Defector: Kim Jong Un ordered aunt be poisoned

A North Korean defector -- believed to be the highest level official to escape the country in years -- tells CNN Kim Jong Un ordered his aunt be poisoned, an action which he says has even shocked regime insiders used to purges.

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UN says Israel, not Iran, North Korea or Syria worst violator of human rights

Fox News

By Anne Bayefsky

FILE -- March 12, 2014: Ben Emmerson, UN Special Rapporteur on Counter Terrorism and Human Rights speaks during a press conference about his annual report to the Human Rights Council on the use of remotely piloted aircraft, or drones, in extraterritorial lethal counter-terrorism operations, at the European headquarters of the United Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland. (AP Photo/Keystone,Martial Trezzini)

What country deserves more condemnation for violating human rights than any other nation on earth? According to the U.N.’s top human rights body, that would be Israel.

Last week, Israel was the U.N.’s number one women’s rights violator. This week it is the U.N.’s all-round human rights villain.

The U.N. Human Rights Council wrapped up its latest session in Geneva on Friday, March 27 by adopting four resolutions condemning Israel.  That’s four times more than any of the other 192 UN member states.

Playing at caring about human rights is the U.N. game. And no state does it better than Iran.

There were four resolutions on Israel. And one on North Korea -- a country that is home to government policies of torture, starvation, enslavement, rape, disappearances, and murder – to name just some of its crimes against humanity.

Four resolutions on Israel. And one on Syria. Where the death toll of four years of war is 100,000 civilians, ten million people are displaced, and barrel bombs containing chemical agents like chlorine gas are back in action.

Four resolutions on Israel. And one on Iran. Where there is no rule of law, no free elections, no freedom of speech, corruption is endemic, protestors are jailed and tortured, religious minorities are persecuted, and pedophilia is state-run.  At last count, in 2012 Iranian courts ordered more than 30,000 girls ages 14 and under to be “married.”

And what did that one resolution on Iran say? Co-sponsored by the United States, it was labelled a “short procedural text,” consisting of just three operative paragraphs that contained not a single condemnation of Iran.

The Israel resolutions, on the other hand, were full of “demands,” “condemns,” “expresses grave concern,” and “deplores” – along with orders to “cease immediately” a long list of alleged human rights violations.

Ninety percent of states – inhabited by 6.6 billion people – got no mention at all. Countries like China, Qatar, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.  For the UN, there was not one human rights violation worthy of mention by any of these human rights horror shows.

Why not? For starters, China, Qatar, Russia and Saudi Arabia are all members of the UN Human Rights Council. Actually protecting human rights is not a condition of being elected to the Council, and thereby transforming into a UN authority on what counts as a human rights violation.

As a result, what counts fast becomes unrecognizable. Subverting human rights principles for all turns out to be the other side of the coin from subverting human rights for Jews.

Thus at this session, “death to America” Iran sponsored a Council resolution called “Enhancement of international cooperation in the field of human rights.” It was adopted by consensus – with U.S. blessing.  

The Cubans successfully engineered a Council resolution on protecting “cultural rights” – minus free expression.

The Palestinians – whose unity government includes the terrorist group Hamas – co-sponsored the resolution “effects of terrorism on the enjoyment of human rights.”  

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation – representing states where converting to Christianity is subject to the death penalty – sponsored a resolution called “combating intolerance of persons based on religion or belief.”

Playing at caring about human rights is the U.N. game. And no state does it better than Iran.

Iran’s human rights record happened to come up at the March session in the context of what the Council calls a “universal periodic review” (UPR). Touted as its leading human rights innovation, the same process is applied to every state every four years.  

That means Iran and Syria get treated the same way as, say, the United States and Canada.  At the end of the UPR, a report is summarily adopted containing a bunch of recommendations that the former cast of characters summarily dismiss.  

It was suggested to Iran, for instance, that it stop peddling little girls as sex slaves for old men. The recommendation received this reply:  “in light of Islamic teachings, a person that has reached the age of maturity and is of sound mind has the possibility of marrying.”

The Council created a human rights investigator on Iran, but Iran has never let him into the country.  Recommendations made to Iran during the UPR that it cooperate, were simply ignored.  

On March 19, 2014, the U.S. representative mustered all her courage and countered with this: “we note with disappointment that Iran has not addressed the issue of allowing the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran to visit the country…”

There is an alternative conclusion. We note with disappointment that the United States legitimizes this travesty and empowers the real enemies of human rights.

---------------------
Anne Bayefsky is director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust.

Kim Jong Un executes army general in latest purge of officials

Pacific - Stripes

General Pyon In Son/
nkleadershipwatch.wordpress.com

By Sam Kim

Bloomberg News

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un executed an army general last month in his latest purge of senior officials.

General Pyon In Son, head of operations in the Korean People's Army, was killed for expressing an opinion different to that of Kim, a South Korean official told reporters in Seoul on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity as per government policy. The official didn't say what they disagreed on.

Kim still mistrusts the military, the official said, adding that senior officers are growing increasingly uneasy. The "Supreme Leader" also removed Ma Won Chun, a National Defense Commission official overseeing construction design, from office in November for alleged corruption and a failure to follow orders.

Kim has relied on purges to consolidate his grip on power since he took over a country with a nuclear arms program and 1.2 million troops in 2011. After killing his uncle and one-time deputy Jang Song Thaek in 2013, he executed about 50 officials last year on charges ranging from graft to watching South Korean soap operas.

"The purge of Pyon sends a message that helps to discipline the military," said Kim Yong Hyun, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. "The execution is a symbol that will help tighten loyalty."

Pyon was promoted to a four-star general in March last year and then removed from office in November, according to the North Korea Leadership Watch blog. South Korea's Unification Ministry's website still identifies him as a general who oversees military operations.

Kim's younger sister Kim Yo Jong may be married and even pregnant, the official said, saying she has a ring on her finger and has recently been seen wearing comfortable shoes in public.

Yonhap News said on Jan. 2 that she married one of party secretary Choe Ryong Hae's sons, citing two unidentified people in China. The official said it's unlikely she wed Choe's son because that would concentrate too much power in Choe.

Earlier Wednesday, North Korea said it wouldn't agree to talks with the U.S. and is now focused on its ability to destroy the country with conventional, nuclear and cyber-warfare attacks.

Kim's regime accused the U.S. of "inching closer to the stage of igniting a war of aggression" by stepping up its sanctions, holding military drills with South Korea and predicting the future collapse of the administration, the official Korean Central News Agency said, citing a statement from the National Defense Commission.

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Russia Writes Off Majority of North Korea Debt

voanews

MOSCOW — Russia's parliament has agreed to write off almost $10 billion of North Korea's Soviet-era debt, in a deal expected to facilitate the building of a gas pipeline to South Korea across the reclusive state.

Russia has written off debts to a number of impoverished Soviet-era allies, including Cuba. North Korea's struggling communist economy is just 2 percent of the size of neighboring South Korea's.

The State Duma lower house on Friday ratified a 2012 agreement to write off the bulk of North Korea's debt. It said the total debt stood at $10.96 billion as of Sept. 17, 2012.

The rest of the debt, $1.09 billion, would be redeemed during the next 20 years, to be paid in equal installments every six months. The outstanding debt owed by North Korea will be managed by Russia's state development bank, Vnesheconombank.

Russia's Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak told Russian media that the money could be used to fund mutual projects in North Korea, including a proposed gas pipeline and a railway to South Korea.

The two Koreas remain technically at war and are separated by one of the world's most militarized frontiers. Parts of the international community have been seeking to re-engage with North Korea amid hopes that the reclusive state's government would seek ways to end years of isolation and poverty.

Russia's state-owned top natural producer Gazprom, has long planned to build a gas pipeline via North Korea to South Korea with a view to shipping 10 billion cubic meters of gas annually.

Moscow has been trying to diversify its energy sales to Asia away from Europe, which, in its turn, wants to cut its dependence on oil and gas from the erstwhile Cold War foe. Moscow aims to reach a deal to supply gas to China, after a decade of talks, this May.

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South Korea investigating reports of new North Korea purge

Fox News

www.bbc.co.uk

The South Korean government is investigating reports that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has purged the man widely believed to be the new power behind the dictatorial throne after Kim had his uncle deposed and executed late last year.

Free North Korea Radio, a Seoul-based service which broadcasts news to North Korean listeners, first reported rumors that Choe Ryong-hae had been arrested and was being interrogated Friday. Rumors and speculation continued to grow over the weekend to the extent that South Korea's Unification Ministry, which handles relations between the two Koreas, told The Times of London that it was "looking into" the rumors. 

Choe is believed to have succeeded Jang Song-taek as the Stalinist dictatorship's military politburo chief. Jang, who was married to Kim's aunt, the sister of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, was executed last December after being accused of plotting to commit "crimes against the state."

The South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported that South Korean intelligence had assumed that Choe would sooner or later be purged based on the fact that he had not been seen at two major events in late February. The paper cited unnamed experts in suggesting that the root of the possible purge might be a falling-out that occurred in a scramble for control of state-run businesses in the aftermath of Jang's execution. 

Other South Korean officials warned that there would not be any more concrete information as to Choe's possible whereabouts until later this month. "There is no concrete information so we need to wait and see until the Supreme People's Assembly convenes on March 9," one official told the Chosun Ilbo.

North Korea: Life in the camps - Documentary

Amnesty International UK

Special report: The cyberwar threat from North Korea

Fox News

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
North Korea’s effort to build a cyberarmy that can conduct a string of attacks on neighboring states has experts asking some key questions:

Is Pyongyang gearing up for a cyberassault on the United States?

Does it have the capability?

“They do have the capability, obviously,” says Alexandre Mansourov, a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “But I don’t think they have the intention.”

But not everyone is so unsure. Like the Cold War in the 1950s and ’60s, cyberwarfare is becoming an arms race. Many nations, including the United States, are building up their offensive and defensive capabilities amid an increase of espionage and a proliferation of attacks on public and private computer networks.

Experts say the number of attacks on South Korea over the last five years looks more like a coordinated war than the work of random hackers. This has some officials in the U.S. girding for a broader fight.

“We should never underestimate Pyongyang's willingness to engage in dangerous and provocative behavior to extract more aid and concessions from the international community,” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement to FoxNews.com.

'They are saying quite publicly they have several thousand men and women working on a daily basis on cyber.'

- Jarno Limnéll, director of cybersecurity at Stonesoft Corp.

“North Korea is certainly not the most capable nation-state threat actor today, but even relatively minor cyberplayers can sometimes find vulnerabilities in complicated civilian architectures and cause significant disruptions."

While no one knows exactly what North Korea has up its sleeve, a number of hackers who have defected, as well as the increasingly sophisticated attacks on South Korea, suggest that its leader, Kim Jong-un, isn’t limiting his muscle-flexing to nuclear tests in the Pacific.

A history of cyber-violence
According to reports beginning in 2010, North Korea has been training thousands of top computer science students to be sophisticated cyberwarriors. Some experts, like Professor Lee Dong-hoon of the Korea University Graduate School of Information Security, estimate that Pyongyang has been pouring money into cyberwarfare since the 1980s.

The proof is in the attacks, of course, though it is difficult to pin down the responsible parties:

• A wave of “distributed denial of service (DDoS)” attacks in 2009 struck both U.S. government and South Korean websites. A virus launched from unknown sources (South Korean officials accused Pyongyang) through a series of “zombie” computers sent waves of Internet traffic to a number of websites in the two countries. The U.S. Treasury and Federal Trade Commission sites were shut down for a weekend, but the action crippled a number of government sites and media outlets in South Korea.
• A DDoS attack on South Korean banks in March 2011 left 30 million people without ATM access for days. At the time, Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research for McAfee Labs, said the attacks had the mark of a North Korean “cyberwar drill” and theorized that Pyongyang had built an army of zombie computers, or “botnets,” to unleash malicious software. He guessed that the 2009 attack had been a similar operation.
• An attack in March 2013 was the biggest one yet, infecting and wiping clean the critical master boot records of 48,000 computers and servers associated with South Korean banks and media outlets, using their own networks. Experts traced the “cyberweapon” back through more than 1,000 IP addresses used on different continents, but South Korean officials accused North Korea of directing the attack. Systems were crippled for days.

Gen. James Thurman, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, told Congress in 2012 that "the newest addition to the North Korean asymmetric arsenal is a growing cyberwarfare capability,” in which North Korea “employs sophisticated computer hackers trained to launch cyberinfiltration and cyberattacks" against South Korea and the U.S.

Observers say the alleged North Korean attacks are launched from servers all over the world in order to avoid detection. 

“It’s all untraceable,” Mansourov said. “But there is a presumption of guilt -- I think it's a valid presumption.”

Jarno Limnéll, director of cybersecurity at Finland-based Stonesoft Corp. (part of the McAfee cybersecurity company), said that while it is “hard to know what cyber-capabilities your enemies or even your friends have, [this is] something [North Korea] has taken very seriously … and what they are saying quite publicly is they have several thousand men and women working on a daily basis on cyber. They want to give a very clear impression that they are a strong player in this field.”

Accusations fly worldwide
For its part, Pyongyang has accused South Korea and the U.S. of launching similar attacks against North Korea. Last March, around the time of the attacks on banks and broadcasters in Seoul, North Korean offices said an online attack took down the servers at Loxley Pacific Co., the broadband provider for the North.

Mansourov said there is a “Cold War situation going on,” a tit-for-tat between the North and South. And it’s not limited to the Korean Peninsula:

China has accused the U.S. of cybersnooping, and the U.S. has accused China not only of spying, but of launching expensive cyberattacks against public and private networks in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Israel and the U.S. were widely fingered for launching the Stuxnet virus that crippled Iran's nuclear program in 2010.

“It’s effectively an arms race,” said C. Matthew Curtin, founder of the computer security consulting firm Interhack and author of  Brute Force: Cracking the Data Encryption Standard.

“We need to assume that hostile nation states -- even non-state actors like al Qaeda -- have offensive cyber-capabilities, and we need to be in a position to render their capabilities moot."

He said the best way to confront cyberthreats is to secure domestic networks and force other countries to spend more money to get to us. “Then it becomes like the [Cold War-era] Soviet Union, where they will eventually have nothing left to spend,” he said.

Rogers still hopes to see the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which the House passed in April,  succeed in the Senate and be signed into law by President Obama. It would allow greater information sharing between the government and private companies to prevent and respond to cyberattacks. But critics say it will give the government greater ability to monitor citizens’ Internet communications.

“It’s not a black-and-white issue,” said Curtin, who noted that “nothing is free” and that breaking down these “barriers” of information will require ordinary citizens to give up some privacy.

But the threat is real, he said, whether it comes from North Korea or Iran.

"If someone was trying to shut down our power grid when there is a huge polar vortex blowing through the country, that would have a serious impact on us,” he said.

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