Demagogue

Remember when President Bush started a war in Iraq on the grounds that the country possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. When that turned out not to be true, the rationale shifted to spreading liberty and toppling a tyrant - it was a humanitarian war.

Well, North Korea does have Weapons of Mass Destruction and a brutal tyrant with a truly terrifying human rights record - from "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps" (massive pdf file)

Former Detainee #24 was eventually forcibly repatriated in a group of fifty North Koreans, some of whom were pregnant women, bound together by their wrists. They were taken, initially, for eighteen days to the Namindong bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police ku-ryu-jang in Sinuiju, who initially accused Former Detainee #24 of being corrupted by capitalism in China. She convinced them that she had gone to China only for food, so she was sent for one month to the do-jip-kyul-so in South Sinuiju run by the In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) police. Though she had heard that Kim Jong Il had recently said North Korean repatriates should not be treated harshly, there were beatings.

Detainees were fed the usual steamed corn, and as it was midsummer, most prisoners were sent out to work in the rice fields. This grandmother was too old and weak for such labor, and as she herself had had seven children, she was taken in the mornings to a nearby medical building to help care for the pregnant detainees. She helped deliver seven babies, some of which were full-term, some of which were injection-induced abortions. All of the babies were killed.

The first baby was born to a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Lim, who had been happily married to a Chinese man. The baby boy was born healthy and unusually large, owing to the mother’s ability to eat well during pregnancy in China. Former Detainee #24 assisted in holding the baby’s head during delivery and then cut the umbilical cord. But when she started to hold the baby and wrap him in a blanket, a guard grabbed the newborn by one leg and threw it in a large, plastic-lined box. A doctor explained that since North Korea was short on food, the country should not have to feed the children of foreign fathers. When the box was full of babies, Former Detainee #24 later learned, it was taken outside and buried.

She next helped deliver a baby to a woman named Kim, who also gave birth to a healthy full-term boy. As Former Detainee #24 caressed the baby, it tried to suckle her finger. The guard again came over and yelled at her to put the baby in the box. As she stood up, the guard slapped her, chipping her tooth. The third baby she delivered was premature — the size of an ear of corn — and the fourth baby was even smaller. She gently laid those babies in the box. The next day she delivered three more very premature babies and also put them in the box. The babies in the box gave her nightmares. Two days later, the premature babies had died but the two full-term baby boys were still alive. Even though their skin had turned yellow and their mouths blue, they still blinked their eyes. The agent came by, and seeing that two of the babies in the box were not dead yet, stabbed them with forceps at a soft spot in their skulls. Former Detainee #24 says she then lost her self-control and started screaming at the agent, who kicked her so hard in the leg that she fainted. Deemed unsuitable for further hospital work, she was returned to the detention center until her release several weeks later.

Of course, Bush is trying to negotiate with them.