The NY Post recently reported that Hillary Clinton had been allowing her maid to print out classified emails for her. What really puzzled me though was this passage where the maid had access to a SCIF:
Marina Santos
Santos also had access to a highly secure room called an SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility) that diplomatic security agents set up at Whitehaven, according to FBI notes from an interview with Abedin.
From within the SCIF, Santos — who had no clearance — “collected documents from the secure facsimile machine for Clinton,” the FBI notes revealed.
Just how sensitive were the papers Santos presumably handled? The FBI noted Clinton periodically received the Presidential Daily Brief — a top-secret document prepared by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies — via the secure fax. [NY Post]
Unless you are in the military or work with classified information in the government I don’t think most people realize how significant this is. How did the maid have access to a SCIF? How did she even get in? I could only imagine what would happen to a servicemember who brought a random janitor for example into a military SCIF and let them run around and grab documents.
Wayne Minard was 17 when he joined the U.S. Army. (Bruce Stubbs)
Wayne Minard knew at an early age that he wanted to be a soldier.
He joined the Army when he was 17 after persuading his mother to sign his enlistment papers. His family thought he would go on to build a lifelong career in the military.
But his career as a corporal in North Korea lasted only two years.
Minard was reported missing in action on Nov. 26, 1950, the day after Chinese communist troops attacked United Nations forces and allies near the Ch’ongch’on River in North Korea, according to the Pentagon.
Minard’s unit was later ordered to withdraw. The farm boy from rural Kansas, then 19, was never seen or heard from again.
He was taken to a prison camp and starved, Bruce Stubbs, Minard’s great-nephew, told The Washington Post.
Now, after 65 years, Minard is finally coming home. His remains will arrive in Wichita on Wednesday.
Minard’s loved ones had always thought he would never be found, his great-nephew said.
But the family saw a sliver of hope in spring 2005, when an Army recovery team learned of a North Korea burial site that contained the remains of an American soldier. Scientists had obtained DNA samples from two of Minard’s sisters, according to the Pentagon. It would take another 11 years for his remains to be positively identified.
Gen. Lee Sun-jin (C), chairman of South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), walks with other military leaders on the Namhan River in Yeoju, about 100 kilometers southeast of Seoul, on Nov. 7, 2016, as the Army’s 30th Mechanized Infantry Division conducts a field maneuver to enhance its combat preparedness against possible North Korean attacks, in this photo released by the JCS. (Yonhap)
Via a reader tip to the archive for the US Naval War College Review, I ended up reading an interesting article about how the failed Toyotomi Hideyoshi invasion of Korea from 1592-1598 may have stopped his plans of conquering the Philippines. According to the article the Spanish rulers of the Philippines had problems with Japanese pirates known as “wako” and soon stories of the wealth in the Philippines from these pirates got back to Hideyoshi who had recently unified Japan under his rule:
The Japanese landing on Busan
The earliest written mention of fears of a Japanese invasion in the broadest sense of the word appears in a Memorial to the Council of 1586, in which there is specu- lation within Manila that the Japanese wakō might have greater ambitions beyond mere plunder: they “make a descent almost every year, and, it is said, with the intent of colonizing Luçon [Luzon].”3 That never happened, but in 1591 the first proper invasion scare began when the Philippines entered the consciousness of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98). By means of a series of brilliant military cam- paigns, Hideyoshi had reunified Japan after the chaos of a century of civil war, and he now set his mind on overseas expeditions. The addition of the Philippines to his megalomaniac aims was credited to a certain “Farandaquiemon [Faranda Quiemon]—a Japanese of low extraction,” who induced Hideyoshi “to write in a barbarous and arrogant manner to the governor, demanding submission and tribute, and threatening to come with a fleet and troops to lay waste the country.” [US Naval War College Review]
According to the article the Japanese soldiers were not interested in attacking Korea because it was a poor country compared to the wealth they believed the Philippines had:
There was also a possible motive, because “[i]n Japon there is universal talk of the abundance of gold in this land. On this account, the soldiers are anxious to come here; and are coming, as they do not care to go to Core [Korea], which is a poor country.”
The Spanish sent an ambassador to Japan that met with Hideyoshi and explained to them the might of the Spanish Empire around the world. Hideyoshi was apparently not very impressed, but instead of focusing on invading the Philippines he attacked Korea first:
The Philippines remained on high alert for four years after Harada’s visit, and during that time the Spanish authorities closely monitored Hideyoshi’s military expedition against Korea. It was launched during the summer of 1592 and rapidly changed from being a blitzkrieg success to a long and painful retreat. The Korean campaign revealed a major Japanese weakness in naval warfare and support, and one of the main reasons for Japan’s eventual defeat was that the Korean navy severed Japan’s lines of communication between Busan and the Japanese island of Tsushima.21 The encouraging lesson was not wasted on Manila. If Hideyoshi could not control the Tsushima Strait, how could he ever contemplate sending an invasion fleet as far as Luzon?
As his Korean incursion dragged on, Hideyoshi grew increasingly suspicious concerning the activities of Portuguese and Spanish missionaries in Japan. An active persecution of Christianity followed, and Japan’s first martyrs died in February 1597. One of them, Fray Martin of the Ascension, wrote a letter to the governor of the Philippines as he was on his way to his execution. It includes what he had heard about Hideyoshi’s intentions toward the Philippines. “It is said that next year he will go to Luzon, and that he does not go this year because of being busy with the Coreans.”22 Martin also commented on the invasion route, whereby “he intends to take the islands of Lequios and Hermosa [Ryukyus and Taiwan], throw forces from them into Cagayan, and thence to fall upon Manila, if God does not first put a stop to his advance.”
The rest of the article goes on to describe other failed schemes by the Japanese to invade the Philippines during the years of the Tokugawa dynasty. However the article concludes that Hideyoshi likely had the best opportunity to conquer the Philippines had he not focused on Korea:
Of the three schemes for invading the Philippines between 1593 and 1637, the vast armies at Hideyoshi’s disposal in his 1593 plan could well have succeeded against the meagre garrison of Manila had he not been humiliated already in Korea by a woeful lack of naval support. Two seaborne attempts against Taiwan in 1609 and 1616 were also failures, and an annexation of the Ryukyus in 1609 was to be contemporary Japan’s only overseas gain.
So how different would East Asia have looked if the Japanese were successful in capturing the Philippines instead of invading Korea?
It seems to me it would have caused a major war with Spain because I doubt they would have sat back and let the Japanese hold onto to the Philippines. Considering Spain’s naval might they would have been able to deny the Japanese resupply by sea and eventually recaptured the Philippines. I think Spain then would have brought the war to Japan and devastated any remaining naval capability they had and likely loot various port cities until they were satisfied they had gotten enough revenge against the Japanese.
I think the aftermath of such a war with Spain would have caused the invasion of Korea to never happen. Would Korea’s course of history have been significantly changed by this course of events?
A bit on an interesting document even though according to the report the document was first revealed in the 1990’s:
A local research team said Monday it found a record of the Japanese military killing Korean women forced to serve as sex slaves when the country was under colonial rule (1910-45).
The operation diary for Sept. 15, 1944, recorded by allied forces of the United States and China, says “Night of the (Sept.) 13th, (1944), the Japs shot 30 Korean girls in the city (of Tengchong, China),” according to the Seoul National University (SNU) Human Rights Center.
The record was discovered at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, during the research team’s monthlong field study from mid-July to August.
Words such as “whores,” “comfort women” and “prostitutes” were used throughout other relevant records, indicating the 30 women mentioned in the page were former sex slaves, said professor Kang Sung-hyun, a member of the research team.
The existence of this record was already revealed to the public in the 1990s, but the latest finding was the first time the exact institution holding the document has been identified, said the professor at the Institute for East Asian Studies under Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but Tengchong, China is right across the border from today’s Myanmar:
Of interest is that the document also says that they found two Englishmen were their hands tied behind their backs with their throats cut. It appears the Japanese may have also executed their wounded. In the document it states that 1,000 Japanese soldiers were found dead in one quadrant of the city and that half of them were wounded before being killed. The Japanese may have killed every non-fighting soldier in the city before its fall to limit the intelligence provided to the allied forces if those people were captured.
Whoever wins the next US Presidential election will apparently receive a fireworks show from the North Koreans:
North Korea may launch a intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) around the time U.S. citizens go to the polls to pick their new president, a local military source said Sunday.
According to the official source, the military is carefully checking developments taking place in the reclusive country and monitoring the movement of the Musudan missiles that are mounted on mobile launchers.
The U.S. presidential election takes place on Tuesday, with the Democratic and Republican candidates locked in a close race according to many surveys.
The Musudan or BM-35 missile is a IRBM with a reported range of some 3,500 kilometers, which is enough to allow it to target the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam. The island is home to many strategic assets that can support South Korean and U.S. forces in the event of a conflict breaking out on the Korean Peninsula. [Yonhap]
Who knows if this report out of North Korea is true or not, but it is North Korea so anything is possible:
More senior citizens in North Korea are being pressured to kill themselves because of intergenerational conflicts and the skyrocketing cost of medicine.
Elderly North Koreans who can no longer depend on the country’s welfare system must also cope with their children who are sometimes apathetic to their needs, Radio Free Asia reported Thursday.
A source in North Hamgyong Province told RFA on Tuesday it is a common sight at parks or train stations to see senior citizens gathered together, even as temperatures continue to drop in some of the coldest parts of the country.
“[Korean War] veterans are among their numbers; it is heartbreaking to see them there,” the source said.
The elderly, who are no longer employable, leave their homes during the day to avoid friction with their children. They shiver in the cold outdoors until the sun sets, the source said.
The financial burden they impose on their adult children who also struggle to make ends meet has led to family crises, where it is the children who are asking their aging parents to commit suicide, said another source in North Hamgyong Province. [UPI]
