Who knows where and what this image is of?

Here are this year’s current Korea Finder Leader’s Board:

Mark -9

James – 2

Sonagi – 2

Peekstr – 1

HumKor – 1

Farty – 1

Mike -1

Note that who ever totals the most points at the end of the year, I will purchase for them a Korea related book or DVD of their choice using the proceeds I have accumulated by people purchasing books from Amazon.com on my website.

The US and South Korea have had a continuous back and forth fight over the status of US beef in Korea.  The Koreans are looking for anything to ban US beef in order to protect their own domestic beef industry at the expense of South Korean consumers who pay some of the world’s highest prices for beef products.

Earlier this month the fight over US beef continued when South Korea banned US beef again because in a massive shipment of US beef the inspectors found four boxes of beef that were produced for the US market not the Korean market because they contained bone fragments which are forbidden by the South Korean government.  The latest ban was enough that it got Congress moving on this beef fight with threats of bringing the issue up to the World Trade Organization.  These threats got the South Koreans to drop their ban, but for how long is anyone’s guess at this point.

However, what is interesting is that details are now beginning to emerge of how the four boxes found themselves inside the container with the rest of the US beef designated for export to South Korea.   Read the whole article but here is (pardon the pun) the meat of the article:

Four boxes of beef, weighing about 287 pounds, were mistakenly sent to South Korea as samples on June 2, although they were meant for domestic consumption, said Kim Do-soon, an official with South Korea’s Agriculture and Forestry Ministry.

The U.S. Agriculture Department informed Seoul of the latest mistaken shipment, Kim said.

Two U.S. meat plants, run by Tyson Foods Inc., processed the beef and have been suspended from handling meat bound for South Korea, the official said.

A spokesman for Springdale, Ark.-based Tyson, Gary Mickelson, said that, “contrary to South Korean news reports, Tyson Foods did not ship the beef in question.”

“We produced it for domestic sale and consumption,” he said Tuesday. “The product was sold by Tyson Foods to a Minnesota company, which resold the product to Iowa-based Midamar Corp.

“Midamar mistakenly exported the beef to South Korea several weeks ago without our knowledge, involvement or permission,” he said. “We’re once again working through USDA in hopes of quickly resolving this problem.”

Mickelson would not say which two plants were involved. The company has several facilities in Nebraska.

A spokesman for Midamar Corp. of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said his company did not send the four boxes to South Korea.

Darrin O’Brien, who works in export sales for Midamar, said they were sent to a South Korean company in California, which he said he would not identify. He also said he didn’t know what that company had done with the samples.

Does anyone else find it interesting that the four boxes found in the US beef shipment to Korea were actually sent to a South Korean company in California and then magically some how appeared in the US container in South Korea?

Things that make you go hmmmm…….

You have to read this entire article in today’s Stars and Stripes to really appreciate how stupid this criminal is:

On Dec. 18, Dwelly was hanging out with Pfc. Juan Antonio Rivera.

“[Rivera] asked me if I wanted to ‘do’ the Iron Triangle, and I said all right,” Dwelly testified.

Dwelly and Rivera pushed open a door of the Camp Hovey club together. They found two safes and carted them on a dolly to an abandoned barracks.

The next day, they discovered one of the safes was unlocked. Rivera — who officials say will likely be court-martialed as well — bought a tool at the post exchange to bust open the other safe. The two split the $15,000 inside the safes, Dwelly said.

Read the whole thing because this is not even half the story. Stupid criminals are always the easiest to catch. His sob story didn’t seem to work to well either considering he received three and half years in jail.

He did get some time reduced from his sentence due to improper confinement by his command back at Camp Hovey:

Military judge Col. Gregory Gross ruled Thursday that three incidents involving Pvt. Bud L. Dwelly’s command, a criminal investigator and the Camp Humphreys confinement facility were unlawful.

Each action violated Article 13 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Gross ruled, and they earned Dwelly 36 extra days’ credit for time served toward the 42-month prison sentence given during his court-martial Thursday.

Those extra 36 days bring Dwelly’s total to 128 days of pre-trial confinement.

Article 13 bars anyone from punishment other than arrest and confinement before a trial; it also prevents punishment any harsher than that required to ensure the person’s presence.

Prior to his transfer to Camp Humphreys facility in March, Dwelly slept on the floor of his Camp Hovey barracks common quarters area without bedding or hygiene products, using pipe insulation as a pillow, according to his testimony.

Capt. Henry Opolot, Dwelly’s commander, testified that he put Dwelly on 24-hour watch in the common area because weapons found in Dwelly’s room “were indicators of future criminal activity.”

Opolot said he also considered the half-Korean soldier a flight risk. He said he did not know that Dwelly hadn’t been sleeping in a cot, had little entertainment and hadn’t been allowed to shower during the first two days of confinement.

I have seen this happen before, but just because someone is suspected of a crime doesn’t mean you can lock them down.  Remember innocent until proven guilty.  The commander can remove pass priviledges which means the soldier can’t leave their installation or even the immediate company area but they still have to access to places like the chow hall, church, clothing sales, etc.  Also you cannot put guards on their doors or have people follow them around everywhere.  This is still considered unlawful confinement.

Journalist Robert Neff has the scoop on a diplomatic dispute between USFK and the Phillipine government over one of their diplomats who was caught shoplifting in the Yongsan PX:

Sources inside the U.S. Provost Office (military police) have revealed to The Korea Herald that a highly placed foreign diplomat was recently caught on camera shoplifting at the Yongsan Military base PX (Post Exchange) shopping center.

Identifying the suspect only as coming from the Philippines, the source said military police were considering what action to take, if any, in the theft of a karaoke machine and a bottle of Gucci perfume.

The alleged offense took place last November but has only recently been revealed.

What is interesting about this incident is the response that USFK Commander General Burwin Bell has had in response to the shoplifting. He has banned Philippine diplomats from using other Yongsan facilities such as the Hartel House over the incident. The dispute gained enough momentum that the Secretary of Foreign Affairs for the Philippines quietly slipped into Korea on an “unofficial visit” to meet with General Bell:

The June 15 arrival of Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Alberto Gatmaitan Romulo, on an unofficial visit to Seoul, has caused some speculation as to the true nature of his visit. Sources suggest Romulo’s two-day visit was to discuss, among other things, the shoplifting incident and smooth over relations with General Bell. During his visit here, Romulo met with Deputy Chief of Staff UNC/USFK Stephen Sargeant.

Which as Robert Neff mentioned, it is strange for a nation’s Foreign Affairs Secretary to meet with a Deputy Chief of Staff and not the USFK commander. All of this leads me to believe there is a lot more going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about if the USFK commander possibly snubbed the Foreign Affairs Secretary of a regional US ally in Asia over the shoplifting incident.

I’m speculating here of course, but it appears General Bell may be unhappy that the Philippine government is not properly punishing the diplomat involved in the shoplifting and is thus implementing measures to show the Philippine Embassy how unhappy he is. Anyway it is good to see the USFK commander stand up against shoplifting. If the average USFK servicemember can be held accountable for shoplifting than diplomats should be held accountable as well.

Anyway you can read more on this over at Robert Neff’s posting at the Marmot’s Hole as well.

The MP involved in the assault of Uijongbu taxi driver last March is now on trial and the typical Korean court room theatrics are taking place:

An exasperated prosecutor repeatedly raised his voice at the elderly victim, Yoon Boon-ha, while questioning how Pvt. Michael Curtis Adams, 21, beat him and then stole his taxi.

Yoon wrote in a statement to police that Adams punched him, but didn’t write that Adams struck him with a 16-ounce bottle.

Yoon told the three-judge panel Tuesday that he felt the bottle strike his right eye but never saw the bottle.

Yoon said he was agitated while making his police statement.

The MP denies using a beer bottle in his crime and says he just punched him and stole the taxi.  It should be real easy to determine if the taxi cab driver was hit with a beer bottle because I have seen people hit with beer bottles before and it is not pretty.  If the cab driver didn’t have any big lacerations then he wasn’t hit over the head with a beer bottle.  The cab driver is trying to get the soldier convicted for a using a weapon during the crime instead of just punching him and stealing the cab.  If he can convince the court a weapon was used against him then he can get a bigger compensation payment.  Look at what the cab driver is already demanding:

Adams now faces up to seven years in prison. A financial settlement could mitigate the sentence, but Yoon is asking for 50,000,000 won, or about $54,000. Such settlements are common in South Korean court, but Yoon’s asking price is far higher than most similar settlements.

I have never seen a settlement in a taxi cab related incident this high and it is highly unlikely the cab driver will receive that kind of money especially from a private.  The private in question seems to be a real winner:

Adams showed up in court Tuesday in a beige South Korean prison uniform and a new, spiky mohawk haircut.

The new look appeared to surprise court officials, who last saw him June 5 wearing a regulation military haircut and an Army combat uniform.

First of all he is an idiot for giving that kind of appearance in a Korean court room where a professional appearances go a long way.  Secondly his unit is still responsible for him and should be responsible for ensuring that he complies with military regulations by having an authorized military haircut, not a spiked mohawk.  He also should be wearing his Army Class A uniform and not prison garb in the courtroom.  He may be a dirtbag but he is still someones soldier that should be supervised to ensure he is doing everything possible to help his case, a mohawk is doing nothing to help his case.  His appearance in the courtroom is only making things worse than they already are for him.   

I have seen USFK accused of a lot of ridiculous things in Korea, but this one takes the cake.  I was walking through Myeongdong the other day and in the middle of this busy Seoul shopping district was a group of what appeared to be college aged students who were collecting signatures for a petition to stop pig slaughtering.  Apparently a veteran’s group and some local politicians slaughtered a pig during a recent protest.  The petitioners weren’t happy about it and to show their displeasure they hoped to have people sign their petition after reading this flyer:

Normally I would hardly care about something like this and just walk on by.  However something immediately caught my attention.  To help make their case the group had a large scale blow up of pictures from the pig slaughter and were making anti-military statements.  Here is what caught my eye, in the first blow up picture, there appeared to be a USFK soldier participating in the pig slaughter:

I was immediately suspicious of this because I just found it absurd that anyone in USFK would be involved in a veteran’s protest much less involved in slaughtering a pig.   The petitioners didn’t have the signs labeled with anything anti-USFK but their comments as well as the intent of prominently displaying this photograph like they did was clear, they were linking USFK to this pig slaughter.

My wife and I were standing there within a large crowd of people who had gathered around the pictures and my mother in law who was with us asked me why USFK was involved in a pig slaughter?  Probably everyone else in the crowd was thinking the same thing.  You can actually see pictures of the crowd around their booth in Myeongdong on the group’s website here and then scrolling to the bottom of the page.

After looking closely at the picture I could tell whoever was wearing the American Army Combat Uniform (ACU) was not a USFK soldier.  The person in the picture if you look closely is wearing tennis shoes.  Even further more the person is wearing non-military issue gloves.  You can’t tell to well from the quality of the picture I took, but the gloves in the original picture definitely had name brand markings on them and were not military issue gloves.  Also notice how the picture was cropped in order to not see the head of the supposed USFK soldier.  These inconsistencies lead me to greatly doubt any involvement of USFK.

However, the damage has already been done and who knows how many thousands of people are now walking around thinking USFK was involved in the slaughter of some pig that USFK actually had nothing to do with.  Just another incident to feed the low level hum of anti-Americanism as well as the ever increasing anti-ROK Army sentiment in the country.

Blackfive has featured a Korean-American in his latest “Someone You Should Know” postings:

No one really knows how they will react under extreme stress until they are thrust into a situation in which they have no options but to do so. Some may collapse under the weight; others, however, rise up and meet the challenges set before them.

One Marine was confronted with a literal do-or-die situation when a roadside bomb rocked his amphibious assault vehicle north of Fallujah during combat operations, June 7.

Lance Cpl. Daniel Kim, 20, is a crew chief with A Company, 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion, in charge of one of the three AAVs in his section. As Kim’s crew, including his section leader, Staff Sgt. Jeffrey S. Vogel, 29, of Boca Raton, Fla., executed their combat patrol, they came to a bridge overpass that was a known site for terrorists to emplace improvised explosive devices…

Click here to read the rest.  Great job by the young Marine.

The North Korean defectors that defected to Japan by the crossing the Sea of Japan Sea that Cannot Be Named have finally made their way to South Korea:

A couple and their two adult sons arrived at Seoul’s Incheon airport from Tokyo around noon (03:00 GMT) and were immediately taken by government officials to a shelter housing North Korean defectors, the witnesess said.

The family had earlier drifted to Japan after a week-long trip across the Sea of Japan (East Sea) in a wooden boat.

They initially wanted to go directly to South Korea, but changed their path due to the tight border control between the two countries.

They were held in an immigration detention facility in eastern Japan while Tokyo processed their requests to go on to South Korea.

I hope they find a better life in South Korea and they can put the poverty and deprivations of North Korea behind them.

The frozen Banco Delta Asia money has been returned to North Korea:

Money at the heart of a dispute that caused North Korea to delay its nuclear disarmament was finally making its way Friday to the communist nation after months of delay.

The transfer of funds previously frozen in a Macau bank could lead North Korea to start shutting down its nuclear weapons program. But the North is certain to want to count every last penny of its $25 million before fulfilling a February pledge to stop making atomic bombs.

“The transfer is in progress,” South Korea’s chief nuclear envoy, Chun Yung-woo, told reporters Friday. “Let’s wait and see how long it takes for North Korea to confirm it.”

Just to remind people the BDA money was frozen by the US Treasury Department not because of the NK nuclear issue, but because of the totally separate issue of NK counterfeiting of US currency and then laundering of the money through Banco Delta Asia.

Additionally something else that is important realize and that the the media has consistently missed is that the return of the BDA money was never part of the February denuclearization agreement.  It was a condition added by the North Koreans after signing the agreement because they knew the Bush administration was desperate to keep the deal together in order to show some kind of foreign policy success.  To keep this charade of a foreign policy success together the Bush administration agreed to return the money despite the fact that it compromises US counterfeiting laws.

Once the US agreed to allow NK to receive the BDA money they made further demands that the money had to be electronically transferred.  The North Koreans could have simply drove a truck to Banco Delta Asia in Macau and loaded it with the money and than chartered a plane to fly it back to North Korea.  They instead made the demands for a wire transfer because it would allow NK to rejoin the international banking system thus overriding the US Treasury Department sanctions.

However, the money is so tainted that no international bank wanted anything to do with NK’s money.  Amazingly enough the US State Dept. then tried to enlist the US Wachovia bank to launder Kim Jong-il’s money for him.  Wachovia justifiably declined and the State Dept. was forced to use our own American Federal Reserve bank and a Russian bank to launder Kim Jong-il’s ill gotten money instead:

 Japan’s Kyodo news agency, citing Macau financial authorities, said the funds were expected to be transferred through the New York branch of the Federal Reserve and Russia’s central bank to a Russian bank where North Korea holds accounts.

Russia said Wednesday it would allow one of its banks to transfer the funds if Washington gave written guarantees it would not fall foul of U.S. sanctions against North Korea.

It is incredible the lengths the current US government have gone to appease North Korea.  The current appeasement policy makes former President Clinton’s 1994 Agreed Framework policy of appeasement seem mild in comparison.  At least Clinton never agreed to launder North Korean money.

So now the big question everyone is wondering is if North Korea is going to denuclearize.  I have said this over and over again and the answer is no.  North Korea may shut down their reactor for awhile at some point after it has extracted all the aid and money it can get out everyone, but it will never give up it’s nuclear weapons.

Kim Jong-il developed nuclear weapons in order to appease his military eager to join the prestigious nuclear club and to ensure regime survival.  He is using the current six party talks to buy time to perfect his nuclear weapons program.  Once Kim Jong-il has successfully created a half dozen nuclear weapons he will be able to fully implement what Richardson at DPRK Studies calls Strategic Disengagement.

Before strategically disengaging, Kim will get all that he can from the international community in what I call the North Korean Freeze Tactic.  He has already been successful in getting his $25 million dollars returned to him along with being allowed to rejoin the international banking system.  He will continue to play out this nuclear issue as long as possible in order to extract whatever other goodies the US is willing to throw in for a nuclear freeze and buy more time to develop nuclear weapons program.

When there is no more goodies to be had and his nuclear weapon program has been perfected, his regime will withdraw content with the knowledge that the Kim regime can never be forcibly removed due to their possession of nuclear weapons and if times get tough they know they can always threaten the international community to give them more money and aid.  Why not it has worked every time so far.  In short they have guaranteed regime survival at the expense of the US taxpayer and American creditability.

I also highly recommend you read other views on this matter over at DPRK Studies and One Free Korea.  Also make sure you read this Front Page Magazine piece from notable Korean author and journalist Gordon Cucullu and OFK’s very own Joshua Stanton.  A great read and highly recommended.

Is anyone surprised that Korean politicians are demagoging the environmental issue:

Politicians are poised for their own investigation into the process in question.

Lawmakers of the National Assembly’s Environment and Labor Committee said they will conduct an on-site inspection Thursday at three bases north of Seoul, which were returned last month.

The inspection is part of preparations for a two-day hearing from June 25 on the issue, in which Foreign Minister Song Min-soon, Defense Minister Kim Jang-soo, and Lt.Gen. Stephen G. Wood, the USFK’s deputy commander, are scheduled to testify.

“We will focus on whether or not the process of returning the bases was appropriate,” said Rep. Woo Won-shik, who recently bolted from the pro-government Uri Party.

Still, it remains uncertain whether the lawmakers will shed light on the allegations raised by environmental activists.

These law makers just happen to be from the liberal political parties like Uri and the DLP who currently have favorably ratings of 9.1% and 10.3%. They are trying to demagogue the pollution issue to their own political advantage. During the 2002 election season they had the June 13th accident to demagogue and since they have no accident this year to demagogue they are relying on the camp pollution issue instead to hopefully rally anti-US sentiment to garner votes.

These environmentalists could care less about pollution in Korea in general because their only concern is manufacturing anti-US sentiment. As many of you I’m sure remember, the environmental groups along with a large block of the DLP political party have been linked to a North Korean spy ring.

These lawmakers and environmentalists have little creditability and I suspect much of the camp pollution findings have been “Dr. Hwang-ed” for political purposes. I have been saying this for months, I would love to see a detailed line by line report on the supposed environmental damage in every camp. What I suspect is going on is that these demagogues are making claims of pollution due to the presence of asphalt on the camps for example. Oil is used in making asphalt thus they can make claims of oil slicks on the camps based on the presence of asphalt.

USFK should use this scheduled hearing to go on the offensive. I have been saying this months as well that USFK should conduct environmental impact studies of the land surrounding USFK camps compared to the land inside the camps. I know quite a few areas outside of USFK camps in Uijongbu that are highly polluted by the local Korean community.

The Korean government would probably never agree to this, but it would also be useful to compare USFK camps to ROK Army camps. I am willing to bet the USFK camps are much cleaner than ROK Army camps. By the government refusing to carry out such a impact study could be used by USFK to support their claims they have met government standards for environmental clean up if the Korean government is not willing to conduct the same type of pollution studies on their own military’s land.

By presenting evidence that USFK camps are cleaner than the surrounding community would greatly diminish the claims by the demagogues. However, what will probably happen is that the demagogues will get their chance to grand stand and bash the US military while USFK officials just take it and hope it all just goes away.

HT: Marmot