The city’s on-post soil analysis of Yongsan Garrison did not show contamination above safe levels. This may be an indication that the off-post soil contamination may not be from the base as claimed. However, the results are not going to matter to South Korean leftists who have been using this issue to create tension in the US-ROK alliance:
Yongsan Garrison in Seoul.
The result of Seoul City’s probe into soil and groundwater in areas near a US military base in central Seoul over alleged oil leaks came out Tuesday, showing below average levels of contamination in the samples from six of nine sites around the military base in Yongsan.
In August, the Seoul city government conducted its own survey on soil and water near the US base for possible contamination with toxic chemicals, amid growing calls for the disclosure of pollution levels in the area.
According to the analysis of samples released Tuesday, all six areas had soil and water contamination below average levels, based on the Soil Environment Conservation Act here.
However, two spots, the main post and the transportation office, will be reinvestigated next month, the city said, as samples from there were close to the average level.
Officials said that levels of total petroleum hydrocarbon detected from these sites were close to exceeding the standard level of 500 milligrams per kilogram. The detected amount was 471 milligrams per kilogram.
“Although there were no significant traces of contamination found from the probe this time, we are still concerned about areas where contamination levels were close to the standard, while the source of the pollutants near the US military base remains unknown,” said Kwon Ki-wook, chief of the city’s water circulation safety bureau. [Korea Herald via reader tip]
Here is an interesting article from GQ magazine of all places that provides an in-depth look at how
Siti Aisyah, left, and Doan Thi Huong, the women recruited for the murder plot.
The female assassins had been identified on the CCTV footage with almost comic ease—the Vietnamese woman’s white jumper, adorned with LOL, proved easy to track through the grainy footage. Catching her was simple, too: Doan Thi Huong, 29, was arrested the day after the killing, when she returned to the airport. She had been born in a rural Vietnamese village, had her dreams of celebrity dashed when she lasted 20 seconds on Vietnam Idol, and ended up working as an escort in Hanoi, where she’d been recruited by an undercover North Korean agent.
At 2 A.M. the morning after the murder, Malaysian police marched through the dank hallways of the Flamingo Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, in which stained springless mattresses leaned against walls to air out during the day. In a third-floor room, the second alleged assassin, a 25-year-old from Indonesia named Siti Aisyah, had just finished servicing a Malaysian man and sent him on his way when the officers burst through the unlocked door.
From the CCTV footage, Doan’s and Siti’s guilt seemed clear until, under interrogation, they both separately explained that they thought they’d merely slathered Jong-nam with a harmless liquid for a hidden-camera TV show. (………)
While both women’s lives followed a remarkably similar lopsided arc of disappointment from remote hamlets to seedy nightclubs to prison cells where they now face death, it was Siti’s footprints that I tracked across Asia because, having lived for three years in Indonesia, I had met dozens of vulnerable migrant women who could have suffered her fate. I felt like there was bound to be more to the story than the Malaysian police had reported. And sure enough, the truth I ultimately discovered was far more complicated than I ever could have imagined.
Siti was recruited by the North Koreans at 3 A.M. on January 5, 2017, outside a notorious bar in Kuala Lumpur. On paper, she worked as a masseuse in the Flamingo Hotel’s spa, but when I visited in July, a worker immediately asked, “You want to sleep with a Thai or Indonesian girl?” Later, one of Siti’s friends laughed when I said I’d heard she’d given massages there, declaring, “She was totally sex!” [GQ Magazine]
You can read the rest of the elaborate scheme the North Koreans put together to recruit Aisyah to conduct the supposed comedy pranks. Here is a very insightful part of the article:
Nam explained, “Pyongyang wanted to horrify the rest of the world by releasing a chemical weapon at an airport.” By unleashing such weaponry in a place symbolically shared by the global community—an international airport—North Korea was warning everyone not to cross it. As Nam concluded, “Jong-un wants to reign a long time and negotiate as a superpower. The only way to do that is to keep the world in fear of his weapons. He has a grand design, and this is part of it.”
In the end, Pyongyang suffered no significant consequences from the assassination. The people on death row for the murder are two Southeast Asian women, whom Nam believes are not guilty.
This is something world government will have to consider, in response to a preemptive strike against North Korea they could retaliate by releasing VX nerve agents in international airports. If people thought the aftermath of 9-11 was bad for the airline industry could you imagine what would happen if multiple airports are targeted with VX nerve agents?
As I have said before I have little sympathy for people who travel to North Korea fully knowing the risks of being used as a pawn by the Kim regime. With that said he did not deserve what happened to him and I feel very bad for Otto Warmbier’s parents to have to deal with such a traumatic death for their son:
The parents of Otto Warmbier, the U.S.student North Korea detained and who died soon after returning home in June, have described the horrific details of his condition.
Fred and Cindy Warmbier disclosed to Fox News on Tuesday what the communist state did to their son and criticized the country for claiming to be a “victim” of the United States’ push for war.
Fred described North Korea as “terrorists” and said they kidnapped and tortured Otto.
The student’s family saw him when they went aboard an air ambulance on June 13. But Otto’s mother and sister left the plane in shock at the initial sight.They said Otto had a shaved head, a feeding tube in his nose, was blind and deaf and was staring blankly.
The father said Otto also had a large scar on his right foot and a high fever.
“It looked like someone had taken pliers and rearranged his bottom teeth,” Cindy said.“We could not call it a coma and were not prepared (to see Otto in such a horrific condition).” [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but unfortunately we will probably never fully know what happened to Otto Warmbier in North Korea.
This is really something everyone in the Seoul region should be preparing for, not just a group of wealthy residents of a posh apartment complex:
Tower Palace in Dogok-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul
With North Korea’s military provocations increasing the possibility of war on the Korean Peninsula, a luxurious residential-commercial complex in Seoul recently held an emergency session for residents on what to do if war actually breaks out.
The managing office of Tower Palace in Dogok-dong, Gangnam-gu, held the session on Sep.18, where participants were given practical tips on what to do when the complex, one of Seoul’s wealthiest communities, issues various warning alarms.
Residents learned what to do when they hear an air raid alarm, a poisonous gas alarm or a war warning wherever they are in the city.
The residents also learned what to pack for emergencies, including a large backpack, gas mask, sustenance for two weeks, two two-liter bottles of water, a family photo with durable coating, a passport and a little cash. [Korea Times]
Here is an interesting story from the Korean War that I had not heard of before about an orphaned baby that was taken aboard and cared for by sailors on a US ship:
Father Riley looks on as Genevieve Keenan holds her new son in 1953.
Life could only get better for Danny Keenan after a Navy medic found him as an abandoned infant on the steps of an infirmary at a U.S. base in South Korea in 1953.
His luck changed so much for the better that it must have rubbed off on a gambling chaplain who won him a Korean passport in a poker game, wagering a bottle of the captain’s best scotch as the final, winning bet.
Before that, however, it appeared as though the baby might die of neglect in an orphanage, until Navy seamen, including two from La Crosse, took him aboard the USS Point Cruz (CVE 119) and doted on him.
“I never would have survived if not for the intervention of the skipper and the men of the Point Cruz,” the 64-year-old Keenan said during an interview last week in La Crosse. [Stars & Stripes]
You can read the rest at the link, but the baby was eventually adopted by a Navy surgeon and brought back to the US where he became Danny Keenan who attended Washington State University and became a sports journalist.
A photo of U.S. Army infantry officer and West Point graduate Spenser Rapone was making its rounds online Monday due to the fact that – while in his uniform – Rapone had the words “Communism will win” scrawled inside of his cap. [Gateway Pundit via a reader tip]
I saw this and I thought this has to be fake, but this is an actual real story. Over at Task and Purpose they have confirmed that Rapone is actually a commissioned officer now and going through infantry training:
Rapone’s no mere troll. He’s a real socialist, who believes American society should be radically reconceived to make citizens more equal. He’s written passionately about “white supremacist iconography” and “profoundly racist culture” at West Point, which he shares as an alma mater with most of the Confederate army’s officer ranks. But it is his alma mater nonetheless. While he renounces private property ownership as the United States practices it, he owns a little piece of the Great Chain and the Point,and its history is now a part of him. He didn’t destroy USMA; he joined it, and seeks to change America from within. As much as he can, as a serving Army infantry officer, anyway. “Symbolic victories are important,” he writes. For all the radical flair, you could imagine him agreeing with the guarded patriotism of that old classical British conservative, Edmund Burke: “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” [Task and Purpose]
So I guess it is okay to promote Communism in uniform now. So what would happen if someone decided to start promoting Nazi ideology in uniform?
