Category: Uncategorized

Does it concern anyone when first President Roh downsizes the Korean military by nearly 200,000 soldiers, than reduces mandatory military service by 6 months, while also removing landmines from the DMZ and taking down key defensive obstacles along the roads, combined with creating great distrust and possible withdrawal of Korea’s key ally the United States?  Than to top it off he sends over a billion dollars in "aid" to North Korea to help them feed and equip their military.

What’s next, a Kim Il-sung statue in the new Gwanghwamun Plaza?

The Korean government is taking a harsher stance against anyone who assaults taxi cab drivers:

Physically assault a South Korea taxi or bus driver and you’ll face a minimum three-year jail term or a $20,000 fine, officials said Wednesday.

A Ministry of Construction and Transportation official confirmed Wednesday that a revised bill addressing the assault of public transportation drivers recently passed South Korea’s National Assembly and is to go into effect in February.

Several U.S. military community personnel found themselves entangled in the South Korean legal system after tangling with taxi drivers in the last year.

“The law was designed to boost people’s safety,” an unnamed ministry official told The Korea Times.

“We will sternly punish those using violence against public transportation drivers that threatens the safety of drivers, passengers and pedestrians.”

Killing a driver will bring a sentence of five years to life in prison, the official said.

I am all for punishing idiots who assault taxi cab drivers, but I do have to wonder if this law is solely meant for USFK personnel or will it be enforced on the general Korean population as well because I have personally seen many times cab drivers getting into confrontations with other Koreans.  With the selective nature of enforcing laws in Korea, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is solely a law focused on punishing USFK personnel.  I would also love to see increased penalties as well for taxi cab drivers who break the law by overcharging and even sometimes assaulting customers who will not pay them the overcharged price. 

The Chosun has an interesting interview with a North Korean defector who has been constantly harrassed for the past 10 years by both the Korean government and the North Korean fifth column allowed to operate freely in South Korea:

Next month, Hwang marks 10 years since he risked his life coming to the South and left his family behind. He is not a man whose resolution is easily shaken by threats from North Korea or its fifth column. But what must be unbearable is the persecution he has been subjected to by the South Korean government, in the very country he came to in search of freedom. For most of the 10 years he has lived in the South, he has lived the life of a virtual person non grata, unable to meet people he wanted to see and say what he wanted to say. He published a newspaper for North Korean refugees that criticized the government’s North Korea policy, only to be stopped by the National Intelligence Service. How bitterly disappointed he must have been to find that somehow Constitutional rights did not apply to him.

When he visited the U.S. in 2003, agency minders shadowed his every step to check whom he met and what they talked about. There were even scuffles when staffers of an American congressman attempted to push them out of an office where the legislator was meeting with Hwang.

While the Pentagon has remained silent about the announcement from the Korean government that they plan on delaying the USFK relocation until 2013, the Korean government has gone ahead and cut funding from next year’s budget for the project:

The government’s request for 158 trillion won in general accounts was reduced by 1.46 trillion won, while 110 billion won was added to its original request for 6.7 trillion won in special accounts.

Some of the significant cuts came from requested funds for inter-Korean cooperation and social employment, which were each cut by 150 billion won from original requests.

The Assembly also cut by 198 billion won the fund allocated for the relocation of U.S. troops stationed here.

So basically since the Pentagon hasn’t come out and vigorously defended the agreed upon the timeline the Korean government has been able to go ahead and cut funding which means that if the USFK relocation is to happen on time by 2009 the US government will have to fund the move itself. 

USFK said last week the move was going to happen on time, but I don’t see how that can happen when the farmers haven’t even been given a deadline to move off the annexed land and now there is no money available to fund the move.  I’m beginning to wonder if the Pentagon is getting ready to approve some money for a move, not to Camp Humphreys, but to CONUS.

HT: Nomad

According to the South Korean government the US nuclear negotiators have offered the North Koreans a deal:

The United States offered to remove North Korea from Washington’s list of states sponsoring terrorism if the communist regime dismantles its atomic weapons program South Korea’s main nuclear envoy said Tuesday. 

The proposal was just one of the incentives the U.S. spelled out last week at six-nation nuclear disarmament talks with the North, along with offers of security guarantees, a peace treaty and normalization of relations, Chun Yung-woo said.

"The point of the proposal is that everything is possible if North Korea denuclearizes and nothing is possible if it refuses," Chun told news cable channel YTN.

It appears that the South Korean government is making a big deal out of this as some kind of sign of "progress" on the North Korean nuclear issue.  I have said it once and I will say it again, North Korea has no intention of giving up it’s nukes and the US negotiators probably understand that, thus they make proposals for grand deals that they know will never happen just to show that the US government is doing everything possible to denuclearize North Korea. 

While these negotiations go on and on the South Korean government can continue to claim that "progress" is being made while the status quo continues on.  Keeping the status quo is what is important to both Koreas and the Chinese.  The Chinese don’t want any instability in North Korea that could lead to a collapse and refugee crisis, the South Koreans do not want a expensive reunification that would destroy their economy, and the North Koreans just want to continue to have time to further develop their nuclear program and missile systems in order to secure their own regime’s security against a US attack to over throw a regime.  So expect these talks to continue to drag off and on just like they have these past few years and the South Korean government claiming "progress".

The ROK military wants to develop their own missile defense system by 2008.  Does that mean 35th ADA BDE can go home?

UPDATE: I just saw a report on this on Anderson Cooper 360 today and of course they slanted and twisted the facts as well.  For one the suicide rate of 19.9 per 100,000 soldiers in Iraq, CNN said was higher than the average civilian suicide rate.  Yes it is higher than the average suicide rate, but it is not higher than average suicide rate of the civilains of the same age group and gender of those who committed suicide as General Kiley pointed out in the below Reuters article, but CNN conveniently left this information out of their Anderson Cooper piece.  They did make sure to harp on how they believe the suicide rate is going up due to increased deployments even though General Kiley in the below Reuters piece says the statistics don’t support it, especially when the average suicide rate of the last two years when combined is lower than the 2003 level, which of course CNN conveniently didn’t mention at all either.

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The media is running big headlines like this recently, US Soldiers’ Suicide Rate in Iraq Doubles in 2005.  Sounds pretty grim right?  Well let’s look at the actual facts:

Twenty-two U.S. soldiers in Iraq took their own lives in 2005, a rate of 19.9 per 100,000 soldiers. In 2004, the rate was 10.5 per 100,000 and in 2003, the year of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the figure was 18.8 per 100,000.

The figures cover U.S. Army soldiers only. They do not include members of other U.S. military services in Iraq such as the Marine Corps.

Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the Army’s surgeon general, cautioned against overinterpreting the figures, saying suicide rates tended to fluctuate from year to year.

“We think that the numbers are so rare to begin with that it’s very hard to make any kind of interpretation,” he said at a news conference to present a study on the mental health of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

“We have not made a connection between the stress on the force and some massive or even significant increase in suicides,” he said.

While every suicide was one too many, Kiley said, the suicide rate among soldiers was lower than the average among civilians of the same age and gender.

So the truth comes out at the very end of the article.  Basically the minute number of soldiers who did commit suicide this year in the Army while stationed in Iraq is actually near identical to the 2003 number and if you take an average of the suicide rate from the last year than the overall number is actually much lower than the 2003 number.  Then the article concludes with the information that if your kid joins the military and goes to Iraq he/she is less likely to commit suicide compared to if he/she just stayed at home where the civilian percentage is higher.  Yet, the big headline is the rise in suicides in the military.

Why doesn’t the MSM come up with a fairer headline of, US Army Suicide Rate Rises, But Still Lower than Civilian Rate.  Aren’t these fairer headlines?  However, the MSM is not about fairness, it is about framing left/right issues and the military suicide rate is something they are trying to frame as soldiers committing suicide because of too many deployments because that is what the left wants you to believe even though the statistics do not support it.  I can guarantee you one thing, if the suicide rate goes down next year, you will hear nothing about it.  It is just like with recruiting numbers, as long as the military continues to make it’s recruiting numbers you will hear nothing about it, but if the military misses it’s recruiting mark for one month than it will be front page news.

The forum AAFES Sucks is looking for feedback from soldiers stationed in Asia.  So if you have a gripe with AAFES they want to hear from you.  One of my favorite gripes with AAFES in Korea was with a Class VI store that always had products that I could see in its back store room that for some reason would never make it out on to the store’s shelves.

We have yet to hear anything from the Pentagon yet on the South Korean government power play to delay the Camp Humphreys expansion to 2013, but a USFK spokesman says things are going to continue as planned:

Workers will proceed as scheduled in getting land ready for the expansion of Camp Humphreys despite reports of a possible five-year delay in the move of U.S. forces there, the U.S. military said Friday.

(…)

Nevertheless, work will start soon on the first section of a 2,328-acre tract outside Humphreys onto which the post will expand its boundaries, said Lawrence M. Monaco, deputy director of the Project Integration Office at U.S. Forces Korea (Advance Element) headquarters on the camp.

The first section, or Parcel 1, occupies about 200 acres. Workers are to cover it with an estimated 3 million cubic yards of landfill and put in roads and a drainage system.

“There’s absolutely no delay in progress on Parcel 1,” Monaco said, noting that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded a $29.7 million contract to Seohee Construction Co. Ltd. of Seoul in November.

“The contractor has been selected, the contract’s awarded, the notice to proceed was given in November,” Monaco said. “We don’t yet have the contractor’s full work schedule, but we know that by mid-January he will be establishing his office on Parcel 1 and will be mobilizing equipment and personnel to begin work.

“In short…” Monaco said, “it’s working as advertised.”

What USFK says it is going to do doesn’t really matter.  What is going to matter is what the Pentagon says about this and apparently as the Korean government probably expected, the Pentagon appears to be more concerned with transition between the outgoing and incoming Defense Secretaries followed by the Christmas holidays to respond to the South Korean announcement.  It looks like this will probably drag on past the holidays before the Pentagon responds.

Don’t you just love how the Korean media finds anyone with any connection to Korea to glorify their Korean mother or in this case, this astronaut’s Korean grandmother.