New, Rare and Unreleased Material from the DMZ Empire
New, Rare and Unreleased Material from the DMZ Empire
At long last, The Intercept has decided to “broaden” access to the massive trove of NSA documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Here’s my initial thoughts on this momentous decision, written hastily from South Korea. Thanks to Lauren Walker of The…
I’m heading back to Korea on Friday. I’ve been invited to Gwangju by the city government with the small group of Korean and foreign reporters who were there during the citizens’ uprising of May 18, 1980. The city is sponsoring…
President Obama will visit Hiroshima on May 27, accompanied by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Should he apologize, pundits ask? Absolutely. My thoughts, just posted at The Nation. The idea that the atomic bombings brought an end to war has always seemed…
The wars drums are beating in Pyongyang and Washington, and the official media in both North Korea and the United States are eating it up. Time for a little sanity: a guest post by my colleague Simone Chun. “Heart speaks…
Noam Chomsky has long had a deep interest in Korea. Ever since his involvement in the antiwar movement of the 1960s, he’s paid close attention to the country and the controversial role played by the United States on the peninsula…
That’s the word yesterday from Defense One, a military publication that’s itself funded by Honeywell and other big defense contractors. The number of private contractors working for the U.S. Defense Department in Iraq grew eight-fold over the past year, a rate that…
Opposition lawmakers in South Korea’s National Assembly are staging a marathon filibuster against a so-called Anti-Terrorist Act being pushed by the Park Geun-Hye government in the wake of North Korea’s latest rocket launch and nuclear test. As the independent…
Democracy Now! has published the full transcript of my February 8 interview on North Korea’s latest satellite launch. Since that day, President Obama has dispatched nuclear-armed F-22s into Korea as a “warning” to Pyongyang and signed tough sanctions passed unanimously…
This week, following North Korea’s launch of a satellite, South Korea unilaterally shut down the Kaesong Industrial Zone just north of the DMZ. The decision marked a decisive shift in the situation in the Korean Peninsula. I’ve always seen the…
North Korea’s rocket test and satellite launch on Saturday has deepened tensions on the Korean Peninsula and led to today’s closure by South Korea of the Kaesong Industrial Zone, the last remaining project from the days of Kim Dae…
I just published a story at The Nation about the recent kidnapping of three U.S. contractors in Baghdad. The tale underscores an important truth about the vast expansion of military contracting in war zones over the past 15 years: it’s…
This happened in 2015 under Park Guen Hye. It might sound trivial compared to what lots of Korean went through under her rule, but it was a bit intimidating at the time. And it cost me: this same year I…
South Korean police raided the national offices of the Korean Federation of Public Services and Transport Workers Union (KPTU) on Friday but were thwarted by workers and union members. The raid is part of a broad crackdown on organized labor by…
A Storify listing of stories I posted on Twitter from China, Japan and Korea over the past two weeks, prepared for the Founding Meeting of the Korea Peace Network. I’m giving a talk Friday morning on the “Geopolitical contest and…
In January 2010, a few days after a Nigerian terrorist came close to blowing up a US passenger plane on its way to Detroit, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser made an extraordinary confession. “I told the President today I let him…
We just love our proxy army, navy and air force. This is from the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Facebook page. Guess they think they need a lot of propaganda to overcome the deep aversion to the security bills that Abe – to…
The New York Times just posted a story shedding new light on that big fight in 2004 between the George W. Bush White House and the Justice Department over the post-9/11 mass collection of domestic calling data by the NSA. …
The late, great Pete Seeger performs Bob Dylan’s Masters Of War with simultaneous translation into Japanese. Eerie yet very moving.