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Category Archives: Human Rights Violations United Nations
Haley has said panel wages ‘pathological’ anti-Israel campaign
U.K.’s Johnson has said council is flawed but has value
The Trump administration plans to announce its withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday, making good on a pledge to leave a body it has long accused of hypocrisy and criticized as biased against Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley plan to announce the withdrawal at the State Department in Washington at 5 p.m., the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing a decision that hadn’t yet been made public.
The 47-member council, based in Geneva and created in 2006, began its latest session on Monday with a broadside against President Donald Trump’s immigration policy by the UN’s high commissioner for human rights. He called the policy of separating children from parents crossing the southern border illegally “unconscionable.”
The U.S. withdrawal had been expected. National Security Adviser John Bolton opposed the body’s creation when he was U.S. ambassador to the UN in 2006. In a speech to the council last year, Haley called out the body for what she said was its “relentless, pathological campaign” against Israel. She has also called for ways to expel members of the council that have poor human rights records themselves.
Won’t ‘Sit Quietly’
“For our part, the United States will not sit quietly while this body, supposedly dedicated to human rights, continues to damage the cause of human rights,” Haley said at the time. “In the end, no speech and no structural reforms will save the members of the Human Rights Council from themselves.”
A State Department spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, while the UN said it hadn’t received a notification that the U.S. was withdrawing.
The move comes as the Trump administration is under intense criticism from business groups, human rights organizations and lawmakers from both parties over its recently imposed decision to separate children from parents who enter the U.S. illegally.
Even some critics of the human rights council have called for continuing to push for a revamping of the body rather than quitting it.
On the opening day of the council’s current session, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson criticized the body’s perennial agenda item dedicated to Israel and the Palestinian territories, calling it “damaging to the cause of peace.” Nonetheless, he said the U.K. wasn’t “blind to the value of this council.”
The council is scheduled to discuss Israel and the Palestinian territories on July 2, according to its agenda.
*** Sheesh, judged by the company you keep eh? As a reminder, GW Bush removed the United States and Barack Obama reversed that.
Professionals at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge Laboratories estimate it would take up to ten years to dismantle all programs and operations in North Korea. Further, Tehran, Moscow and Beijing will work hard to delay what they can due to eliminating evidence of their respective involvement for decades in North Korea.
The Nine Steps Required to Really Disarm North Korea
NYT’s: The vast scope of North Korea’s atomic program means ending it would be the most challenging case of nuclear disarmament in history. Here’s what has to be done to achieve — and verify — the removal of the nuclear arms, the dismantlement of the atomic complex and the elimination of the North’s other weapons of mass destruction.
Nuclear Capabilities
Dismantle and remove nuclear weapons
Take apart every nuclear weapon in the North’s arsenal and ship the parts out of the country.
Halt uranium enrichment
Dismantle the plants where centrifuges make fuel for nuclear reactors and atom bombs.
Disable reactors
Shutter the nuclear reactors that turn uranium into plutonium, a second bomb fuel.
Close nuclear test sites
Confirm that the North’s recent, staged explosions actually destroyed the complex.
End H-bomb fuel production
Close exotic fuel plants that can make atom bombs hundreds of times more destructive.
Inspect anywhere, forever
Give international inspectors the freedom to roam and inspect anywhere.
Non-Nuclear Capabilities
Destroy germ weapons
Eliminate anthrax and other deadly biological arms, under constant inspection.
Destroy chemical weapons
Eliminate sarin, VX and other lethal agents the North has used on enemies.
Curb missile program
Eliminate missile threats to the U.S., Japan and South Korea.
President Trump says he is meeting Kim Jong-un in Singapore because the North Korean leader has signaled a willingness to “denuclearize.’’
But that word means very different things in Pyongyang and Washington, and in recent weeks Mr. Trump has appeared to back away from his earlier insistence on a rapid dismantlement of all things nuclear — weapons and production facilities — before the North receives any sanctions relief.
Whether it happens quickly or slowly, the task of “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization’’ — the phrase that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo keeps repeating — will be enormous. Since 1992, the country has repeatedly vowed never to test, manufacture, produce, store or deploy nuclear arms. It has broken all those promises and built a sprawling nuclear complex.
North Korea has 141 sites devoted to the production and use of weapons of mass destruction, according to a 2014 Rand Corporation report. Just one of them — Yongbyon, the nation’s main atomic complex — covers more than three square miles. Recently, the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington, inspected satellite images of Yongbyon and counted 663 buildings.
North Korea is the size of Pennsylvania. The disarmament challenge is made worse by uncertainty about how many nuclear weapons the North possesses — estimates range from 20 to 60 — and whether tunnels deep inside the North’s mountains hide plants and mobile missiles.
The process of unwinding more than 50 years of North Korean open and covert developments, therefore, would need to start with the North’s declaration of all its facilities and weapons, which intelligence agencies would then compare with their own lists and information.
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Nuclear experts like David A. Kay, who led the largely futile American hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, argue that the North Korean arms complex is too large for outsiders to dismantle. The best approach, he contends, is for Western inspectors to monitor North Korean disarmament. The time estimates range from a few years to a decade and a half — long after Mr. Trump leaves office.
The magnitude of the North Korean challenge becomes clearer when compared with past efforts to disarm other nations. For instance, Libya’s nuclear program was so undeveloped that the centrifuges it turned over had never been unpacked from their original shipping crates. Infrastructure in Syria, Iraq, Iran and South Africa was much smaller. Even so, Israel saw the stakes as so high that it bombed an Iraqi reactor in 1981, and a Syrian reactor in 2007.
Undoing weapons of mass destruction
Full elimination Partial elimination
Steps
North Korea
Libya
Syria
Iraq
Iran
South Africa
Dismantle nuclear arms
X
X
Halt uranium enrichment
X
X
X
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X
Disable reactors
X
X
X
X
Close nuclear test sites
X
X
End H-bomb fuel production
X
Destroy germ arms
X
X
Destroy chemical arms
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X
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X
Curb missile program
X
X
Here’s what is involved in each of the major disarmament steps:
Dismantle and remove nuclear weapons
Under the eye of a declared nuclear state — like the United States, China or Russia — take apart every nuclear weapon in the North Korean arsenal and safely ship the components out of the country.
North Korea released a photograph of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, center, inspecting what it said was a hydrogen bomb that could be fitted atop a long-range missile.Korean Central News Agency
John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, has argued that before any sanctions are lifted, the North should deliver all its nuclear arms to the United States, shipping them to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where inspectors sent Libya’s uranium gear.
It’s almost unimaginable that the North would simply ship out its weapons — or that the rest of the world would be convinced that it had turned over all of them.
Siegfried S. Hecker, a Stanford professor who formerly headed the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, argues that the only safe way to dismantle the North’s nuclear arsenal is to put the job, under inspection, in the hands of the same North Korean engineers who built the weapons. Otherwise, he said, outsiders unfamiliar with the intricacies might accidently detonate the nuclear arms.
Halt uranium enrichment
Dismantle the plants where centrifuges spin at supersonic speeds to make fuel for nuclear reactors and atom bombs.
Factories holding hundreds of centrifuges spin gaseous uranium until it is enriched in a rare form of the element that can fuel reactors — or, with more enrichment, nuclear arms.
It’s easy to shut down such plants and dismantle them. The problem is that they’re relatively simple to hide underground. North Korea has shown off one such plant, at Yongbyon, but intelligence agencies say there must be others. The 2014 Rand report put the number of enrichment plants at five.
Because uranium can be used to fuel reactors that make electricity, North Korea is almost certain to argue it needs to keep some enrichment plants open for peaceful purposes. That poses a dilemma for the Trump administration.
In the case of Iran, it has insisted that all such plants be shut down permanently. After arguing that the Obama administration made a “terrible deal” by allowing modest enrichment to continue in Iran, it is hard to imagine how Mr. Trump could insist on less than a total shutdown in North Korea.
Disable reactors
Shutter nuclear reactors that turn uranium into plutonium, a second bomb fuel.
Inside a reactor, some of the uranium in the fuel rods is turned into plutonium, which makes a very attractive bomb fuel. Pound for pound, plutonium produces far more powerful nuclear blasts than does uranium. In 1986, at Yongbyon, North Korea began operating a five-megawatt reactor, which analysts say produced the plutonium fuel for the nation’s first atom bombs. Today, the North is commissioning a second reactor that is much larger.
Jan. 17, 2018 image from DigitalGlobe via Institute for Science and International Security
Reactors are hard to hide: They generate vast amounts of heat, making them extremely easy to identify by satellite.
But reactors that produce large amounts of electricity — such as the new one being readied in North Korea — pose a dilemma, because the North can legitimately argue it needs electric power. It seems likely that the Trump administration will come down hard on the North’s new reactor, but might ultimately permit its operation if the North agrees for the bomb-usable waste products to be shipped out of the country.
Close nuclear test sites
Confirm that the North’s recent, staged explosions actually destroyed the deep tunnels and infrastructure, or take additional steps to make the complex unusable.
Atom and hydrogen bombs need repeated testing to check their performance. Since 2006, the North has detonated nuclear devices at least six times in tunnels dug deep inside Mount Mantap, a mile-high peak in the North’s mountainous wilds.
Last month, the North blew up test-tunnel portals at Mount Mantap as a conciliatory gesture before the planned denuclearization talks. Experts say the thick clouds of rising smoke and debris, while impressive for television cameras, leave open the question of whether the damage is irreversible. Presumably, the North could also dig new test sites beneath other mountains. The Trump administration has called for an end to all explosive testing.
End H-bomb fuel production
Close exotic fuel plants that can make atom bombs hundreds of times more destructive.
At the heart of a missile warhead, an exploding atom bomb can act as a superhot match that ignites thermonuclear fuel, also known as hydrogen fuel. The resulting blast can be 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. North Korea is suspected of having at least two sites for different aspects of H-bomb fuel production — one at Yongbyon, and one near Hamhung, on the country’s east coast.
The exotic fuels also have civilian uses for the manufacture of glow-in-the-dark lighting, exit signs and runway lights. The Trump administration stance is unclear. Atomic experts say the military threat can be reduced by shuttering large plants, building smaller factories and carefully regulating their products.
Inspect anywhere, forever
In a mountainous country, give international inspectors the freedom to roam and inspect anywhere — with automated monitoring of key sites.
Under past nuclear agreements, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency have lived in North Korea, but their movements were limited to small parts of the giant Yongbyon facility, where the nation’s nuclear reactors are located. For inspections to be effective, they must cover the whole country — including military facilities. (One of Mr. Trump’s complaints about the Iran agreement was that inspectors were inhibited from going anywhere.)
But inspecting all of North Korea — land of underground tunnels — would be an enormous job. American intelligence agencies have spent billions of dollars watching missiles move, mapping likely facilities, and using spy satellites and cyber reconnaissance to track the arms. But they have surely made mistakes, and missed some facilities. The problem gets larger if the inspectors are seeking out underground bunkers that hide missiles for quick strikes.
Destroy germ weapons
Eliminate anthrax and other deadly biological weapons, under constant inspection.
Biological weapons can be more destructive than nuclear arms. A single gallon of concentrated anthrax is said to have enough spores to kill every person on Earth. The challenge is how to deliver the living weapons. The anthrax attacks of 2001 relied on letters, killing five people, sickening 17 others and frightening the nation.
North Korea is suspected of having a large complex for making germ weapons. The problem is learning its true dimensions, and verifying its dismantlement. While nuclear and missile tests advertise their developmental strides openly, the production and testing of deadly pathogens can be done behind closed doors.
Moreover, experts argue that the gear for producing germ weapons is often identical or similar to that of medicine and agriculture, making it extremely hard if not impossible for outsiders to verify that germ-weapon work has ended. The Trump administration’s stance is unknown other than it wants the North to end all work on biological weapons.
Destroy chemical weapons
Eliminate sarin, VX and other lethal agents the North has used on enemies.
Last year, the deadly nerve agent VX was used to assassinate Kim Jong-nam, the estranged half brother of the North’s leader. The killing cast light on the North’s long pursuit of chemical weapons. Although the North denies having any, experts rank the nation as among the world’s top possessors, saying it harbors thousands of tons of the banned armaments.
The Trump administration’s negotiating list with the North includes chemical disarmament. Syria is a reminder of the difficulty. President Barack Obama cut a deal with Damascus to destroy its chemical arsenal. This year, the United States accused the Syrian government of using the banned weapons at least 50 times since the civil war began, topping previous official estimates. The attacks have maimed and killed hundreds of Syrians, including many children.
Curb missile program
Eliminate the long-range threat to the U.S. and mid-range missile threat to Japan and South Korea.
In November, the North tested a greatly improved intercontinental ballistic missile that flew farther than any other — far enough to threaten all of the United States. It was a remarkable achievement that brought the current, long-escalating crisis to a head. While experts say the North still needs to do more testing to ensure that the missile’s warheads can survive fiery re-entry, the test flight showed that Mr. Kim had come remarkably close to perfecting a weapon that could threaten American cities.
Curbing the North’s missile program is high on the Trump administration’s negotiation list. A simple precaution is to limit the range of test flights — a fairly easily thing to monitor. A key question is whether arms negotiators will also try to redirect the North’s large corps of rocket designers and engineers into peaceful activities, such as making and lofting civilian satellites.
Imagine the other cities in Iraq and Syria. Mosul was part of Assyria as early as the 25th century BC. Of note, in 2008, there was a sizeable exodus of Assyrian Christians. They sought sanctuary in Syria and Turkey due to threats of murder unless they converted to Islam.
MOSUL, Iraq — In March, VICE News returned to Mosul for the first time since the war against ISIS was declared over eight months ago.
While life may be returning to normal in the eastern half of the city, on the other side of the river — where the fighting was most intense — the scale of rebuilding that needs to be done is monumental. It’s estimated there are still 8 million tons of conflict debris that need to be moved before reconstruction can start, equivalent to three times the size of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. About 75 percent of that rubble is in West Mosul, and it’s mixed with so much unexploded ordnance that experts say this is now one of the most contaminated spots on the planet.
In the Old City, where ISIS made its last stand, residents have slowly started to come back – a few business owners hoping to repair shops, and families who have no other option but to live in their damaged homes. Some water tanks have been trucked in, and electricity cables have been temporarily patched together along some streets, but the place feels deserted, and in some ways the scene was not that different from how it looked shortly after the fighting.
Eight months on, there are hundreds or perhaps thousands of bodies still under the rubble, making life unbearable for the families who have returned.
The putrefied corpses are mainly Islamic State fighters or their families, since many of the non-ISIS civilian bodies have been dug out and reclaimed by family members or civil defense workers. The bodies that remain are a severe health hazard, but there’s little political will to deal with them, and removing them is risky given the unexploded munitions littering the area. Nevertheless, teams of citizen volunteers are going house-to-house carrying out this gruesome, dangerous work on a daily basis.
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One volunteer team is led by Sroor al-Hosayni, a 23-year-old former nurse. Many of her group are even younger; some are medical students, but most have no formal training in handling corpses. So far, they say they’ve pulled and bagged more than 350 bodies that no one else was willing to deal with. They laid them in white plastic body bags where municipal trucks can easily collect them, labeling them for any potential explosives found with the corpse.
“We saw that there were bodies everywhere, in the alleys and inside the houses,” Hosayni said. “I took my team and started implementing this idea by going to help municipality and government workers in removing these bodies before summer comes and disease spreads in the city.”
At first the authorities complained, telling her: “‘You don’t have to move ISIS bodies. Leave them there; the dogs will eat them.”
Hosayni replied, “But one or two dogs can’t eat them; there are thousands of bodies.”
A suspected execution room inside the basement of a collapsed building Al Maydan, the district of the Old City where ISIS made its last stand. Hosayni and her team say there are more than 100 rotting corpses here. So far they have pulled more than 30 bodies from this room n the last few weeks. (Adam Desiderio/VICE News)
After filming Hosayni’s team at work near the destroyed Al Nuri mosque, we followed them to Al Maydan — the Old City neighborhood where ISIS made its last stand — where they had been working on one particular site for weeks.
Bulldozers have started clearing a path where Souk Al-Samak Street once ran along the river, but almost nothing else has changed since the air bombardment flattened this district.
The ruins of arched and intricately carved stone doorways open onto inner courtyards like dioramas of the war, frozen in time: Human corpses in varying degrees of decay lying amid stray ordnance, broken china, plastic toy trucks, and discarded military apparel.
Two hundred yards up the street and on the right, the team pointed us to a building on the banks of the Tigris River. Scrambling through the collapsed masonry, we emerged into two mostly intact basement rooms with barred windows looking out onto the river. In the far room, buzzing with flies and inescapable stench, were dozens and dozens of corpses, stacked too deep to count, one on top of another. It seemed to be the remains of a mass execution.
The body collectors told us there were at least 100 bodies in here; the team had already cleared more than 30 but had barely made a dent in the mound of corpses.
23 year-old Sroor al-Hosayni, a former nurse, leads a team of volunteer body collectors pulling corpses out of a collapsed building in Al Maydan, the district of the Old City where ISIS made its last stand. Hosayni and her team of volunteers have been pulling bodies from what they say is an execution room in the basement of this building. (Adam Desiderio/VICE News)
We saw what appeared to be the bodies of children, though it was difficult to verify given the level of decay. We saw no weapons or military gear on the bodies. The team told us they could see bullet wounds to their heads.
There are reports that ISIS locked large numbers of people in rooms like this, using them as human shields during the final days of the conflict. Many of those families died in coalition airstrikes — but this room was intact. It’s possible they could have been executed by ISIS fighters as government forces closed in. But it’s not clear why ISIS would kill or dispose of civilians in this way.
There are also reports of Iraqi forces executing captured ISIS members in this exact neighborhood. Beards and long hair were still visible on some of the corpses, leading the body collectors to believe some could be men who may have been affiliated with ISIS. But speaking to VICE, a senior Iraqi military official rejected any notion that Iraqi forces may have been responsible for the killings and told us that the site had already been investigated, without providing further details.
One international organization that has documented instances where Iraqi security forces have been accused of carrying out executions is Human Rights Watch.
Belkis Wille, the lead Iraq investigator at Human Rights Watch, visited the site soon after we did. She told us she was unaware of any investigation having been done at this particular site, and that — whoever was responsible for the deaths — the removal of evidence was troubling given that this was potentially the site of a war crime.
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“Sites like that need the proper forensic teams securing the site and conducting the analysis needed to determine whether this is indeed the site of a crime,” Wille told VICE News. “Despite promises by the prime minister at the end of the battle to investigate abuses, we haven’t seen any sign of that leading to teams coming in and doing the investigations necessary. And the question really is, at what point do these sites potentially lose their forensic value and lose the evidence?”
Inside the remains of Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, Iraq where ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared an Islamic State caliphate in 2014. (Adam Desiderio/VICE News)
But for the body collectors — and for many residents of Mosul — with the heat of summer approaching, the overwhelming priority right now is to clean up this city and begin rebuilding. The need to properly document and investigate potential war crimes isn’t at the top of the agenda.
“It’s time to focus on the living, not the dead,” was the mantra we heard from authorities and from many families trying to rebuild their shattered lives.
Nevertheless, the question of what happened in neighborhoods like Al Maydan and others in those final stages before victory was announced, and in the days shortly afterward, refuses to disappear.
In the ultimate stages of the battle to extinguish the last pockets of ISIS from Mosul last summer, access to the “fight zone” became increasingly restricted.
Baghdad declared the conflict officially over on July 10. The announcement, broadcast live on state television, came as a surprise to many, since there were explosions and gunfire still echoing out from the Old City where the last dregs of the Islamic State terrorist group were refusing to surrender.
Just a day before that, VICE News was one of the few outlets that managed to get past the cordon to join a general from Iraq’s elite counterterrorism brigade and an advance team of his men as they carefully picked their way across the booby-trapped rooftops of collapsed buildings in the district of Al Maydan to plant an Iraqi flag on the banks of the Tigris.
It was a journey through hell. The neighborhood had been pulverized by airstrikes and shelling throughout the campaign, but the intensity had grown as ISIS fell back to these ancient, narrow streets lined with buildings dating back to the 12th century. There was hardly a structure still intact, ordnance and bodies lined the route, some fresh, some bloated and badly decomposed from days or weeks in the sun.
Reaching the river was a symbol of having decisively broken through ISIS defensive lines, a long-awaited moment of triumph for the soldiers. But as the flag was raised and the soldiers took selfies, gunfire from a sniper still alive among the rubble sent the party scattering for cover. In those final days, as different units of Iraq’s security forces held impromptu victory celebrations after liberating neighborhoods, the question lingered of what the end of hostilities actually looks like when the enemy is hell-bent on fighting to the death.
We will likely never know who killed the people in the basement room of the house on Al-Samak Street — but as long as claims persist that extrajudicial killings by Iraqi security forces may have taken place, the stakes of not investigating those could be high. While there is little sympathy for ISIS right now in the devastated neighborhoods of Mosul, a culture of impunity for any abuses that were committed could set the stage for the same kinds of grievances that contributed to the group’s rise in the first place.
Cover image: The basement of a collapsed building in Al Maydan, the district of the Old City where ISIS made its last stand. Volunteers have been pulling bodies from what they say is an execution room filled with more than 100 corpses in the basement of this building. (Adam Desiderio/VICE News)
North Korea is holding up to 120,000 political prisoners in “horrific conditions” in camps across the country, according to estimates from a newly released State Department report.
The department on Tuesday issued its annual International Religious Freedom Report for 2017, which covers 200 countries and territories, documenting religious freedom and human rights abuses.
The findings on North Korea come as the Trump administration is working to engage the isolated regime. The White House says the administration continues to “actively prepare” for a possible summit with Kim Jong Un.
The report, though, addressed the brutal conditions festering inside Kim’s kingdom. It revealed 1,304 cases of alleged religious freedom violations in the country last year, while detailing the harsh treatment of political and religious prisoners — and persecution of Christians.
Secretary of States Mike Pompeo is meeting with 4 Star General and head of the military intelligence, Kim Yong Chol is a longtime spy chief and vice chairman of the ruling Workers’ Party was responsible for hacking Sony. More here.
Then North Korea has 2 satellites in orbit and more planned in 2018-2019.
“The Unha launcher can put maybe 100 kilograms [220 lbs.] into a pretty low orbit, maybe 400 or 500 kilometers [250 to 310 miles]” above the Earth’s surface, Wright said. “By increasing the thrust, it allows North Korea to lift satellites to higher altitudes, or to carry a greater payload to longer distances if it is a ballistic missile.”
Wright noted that the earlier, Nodong engine was essentially a scaled-up version of the one in the Scud, the Soviet missile that Iraq often used during the Gulf War of the 1990s. Whereas the Nodong used Scud-level propellants instead of ones used in more modern rockets, Wright noted that the color of the flame coming from the new engine in photos of the test suggest that this missile uses more advanced propellants that can generate higher thrust. [Top 10 Space Weapons]
“The surprise has been why North Korea has stuck with Scud propellants for so long,” Wright said. “There have been reports for 15 years now that North Korea had bought some submarine-launched missiles from the Soviet Union after it collapsed that used more advanced propellants, yet in all this time, we didn’t see them launch missiles with anything but Scud propellant.
In 2016, At United States Strategic Command, controllers likely had a high-workload evening as STRATCOM monitored the launch of a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome just eight minutes prior to North Korea’s launch, as is typical for launches from Russia’s military launch site. The ascending Unha rocket was tracked using the Space-Based Infrared System in Geostationary Orbit, capable of detecting the infrared signature of ascending rockets from ground level all the way into orbit. This allows the U.S. military to track the vehicle’s trajectory in real time before relying on ground-based radars to track any objects that entered orbit. More here .
Ah but there is but one more issue at least. Yes, North Korea imploded their nuclear test site at Punggye-ri. But…there are 4 more locations.
The most important is Yongbyon, while the other locations appear to have slight or no activity.
Further, North Korea maintains a rather advanced air defense system, listed among the top in the world.
However, while North Korean technology is relatively primitive—the nation’s air defenses are coordinated.
“They do have an old Soviet computerized anti-aircraft command and control system. Most of the radars are old, but they did receive some newer Iranian phased array radars,” Kashin said. “This is what I know, the anti-aircraft units are extensively using underground shelters for cover—not easy to destroy.”
Thus, while generally primitive, North Korean defenses might be a tougher nut to crack than many might expect. Moreover, while their technology is old, North Korea’s philosophy of self-reliance means it can produce most of its own military hardware. More here.
Lastly but hardly finally is the cyber weapons produced and applied by North Korea.
Most recently is: May 29, 2018, The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a joint Technical Alert (TA) that identifies two families of malware—referred to as Joanap and Brambul—used by the North Korean government. The U.S. Government refers to malicious cyber activity by the North Korean government as HIDDEN COBRA.
In conjunction with the release of this TA, NCCIC has released a Malware Analysis Report (MAR) that provides analysis on samples of Joanap and Brambul malware.
While there has been recent discussions about applying the Libya model to North Korea for removing nuclear weapons, you can bet Kim Jung Un is going to demand the Pakistan model.
Babchenko wrote a chilling book, titled One Soldier’s War in 2009. In 1995, he was forced into the Russian military and sent to Chechnya. He has a history with the brutality of Putin.
The man allegedly paid to organize Banchenko’s killing was detained Wednesday, he said, showing a video of the arrest.
Gritsak said killing Babchenko was part of a larger alleged plot by Russian security services. The Ukrainian man was also supposed to procure large quantities of weapons and explosives, including 300 AK-47 rifles and “hundreds of kilos of explosives,” to perpetrate acts of terror in Ukraine, he said.
Babchenko said he was not allowed to go into the details of the sting operation, but said Ukrainian law enforcement had been aware of a contract on his head for two months. He said he was approached by the Ukrainian Security Service, the SBU, a month ago.
KYIV — Ukrainian security officials said they faked the death of a dissident Russian journalist in an effort to catch people it says were involved in a Russian plot to kill him.
Vasyl Hrytsak, the head of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), shocked reporters at the SBU headquarters in Kyiv on May 30 when he announced that journalist and Kremlin critic Arkady Babchenko was still alive, a day after Ukrainian authorities announced he had been killed by a gunman outside of his Kyiv apartment.
Hrytsak told reporters that Ukrainian intelligence sources learned that Russia’s security services had ordered the killing of Babchenko several months earlier.
Hrytsak also said a suspected organizer of an attempted murder plot against Babchenko, identified as a Ukrainian national, was detained as a result of a “special operation” by the SBU.
“We have prevented an attempted murder of Babchenko by carrying out a special operation,” Hrytsak said on May 30. “Thanks to this operation, we were able to foil a cynical plot and document how the Russian security service was planning for this crime.”
Babchenko made a dramatic appearance at the live May 30 television briefing after Hrytsak’s announcement, saying the fictitious reports of his death were part of an SBU operation that had been prepared for two months.
** Babchenko reacts during the news conference in Kyiv on May 30.
“As far as I know, this operation was prepared for two months. A result of that was this special operation,” Babchenko told the briefing. “They saved my life. I want to say thanks. Larger terrorist attacks were prevented.”
Babchenko did not specify what those other planned attacks were. But Hrytsak said the SBU had received information about a plot to kill 30 people in Ukraine, including Babchenko. The security service declined to say who the other 29 people were.
Hrytsak said the detained Ukrainian citizen in the case — a former separatist fighter in eastern Ukraine — had been recruited by Russia to find someone to kill Babchenko. The SBU said the Ukrainian suspect was given $40,000 to organize the killing of Babchenko — $30,000 for the killer and $10,000 for being an intermediary.
“It is known that once the killing was done, [the suspect] was planning to leave Ukraine…He was planning to travel to Russia via a third country,” Hrytsak said.
“We managed not only to break this cynical provocation but also to document the preparation of this shameful crime by Russian special services,” he added.
Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko, who appeared alongside Babchenko at the May 30 press briefing, said it was necessary to fake the journalist’s death so that the organizers of the plot to kill him would believe they had succeeded.
Babchenko said he had no choice but to take part in the operation.
“I did my job. I’m still alive,” Babchenko said.
“I would like to apologize for what you have all had to go through,” said Babchenko, who broke into tears at times. “I’m sorry, but there was no other way of doing it. Separately, I want to apologize to my wife for the hell that she has been through.”
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said his government would provide round-the-clock protection to Babchenko and his family and called the security services’ effort a “brilliant operation.”
“Ukrainian law enforcement agencies are becoming stronger every day in countering Russian aggression,” Poroshenko said on Twitter. “It is unlikely that Moscow will calm down — I’ve given an order to provide Arkady and his family with protection.”
Вітаю @servicessu з блискучою операцією зі збереження життя російському журналістові Аркадію Бабченку. Українські правоохоронні органи з кожним днем стають сильнішими у протидії російській агресії. Навряд чи Москва заспокоїться – доручив надати Аркадієві та його родині охорону
Congratulations @servicessu with a brilliant operation on preserving the life of the Russian journalism Arcadia Babenku. Ukrainian law enforcement agencies are becoming stronger in counteraction to the Russian aggression. Hardly Moscow will calm down-commissioned to give the arcade and his Family Protection
11:16 AM – 30 May 2018
Meanwhile, the Reporters Without Borders media watchdog criticized Ukrainian authorities for staging Babchenko’s death, saying it “would not help the cause of press freedom.”
“It is pathetic and regrettable that the Ukrainian police have played with the truth, whatever their motive…for the stunt,” Christophe Deloire, the head of the group, said.
“All it takes is one case like this to cast doubt on all the other political assassinations,” he said, referring to the deaths and attempted assassinations of several Kremlin critics outside of Russia in recent years.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said after Babchenko’s reappearance on May 30 that officials in Moscow were glad Babchenko was still alive.
But Zakharova said Ukrainian officials had circulated a false story as “propaganda.”
Transcript: Arkady Babchenko’s Remarks After SBU Sting Operation (Edited)
“First, I’d like to apologize for everything you’ve had to go through. I’ve been at the funeral of many friends and colleagues, and I know this nauseous feeling. Sorry for imposing this upon you, but there was no other way.
“Special apologies to my wife for the hell she’s been through these two days. Olya, excuse me, please, but there was no other option.
“I’d also like to thank the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) for saving my life. … This operation has been prepared for two months. I was told about this a month ago. …
“A week or two ago, Russia announced that [Islamic State] were preparing terrorist attacks before the Champions League [final in Kyiv]. I think it was going to be my [assassination]. …
“What else to say? As I said, two months ago I was approached and told that my assassination has been commissioned and money allocated. Forty-thousand dollars. It turns out I’m quite valuable!”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that he had only seen media reports so far and otherwise had “no information on the matter.”
He said he did not know “who is doing the accusing and what the accusations are…I cannot say anything,” Peskov said.
Kyiv police and officials from Ukraine’s Interior Ministry had announced on May 29 that Babchenko had died in an ambulance on the way to a hospital after being shot in the back at his Kyiv apartment, where he has lived in exile since August 2017.
Reports of the 41-year-old’s supposed death had stunned colleagues and added to tension between Moscow and Kyiv, whose ties have been badly damaged by Russia’s seizure of Crimea and backing for separatist militants in a devastating war in eastern Ukraine.
In a post to Facebook just hours after news of Babchenko’s death emerged, Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroysman said, “I am convinced that the Russian totalitarian machine could not forgive his honesty and principled position.”
Before Babchenko’s dramatic reappearance on May 30, Peskov said allegations of a Russian assassination plan were part of an anti-Russia smear campaign.
Aleksandr Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), said Ukrainian allegations of an FSB plot were nonsense and a provocation.
Babchenko is well-known for his criticism of the Kremlin.
His reporting about Moscow’s support for pro-Russia separatist fighters in eastern Ukraine brought him severe criticism by Russian state media and from Russian officials.
Babchenko told RFE/RL in December 2016 that “all of the elements” of Russia’s state “propaganda machine” were engaged against him after he posted comments to Facebook about the crash of a Russian military plane in the Black Sea.
All 92 people on board were killed, including members of the Russian Army’s renowned choir, the Aleksandrov Ensemble, who were traveling to give a performance for Russian troops in Syria.
Babchenko said the reaction by state officials and state media to his remarks was intended to send a signal to Russian society that “we must be in one line; we must express sadness; we must appear sad — and anyone who doesn’t must be destroyed.”
‘Forced To Flee’
Babchenko told RFE/RL in late 2016 that State Duma Deputy Vitaly Milonov, Federation Council member Frants Klintsevich, and Russian media like Channel One and Life News were “stitching together some fake news” about him.
Babchenko said: “A major effort is being organized. They aren’t investigating why the plane crashed but instead are persecuting me.”
In February 2017, writing for Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, Babchenko said: “I can tell you what political harassment feels like in [President Vladimir] Putin’s Russia. Like many dissidents I am used to abuse, but a recent campaign against me was so personal, so scary, that I was forced to flee.”
Babchenko served in the Russian Army during the first separatist war in Chechnya in the 1990s before he became a journalist.
He worked as a military correspondent and wrote for several Russian media organizations, including the Moskovsky Komsomolets daily newspaper and Novaya Gazeta, as well as TV Tsentr, and Channel One TV.
He had been scathingly critical of the Kremlin in recent years. He moved to Kyiv in the autumn of 2017, where he worked as a host for the Crimean Tatar TV station, ATR.
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