Cumings Wife Featured in Korea Times

Slightly interesting article in the Korea Times about Bruce Cumings’ wife, a professor at the University of Michigan, being featured on ABC’s Prime Time Live. Here are some of her views regarding the Korean peninsula:

Woo expresses her passion for Korean studies in her praise of Korea’s potential.

“The country has excellent human capital with people so energetic and intelligent,’’ said the professor. “Korea had many geopolitical conditions starting in 1945 that had to be resolved before becoming a truly developed country.’’

“North Korea is undoubtedly an important country,’’ she said. “It can choose to be a country of peace and stability or go the other way and become a tremendous problem to East Asia and the world.’’

On the matter of the North’s nuclear detonation in October, Woo said, “It was unexpected because North Korea is always in a guessing game, but after the test took place, the anticipated thing was done.’’

I agree with her about South Korea, but she is kidding herself if she thinks North Korea as long as Kim Jong-il is alive, will ever be interested in “peace and stability”. Kim Jong-il brings in all the international aid money by being a threat. Plus he has to keep the US and South Korea as the boogeymen of the North Korean state in order to validate his juche ideology. So it isn’t in his interest to suddenly want peace. So that is why I say plan around them being a threat to the region for some time.

I can’t tell from the few above comments and I’m not saying she does, but I do wonder if she shares any of the views of her North Korea apologizer husband?

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18 years ago

Cummings Wife Featured in Korea Times…

Mark
18 years ago

I suppose quite a few members of the spy ring have yet to be indicted.

Harold
Harold
18 years ago

GI,

We agree with you. North Korean apologists are a shady lot. Fortunately, we have means to eradicate such apologism that uses the internet as a political tool for disseminating such garbage.

In a speech given Monday, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a “terror training camp,” through which “disaffected people living in the United States” are developing “radical ideologies and potentially violent skills.”

Chertoff has pledged to dispatch Homeland Security agents to local police departments in order to aid in the apprehension of domestic terrorists who use the Internet as a political tool. People like Cummings must remember the new American policy now allows agents to "pressure" the loved ones (such as wives and children)of designated enemy combatants … directly in front of the enemy combatant if the situation calls for it.

There is nothing in the "detainee" legislation that prevents American citizens from being kidnapped by their own government and tortured.

Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman states in the L.A. Times, "The compromise legislation….authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights."

Similarly, law Professor Marty Lederman explains: "this [subsection (ii) of the definition of 'unlawful enemy combatant'] means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant — using whatever criteria they wish — then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to 'hostilities' at all."

GI, we got em. Cummings and his wife are not a problem.

We have established that the bill allows the President to define American citizens as enemy combatants. Now let's take it one step further.

Bush now has not only the legal authority but the active blessings of his own advisors to torture American children. GI, the apologism problems are going to fade fast. You'll see.

The backdrop of the Bush administration's push to over-ride the Geneva Conventions was encapsulated by John Yoo, professor of law at Berkeley, co-author of the PATRIOT Act, author of torture memos and White House advisor(we love the Asian sensibility).

During a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel, John Yoo gave the green light for the scope of torture to legally include sexual torture of infants. We now have been given an effective way to win the war on terror. Freedom is at our doorstep.

Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty.

Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

So, if the President thinks he needs to order children's penises to be put in vices, there is no law that can stop him and after the vote, the Senate and Congress, has graciously provided America its full support for kids around the world to be molested in order to stop the blight of terror.

Yoo's comments were made before the passage of the torture legislation. Up until that point President Bush had merely cited his role as Commander-in-chief as carte-blanche license for ordering needed torture – now he has openly put it in writing – going one step further to effectively eradicating domestic terrorists… such as North Korean apologists, sympathetic wives… and children.

Again, those who think our "pressure" is loud music and cold water being thrown over Johnny Jihad in Ragheadistan, consider for a moment the fact that Congress and our President legalized abducting American kids from their home and electric shocking their genitals.

Will this mean President Bush will be barbecuing babies on the White House lawn? Of course not, but the policy of torturing children in front of their parents has already been signed off on by the Pentagon and enacted under the Copper Green program and it happened at Abu Ghraib .

Apologist women of the Iraqi insurgency who were arrested with their children were allowed to watch their boys sodomized with chemical glow sticks as the cameras rolled. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says that the U.S. government is still withholding the tapes because of the horror of the "soundtrack of the shrieking boys" and their mothers begging to be killed in favor of seeing their children raped and tortured. Such as shame, these tapes are necessary to show terrorists the consequences of using the internet to promote terrorism.

Don't even think about resistance; the bill retroactively gives President Bush and all agents immunity from war crimes charges dating back to September 11. GI, stay in your place … and things will be just fine.

Relax …Bruce Cummings and his wife — I suspect, will not be a future problem. GI, you are a good man.

STAY GOOD.

By the way, we like your blog.

Mark
18 years ago

She's back.

Gerald
Gerald
18 years ago

I am confused … GI Korea assured us there is no loss of American liberties. Who to believe?

Mark
18 years ago

You have nothing to fear but fear itself.

usinkorea
18 years ago

Cumming's wife clearly didn't marry him because opposites in thinking attract.

Her book I had to read was one of the more painful experiences in my education. It was not painful in the same way Cumings is.

You could tell she shares the same politics and utter willingness to be blind, but what made the read excruciating was what seemed like her complete dependance on a thesaurus. It was packed page after page with huge words that ended up making many things uncomprehensible.

At the end of the semester, the prof who had asigned it had us select which book we would take off the reading list for the next class – something he gets feed back on each semester, and hers won.

It was a close 2nd to Marcus Noland's "Avoiding the Apocalypse" – both books were dropped from the reading list.

Noland's was disliked for a very different reason, however.

We considered is highly informational and well-researched with clear detail and logic to the points of view —- but that was also the problem — it was too damn dense.

It was like what I imagine intelligence briefings of other intelligence officers are like: two experts in the same archaic field discussing things in detail that nobdy else can really evaluate because your level of knowledge and expertise don't match theres.

It is like someone like me who knows nota about cars listening to two guys in their 30s talk about hot rods they have been fascinated by since the were little kids.

Michael Sheehan
Michael Sheehan
18 years ago

Is 'Harold' responding to this thread in particular, or is this a gratuitous Bush-bashing screed, with a lead-in sentence included just to provide 'relevance' to the point under discussion?

Inquiring minds want to know!!

Citing 'Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh' (no baseless-rumor-mongerer he!) is the real howler.

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