ACCESS OF EVIL

At the passionate insistence of a friend, I draw attention to the possibility of North Korean death camps. “Death camps” would be a term that fails to do justice to the allegations, actually. “Atrocity exhibition” would be closer.

The lack of press coverage raises doubts that the camps are real, but The Guardian is not exactly the Weekly World News, and this would not be the first outrage ignored by most of the media and the world. The Financial Times has also looked at the camps, and added another scandalous wrinkle:

South Korean and US intelligence agencies have long been rumoured to possess satellite pictures of the camps but the evidence has never been made public.

This would mean that not only did the United States ignore North Korea’s boasts of illegal nuclear capabilities to go after Iraq, which had no nuclear capabilities, but that it is still ignoring ongoing North Korean crimes against humanity while justifying the Iraq war becaused it deposed the tyrant Saddam Hussein. (Again, the point is not that there was bad intelligence before our invasion, but that a rush to war eliminated our chances at replacing what we knew was intelligence of questionable quality.)

Even if U.S. intelligence had not known of the death camps, well, it does now. But the White House is silent on the matter. It was war for Iraq, which had -- relatively speaking -- been keeping to itself, and diplomacy for North Korea, which has been jumping up and down waving loaded pistols in the air.

It’s possible the death camp story, if it’s not debunked, will get bigger play, putting pressure on the White House to more aggressively take on North Korea. But don’t count on there being another war.

Those are reserved for the Middle East, for countries that really don’t have weapons of mass destruction.