Fox's Morris:  Freed hostages maybe should have stayed in N. Korea

http://www.nukewatch.com/quarterly/2009summer/page1a.pdf

The Not So Scary North Koreans by John LaForge

Speaking in the Rose Garden May 25, President Obama
vowed to “take action” in response to what he called “a
blatant violation of international law.”
Did the president mean he would direct the Attorney
General to bring charges against Bush administration officials
and the General Staff for their unprovoked military
aggression against Iraq? After all, in 2004 Secretary General
Kofi Annan of the UN called the Iraq war “illegal,” and in
2007, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia said publicly that the
U.S. occupation of Iraq was illegal. But no, U.S. crimes
against peace weren’t Mr. Obama’s focus.
Did Mr. Obama mean that a special prosecutor would
soon investigate the culpability of Bush White House
officials who developed, rationalized and directed the
worldwide torture of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners of war?
The Red Cross, a dozen books, national governments and
rights groups around the world have concluded that ghastly
tortures committed by U.S. personnel were systematic,
widespread and relentless. But unfortunately for the Rule of
Law, the President was not condemning the high crimes of
the Bush years. No, the target of Obama’s finger pointing
was North Korea which has conducted its second
underground nuclear bomb test.
How perfectly hypocritical and embarrassing can the
man be, speaking for a government that still refuses to ratify
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Considering the mountains of self-inflicted cancer-
causing contamination that our own government’s 1,000
nuclear bomb tests and 50 years of weapons production
have produced in the United States (read through any edition
of the Quarterly), it’s clear that if the Pentagon and the
White House want to hurt the North Korean dictatorship,
they might just leave it to pursue its own self-destruction.
That’s what our military advocated, having caused
enough cancer and debilitating illness among the American
people, that the Energy Department is belatedly paying out
millions in individual compensation to victims and their
survivors if they can show that their loss was caused by
weapons work or fallout. The National Cancer Institute
concluded in 1997 that as many as 75,000 thyroid cancers
were given to U.S. citizens by our own bomb test fallout. Up
to 15,000 of these cancers may have been fatal.
No, North Korea is not a threat to Asia or the U.S. today,
any more than Iraq or Afghanistan were in 2001. Weapons
contractors, who enjoy the $650 billion military budget, need
these foreign phantoms of fear and loathing, so the working
class will stay scared enough to hand half of their federal income
tax to the Pentagon (the contractors that is) every April.
Consider that the Japanese and the South Koreans, the
people actually within missile range of Pyong Yang’s missiles,
are less concerned about direct attack from the North —
something they would never dare — than about North Korea
selling its nuclear weapons technology on the black market.
With Pakistan, Obama’s good ally, selling H-bomb secrets
to Iran, North Korea and Libya; with Bolivia supplying uranium
to Iran; with France having sold the same to Israel for its nuclear
arsenal; and with the U.S. itself having just signed deals to sell
nuclear technology to nuclear-armed India and to the torture
state of United Arab Emirates, there is no end of profiteering in
the nuclear power and weapons arena.
As Gertrude Stein said, “Considering how dangerous
everything is, mothering is really very frightening” — leastof all North Korea. — John LaForge