I would hope that the US government is holding secret, direct talks with the North Koreans in preparation for the Kim-Trump summit. Does CNN think they should hold negotiations on the White House Facebook page?:
The United States and North Korea have been holding secret, direct talks to prepare for a summit between President Donald Trump and North Korea leader Kim Jong Un, a sign that planning for the highly anticipated meeting is progressing, several administration officials familiar with the discussions tell CNN.
Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo and a team at the CIA have been working through intelligence back-channels to make preparations for the summit, the officials said. American and North Korean intelligence officials have spoken several times and have even met in a third country, with a focus on nailing down a location for the talks. (………)
Officials said the decision to use the already existing intelligence channel was more a facet of Pompeo’s current status as CIA director as he awaits confirmation as secretary of state than a reflection of the content of the discussions. Pompeo is expected to begin the process of Senate confirmation in the next several weeks.
One of Trump’s most trusted national security advisers, Pompeo has led efforts to prepare for the summit, which Trump has pressed his aides to organize. If he confirmed, he will assume oversight of the diplomatic preparations. [CNN]
How much of Choe Sang-hun's bias is it possible to squeeze into one headline? In fact, we have plenty of leverage over N. Korea if we're willing to use it. Moon Jae-in & his lapdog, Choe, just don't want us to. https://t.co/u3jGjo9p4n
Here is an interesting immigration story involving a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel and his adopted Korean daughter:
Retired Army Lt. Col. Patrick Schreiber is hoping his family — adopted daughter Hyebin and wife Soo Jin Schreiber — can stay in the country. Schreiber assumed he and his wife had time to adopt their Korean-immigrant niece, then 15, as their daughter. They didn’t realize that children brought into the country should be adopted before age 16 to be allowed access to U.S. citizenship.
A retired Army lieutenant colonel with six tours of duty, Patrick Schreiber says that his failure to gain an understanding of immigration law is “the greatest regret in my life.”
Because it now could mean having to move his family to South Korea next year so he, his wife and adopted daughter could stay together.
In 2013, just before he deployed to Afghanistan as a chief intelligence officer, Schreiber of Lansing, Mich. assumed he and his wife had time to adopt a Korean-immigrant niece, then 15, as their daughter. Having consulted with an adoption attorney, he thought the cut-off date to legally adopt would be her 18th birthday.
“I assumed wrong,” he says now, having adopted the girl when she was 17.
Too late, according to the government. A federal statute says that children brought into the country should be adopted before age 16 to be allowed access to U.S. citizenship.
As a result, deportation could await daughter Hyebin, a junior studying chemical engineering at the University of Kansas. [Stars & Stripes]
You can read more at the link, but it seems that US immigration laws need to have a process to apply for an exception to policy for unusual circumstances like this. With that said since she is studying chemical engineering I would be surprised if she isn’t able to get a work visa to stay in the US after graduating from college.
Hopefully this gets worked out, but even the worst case scenario of having to go back to South Korea is not that bad. It isn’t like she is going to some third world country and South Korea is where she has spent the vast majority of her life at. I have feeling this will work its self out, but I do find it interesting the difficulty this family is having trying to legally immigrate their adopted daughter to the US while the children of illegal immigrants continue to get special treatment under US immigration laws.
This may be a blueprint that we may see played again by North Korea in upcoming talks to meet their goal of separating the ROK from the US:
In the late 1980s, North Korea proposed creating a neutral state on the Korean Peninsula that could serve as a buffer zone in the region, declassified diplomatic documents showed Friday.
Then Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev delivered the North’s secret proposal to then U.S. President Ronald Reagan during their summit in Washington on Dec. 9, 1987, according to the documents disclosed by the foreign ministry.
Under the plan, the North wanted to create a federation-style republic consisting of two different governments representing the two Koreas and declare it as a neutral state that could serve as a regional buffer zone, the documents said.
The North also called for the two Koreas to sign a nonaggression treaty and replace the current armistice with a peace treaty, while suggesting the new entity would join the United Nations under a single name.
In addition, Pyongyang sought to scrap all agreements or treaties reached with third parties deemed to be running counter to their pursuit of reunification, a demand interpreted as a way to put pressure on Seoul to walk away from its mutual defense treaty with the U.S.
The North suggested the two Koreas reduce the number of their respective troops to fewer than 100,000 as a step toward building a peace mood and called for the withdrawal of any nuclear weapons and foreign troops from the peninsula, apparently targeting U.S. troops stationed in the South. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but this shows the Kim regime has long tried to separate the ROK from the US. Their nuclear weapons program is just the latest attempt to make this happen. Their nuclear weapons program that can threaten the US is being used as a bargaining chip to separate the US from South Korea and then seek a confederation on North Korean terms.
Japan wants conditions attached to the summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un: make North Korea promise to resolve the abduction issue and abandon medium-range ballistic missiles having Japan within range https://t.co/GFQUq4fJrQ
The Chinese government has long sought to break up the US-ROK and US-Japan military alliances that maintains the current security framework in Northeast Asia. The THAAD issue is a perfect example of how they have created tension in the US-ROK alliance with disinformation. The comfort women issue is another issue that Beijing has weaponized to create tension between the US, Korea, and Japan:
The “comfort women” issue appears, on the surface, to be a bilateral problem between South Korea and Japan. In reality, it is deeper. The key player is increasingly not South Korea, but China, and the ultimate target is not Japan, but the United States, as the comfort women are co-opted by Beijing in its anti-American information war.
China has been waging this war since Beijing realized after the First Gulf War that it would likely be unable to the United States on the battlefield. As the document Unrestricted Warfare, published by two high-ranking Chinese military officials, makes clear, the Chinese have chosen to fight the US, and particularly the US-Japan alliance, using desinformatsiya rather than hardware and troops. (…)
Overseas Chinese groups have also pressed hard on the comfort women and Nanjing issues in the US and Canada: In San Francisco, Superior Court judges Julie Tang and Lillian Sing retired from the bench in order to co-found the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, which was ultimately successful in bringing a comfort woman statue to San Francisco. Chinese-American San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee was himself a vocal proponent of the comfort woman statue. [Asia Times]
You can read more at the link, but I would not be surprised if Beijing isn’t fanning the flames of the anti-base sentiment in Okinawa as well to create further tension between the US and Japan.
If the US-North Korea summit is held at Panmunjom it would make sense to have President Moon attend as well:
President Moon Jae-in said Wednesday that North Korea’s separate summits with the South and the U.S. could possibly lead to a three-way meeting of the countries.
Moon said, “Depending on the venue, the summits may be more dramatic. Depending on the circumstances, they could lead to a three-way summit between North and South Korea and the U.S.”
He made the remarks at the summit preparation committee’s second meeting at Cheong Wa Dae.
The inter-Korean summit will take place at the truce village of Panmunjeom in late April. The venue for the Pyongyang-Washington summit has not yet been decided, but Panmunjeom is one feasible candidate. Moon was implying if the summit was held there, South Korea could join without much difficulty, enabling a three-way meeting.
“Through the upcoming summits and those that will follow, we must put an end to the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula,” the President said. [Korea Times]
It appears the Kim regime plans to use these three Americans as bargaining chips as part of the upcoming negotiations before the Kim-Trump summit:
The release of three U.S. citizens held in North Korea should not be a condition for the planned summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Sweden’s foreign minister said on Monday.
The United States has no embassy in Pyongyang and relies on Sweden, the so-called U.S. protecting power there, to do consular work, especially to help Americans in trouble.
Asked about the three Americans, Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom said: “I don’t want to have those elements involved in all of this … this is not a time to put up a lot of conditions and preconditions.”
The State Department’s recently retired envoy for North Korea said on Thursday he had urged North Korea to send a positive signal by releasing Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak Song and Kim Sang-duk before the summit. [Reuters]
