A new feature I have decided to add to the site is to profile things to do in Korea. Last year there was a discussion initiated on multiple blogs about if Korea is boring. I have never found Korea boring and if anything having to much to do, however the complaint about Korea being boring is one I have heard all to often. So I plan on building a list of things to do in Korea. I figured I would begin with Dobong Mountain (Dobongsan) due to its close proximity to both Uijongbu and Seoul where many soldiers and expats live.

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The soldiers involved in a brawl in Itaewon last November have been sentenced:

A South Korean judge sentenced three U.S. soldiers Friday for their participation in a Nov. 11 bar brawl in the Itaewon entertainment district.

Two soldiers — Pvt. Sylvester Antely Clark, 19, and Spc. Tydes Whiten, 27, — were sentenced to 18 months in prison for punching and striking a U.N. Club bouncer with beer bottles during the fight.

But judge Han Yang-seok suspended both sentences for two years, saying he took into account that both soldiers paid compensation to the bouncer, had no prior convictions and “had worked diligently to defend the country” as soldiers here.

Pfc. Mario Duprey, convicted of assaulting a police officer, was fined the equivalent of about $3,000.

The two soldiers involved in the brawl have been maintaining their innocence that they were not the ones who hit the bouncer with a beer bottle.  Judging by past altercations involving Koreans falsely accusing GIs of assault, this claim may quite possibly be true.  However, there is not enough information available compared to the Acosta case, to really make a determination on this and the fact that PVT Clark was led into the courtroom in shackles I found quite interesting:

Clark, who was escorted in and out of the courtroom by Army criminal investigators and restrained with his hands shackled to a belt around his waist, declined to comment.

The fact he was led into the courtroom into shackles leads me to wonder what other trouble he has gotten into to be the only one shackled in the courtroom.  No one is going to jail, but they are definitely lighter in the pocketbook and hopefully other soldiers can take some good lessons learned from this incident, especially like when you are drunk don’t go to the police station and start crap there.Â

The Asia Sentinel has some a strong view on the latest Macau Bank deal being negotiated between the US and North Korea. 

Links from this week worth checking out

-  Seoul did not make any of the Top 10 lists for the best cities in Asia for expats to live.  Here is the list:

World Wide:

1 Singapore, Singapore (1), 2 Australia, Sydney (2), 3 Australia, Melbourne (3), 4 Japan, Kobe (5), 5 Australia, Canberra (4), 6 Canada, Vancouver (7), 6 Denmark, Copenhagen (6), 8 New Zealand, Wellington (8), 9 Netherlands, Amsterdam (23), 10 Japan, Osaka (10), 10 Japan, Tokyo (11), 10 Belgium, Brussels (14), 10 Germany, Bonn (14), 10 Ireland, Dublin (14), 10 Switzerland, Basel (9), 10 Switzerland, Geneva (22)

Top 10 best locations in Asia for Asian expats:

1 Singapore, Singapore, 2 Japan, Kobe, 3 Japan, Tokyo, 3 Japan, Osaka, 5 Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 6 Macau, Macau, 7 Taiwan, Taipei, 8 Thailand, Bangkok, 9 Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, 10 Malaysia, Georgetown

-  If you are one of those people who think Seoul is really that bad, maybe you should take the Get Out of Korea quiz here.

-  After taking the quiz, if Seoul is still that bad you can always drive out of the city.  Check here for a historical look at automobiles in Korea

-  If you can’t drive out of Seoul, you can always fly out, which is about to get easier to do.  Here is an update on the long over due subway expansion to Incheon International Airport that is set to open soon.

-  Or you can just drink your misery away with some Korean soju and decide if it is better than Japanese shochu?

-  At least a professional wrestler is running the city yet, like in Japan where they now have their own version of Jesse "The Body" Ventura.

-  Or you could just riot like 20,000 people in China recently did and had to be put down by the Chinese Army.

From the Stars and Stripes:

U.S. Forces Korea issued a warning Friday about two dissident groups that plan to physically halt or interfere with two upcoming exercises.

Participants in the upcoming Reception Staging Onward Movement and Integration and Foal Eagle training should be wary of possible demonstrators, according to a force protection advisory posted on www.usfk.mil.

U.S. troops from Japan, Okinawa and stateside bases will be in South Korea to participate in the training.

The HanChongRyun and Pyontongsa dissident groups will target the March 25 to March 31 exercises, according to the advisory.

For those that don’t know Hanchongryun is a North Korean sponsored, anti-US hate group who’s leader is allowed to regularly go to North Korea by the South Korean government to receive her marching orders to protest USFK.  Any bets if these anti-US hate groups will physically attack the Marines participating in the exercise like they did last year?

Is anyone surprised by this at all:

North Korea will not stop its nuclear activity unless $25 million of its funds held in a Macau bank are fully released, the regime’s top nuclear envoy said Saturday.

Banco Delta Asia had been blacklisted by Washington since September 2005 for its complicity in North Korean money laundering. The U.S. had promised to resolve the issue as part of the implementation of a landmark nuclear disarmament deal with North Korea.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Treasury Department ended its investigation into the small Macau lender and said that ties would be cut with the bank and the U.S. financial system. The move might lead regulators to unfreeze a portion of the money.

Issuing the communist state’s first official response to the U.S. decision, Kim Kye Gwan said Saturday in Beijing that his country has not heard anything officially about the lifting of financial sanctions.

"We will not stop our nuclear activity until our funds frozen in the BDA are fully released," he said. "We will not stop the Yongbyon nuclear facility until the United States fully releases our funds frozen in the BDA."

What annoys me about the media coverage of this latest North Korean antic is that the unfreezing of money in the Macau bank was not an agreed upon pre-condition for the US to give to North Korea in return for freezing their nuclear reactor.  I recommend everyone read OFK’s excellent run down on this issue.  However, I felt the tone of the article made it sound like the US side is the one not living up to the agreement by not unfreezing the accounts when in fact it is the North Koreans making demands that are not in the original agreement. 

Via OFK, comes this news that Al Qaida mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad planned to conduct terrorist attacks against US interests in Korea:

I was responsible for planning and surveying to hit American targets in South Korea, such as American military bases and a few night clubs frequented by American soldiers.

I think this is very possible and the Al Qaida number two man Alman al-Zawahiri has not been shy about his desire to strike South Korean targets:

“We should not wait until U.S., British, French, Jewish, South Korean, Australian or Polish forces enter Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen and Algeria before we resist,” said the tape. The tape called for indiscriminate attacks against the U.S. and its allies, saying “Let us start resisting now. The interests of America, Britain, Australia, France, Poland, Norway, South Korea and Japan are spread everywhere.”

Also remember just two years ago USFK received specific intelligence in regards to terror threats against US interests in Korea.  The threats caused USFK to implement a 2100 curfew and prevent soldiers from congregating in bars and public areas.  The source of the intelligence on this plot is quite clear now and led to South Korea cracking down on third country nationals at the time and uncovered a foreign terror cell:

Since 2002, the National Intelligence Service has investigated 107 suspects in connection with six cases involving Middle East terror organizations, the agency said in a report to a legislator made public yesterday.

The intelligence service, according to Representative Won Hye-young of the Uri Party, said South Korea has not escaped involvement with terror attempts by radical Islamist groups.
According to the report, the service learned in May 2005 that an Iranian organization linked to Hezbollah, named by the United States and a few other nations as a terrorist organization, had been involved in wire transfers of cash amounting to about 60 billion won ($63 million).
The transfers had been disguised as trade transactions; it was not clear from the report if the money had been raised in Korea or had been routed through this country in an attempt to disguise its origins. One Iranian was sentenced to a year in prison here for violations of Korea’s financial transfer laws.

In May 2004, the report added, the spy agency learned that people linked to Jemaah Islamiah, another Islamist group, were arriving in Korea to set up a base of operations here. Eight Moroccans were denied entry and turned over to Moroccan intelligence in October.
One Korean-American suspect was cited in the report; the agency said it and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in March 2003 jointly tracked down a 30-year-old man affiliated with a Pakistani terror group.

He was deported to the United States, where he received an 11.5-year sentence after being convicted of being a member of a terror organization and having received paramilitary training.

It is highly possible that the Jemaah Islamiah cell that was broke up in Korea was due to the intelligence given by Sheikh Mohammad at the time preventing a terror attack in Korea.  This news makes me wonder if water boarding of Sheikh Mohammad was responsible for him divulging this information that may have foiled a terror plot?  We will probably never know due to the classified nature of this information, but it just goes to show the moral complexities the United States finds itself in while conducting the War on Terror. 

I have always felt that if Al Qaida was going to strike Korea they would target the subway system.  As past Al Qaida attacks have shown they like to attack soft mass transit targets and Korea’s mass transit system is a big soft target that has the potential for many casualties which was evident by the 2002 Taegu subway fire which killed 130 people.  This tragedy could unfortunately be a blueprint for a future Al Qaida attack. 

Just for the record I feel that Korea is very safe from any terror attack.  You have to remember that Korea has been a target of terror attacks for decades prior to Al Qaida becoming a household name due to the threat they face from North Korea.  Korean authorities take external security threats very seriously and I’m confident they can continue to unravel any possible terror cells operating in South Korea. 

This is an interesting legal question that has just come up with the recent arrest of a Korean Army soldier as a US Army deserter:

A South Korean soldier may be a U.S. military deserter after he left his U.S. base and joined the South Korean army, apparently to avoid a tour of duty in Iraq, the defense ministry in Seoul said on Thursday.

The South Korean army private second class, whose identity was given only as Kim, joined the U.S. military in 2003 to become a permanent U.S. citizen on condition that he would serve in Iraq, a ministry official said.

In 2005, he visited his home country on leave just before his U.S. unit was to be deployed to Iraq and never went back, the South Korean defense ministry official.

Instead, as he still held a South Korean passport, he was called up by the South Korean military and began serving late last year due to mandatory military enlistment.

Kim’s trouble with the U.S. military came to the surface when he went to the U.S. army headquarters in Seoul this month hoping to clear his name but was arrested on the spot.

I think the soldier in question will probably just receive a bad conduct discharge as I have seen other soldiers who have deserted in the last few years receive as well, but I’m no JAG so maybe some of you Army lawyers out there have a better understanding of what will happen to this soldier. 

HT: Marmot and Nomad

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