors who recall such killings, and the frank accounts of those American veterans brave enough to admit involvement.

The Korean War began on 25 June 1950 when communist North Korea invaded the South with six army divisions. These North Korean forces, backed by impressive Soviet equipment including tanks, made quick gains into the territory. The United States decided to intervene in the defence of the South and, taking advantage of the Soviet absence from the UN Security Council, proceeded to press for UN resolutions condemning the invasion. Days later a resolution was passed calling upon member countries to give assistance to South Korea to repulse the attack. General Douglas MacArthur, then in charge of US forces in the Pacific and of the occupation of Japan, was appointed commander of the joint forces.

Read the rest & view photos...

NATO backs U.S. missile plan on eve of Russia talks

Reuters, June 25, 2007

MOSCOW (Reuters) - NATO's secretary-general mounted a stout defense of Washington's missile shield plan on Monday, the day before meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin when the issue is likely to top the agenda.

Russia has described United States' plan to place part of its missile shield in eastern Europe as a threat and the issue has divided European politicians with some saying it is vital for defense and others saying it is misguided.

"You don't have to be Einstein to understand that 10 interceptor rockets don't pose any threat to Russia and the Russian people," NATO's Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said via an interpreter in a debate on Russia's Ekho Moskvy radio station.

On Tuesday de Hoop Scheffer meets Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin.

He underlined the shield was aimed at shooting down missiles fired by rogue states such as North Korea and Iran, and that Russia also shared these common enemies.

In echoes of the Cold War, Putin this month said he would order Russia to aim its missiles back at major European cities if Washington went ahead with the plan to site elements of the shield near Russia's borders.

"We were enemies and we tried to destroy each other but that era has now finished," de Hoop Scheffer said on Monday.

The United States wants to place part of the missile shield in Poland and the Czech republic.

As an alternative to the shield, Russia has also offered the United States use of a Soviet-built radar station in Azerbaijan. The United States said it would consider the offer although the Azeri radar station could not replace the main missile shield.

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Tell Bush & Congress: No U.S. Military Bases in The Czech Republic & Poland!

The Neocon Threat to World Peace and American Freedom

by Paul Craig Roberts, AntiWar.com, June 12, 2007

The Bush/Cheney White House, which told the American people in 2003 that the Iraqi invasion would be a three-to-six-week affair, now tells us that the U.S. occupation is permanent. Forever.

Attentive Americans, of which, alas, there are so few, had already concluded that the occupation was permanent. Permanence is the obvious message from the massive and fortified U.S. embassy under construction in Iraq and from the large permanent military bases that the Bush regime is building in Iraq.

Bush regime propagandists have created a false analogy with "the Korean model" in their effort to sell the permanent occupation of Iraq as necessary for Iraq's security. More than one half century after the close of the Korean war, U.S. troops continue to be based in Korea, as they are in Germany more than six decades after the end of World War II.

The rationale for the U.S. troops in South Korea is to remind North Korea that an attack on South Korea is an attack on the U.S. itself. The rationale for U.S. troops in Germany disappeared when Reagan and Gorbachev brought the Cold War to an end.

There is, of course, no similarity between Iraq and Korea. There was no insurgency in Korea and no attacks on U.S. troops based in South Korea once the fighting stopped. The presence of U.S. troops in South Korea has produced many protest demonstrations by South Koreans, but the U.S. troops in South Korea have had no exposure to combat since the war ended in 1953.

In contrast, the insurgency in Iraq continues to rage and could expand dramatically if Shi'ites were to join the Sunnis in attacks on U.S. forces. Most American military leaders no longer believe the insurgency can be defeated. Permanent occupation means permanent insurgency. Indeed, an attempt at permanent occupation could possibly unify the Arabs in a joint effort to expel the Americans.

The absurd analogy with Korea is so far-fetched that it raises the question whether the Bush/Cheney regime has entered a new, higher level of delusion. Bush cannot keep troops in Iraq permanently unless he intends to remain permanently in the White House. Even some Republicans in Congress are talking about beginning withdrawals of U.S. troops in September. Republicans believe that if withdrawals do not begin, their party will be wiped out in the 2008 election.

The wild card is the neoconservatives' long-standing alliance with Israeli Zionists. The neoconservatives still have a death grip on the discredited Bush regime. Jim Lobe describes the extensive international organization that the neoconservatives have put into place for the purpose of orchestrating an attack on Iran.

A sane reader might wonder why neoconservatives would want to expand a conflict in which the U.S. has failed. Surely, even delusional "cakewalk" neoconservatives must realize that attacking Iran would greatly increase the threat to U.S. troops in Iraq and perhaps bring missile attacks on oil facilities and U.S. bases throughout the Middle East. An attack on Iran would further radicalize Muslims and further undermine U.S. puppets in the Middle East. It could bring war to the entire region.

The point is that the neoconservatives do realize this. Their defeat in Iraq and Israel's defeat in Lebanon have taught the neoconservatives that the U.S. cannot prevail in the Middle East by conventional military means. As I have previously explained, the neoconservatives' plan is to escape the failure of their Iraq plan by orchestrating a war with Iran in which the U.S. can prevail only by using nuclear weapons. As previously reported, the neoconservatives believe that the use of nuclear weapons against Iran will convince Muslims that they must accept U.S. hegemony.

The neoconservatives have put the elements of their plan in place. They have powerful naval forces on station off Iran's coast. They have convinced President Bush that only by attacking Iran can he prevail in Iraq.

The neoconservatives have rewritten U.S. war doctrine to permit preemptive U.S. nuclear attacks on non-nuclear countries. They have demonized Iran as the greatest threat since Hitler. Neoconservatives have invented "Islamofascism," something that exists only in the neoconservative propaganda used to instill in Americans hatred of Muslims. The neoconservatives have dehumanized Muslims as monsters who must be destroyed at all costs. Recent statements by neoconservative leaders such as Norman Podhoretz read like the ravings of ignorant lunatics. Podhoretz has written Muslims out of the human race. He demands that their culture be deracinated.

Neoconservatives, convinced that a nuclear attack will bring Muslims to heel, are ignoring the likely blowback and unintended consequences of an attack on Iran, just as they ignored the likely consequences of their attack on Iraq. If the neoconservatives are mistaken in their assumption that nuclear weapons will cause Muslims to submit to the U.S., the consequences will be unmanageable.

The neoconservative Bush regime has got away with more than I thought possible, perhaps because most of Congress and the American public cannot imagine the degree of insanity that lies behind the Bush administration. Most Americans who have turned against the regime think that the administration is incompetent, that it jumped to wrong conclusions about Iraq, and that it mismanaged the war and will not admit its mistakes. As every reason Bush gave for the war has proven to be false, people see no point in continuing the struggle.

If Americans understood the enormity of the deception behind the invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan) and the pending attack on Iran, Bush and Cheney would be impeached and turned over to the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague, and AIPAC would be forced to register as a foreign agent.

Just as Goebbels said, some lies are too big to be disbelieved. It is this disbelief that is so dangerous. The inability of Americans to see through the Big Lie to the secret agenda allows the neoconservatives to escape accountability and continue with their plot.

The neoconservatives also believe that nuclear attack on Iran will isolate America in the world and thereby give the government control over the American people. The denunciations that will be hurled at Americans from every quarter will force the country to wrap itself in the flag and treat domestic critics as foreign enemies. Not only free speech but also truth itself will disappear along with every civil liberty.