The Truth About North Korea?

The December 22, 2014 episode of Democracy Now featured two eminent guests giving their thoughts on the North Korean hacking scandal. They didn't agree with controlled media.

The guests were:

Tim Shorrock, investigative journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence, Shorrock grew up in South Korea and has been writing about U.S.-Korea relations for 30 years.

Christine Hong, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, executive board member of the Korea Policy Institute. She has spent time in North Korea, including a visit to the country as part of a North American peace delegation.

Following is an edited version of the transcript of the show. Bolding and content in brackets was added by me.

The original transcript and video of the show can be found here:

http://www.democracy...es_fun_at_north

. . . JUAN GONZÁLEZ [Democracy Now Anchor]:
Although U.S. officials have said North Korea is behind the attack, many experts have questioned whether the evidence is sufficient. . . .

CHRISTINE HONG: . . . . the United States is one of the most egregious global actors when it comes to cyberwarfare [Edward Snowden also hinted at this]. . . . the United States has to shift its policy with regard to Cuba. But the same is not true with regard to North Korea.

With regard to this film, one thing that I’d say is that the lines between truth and fiction are extraordinarily thin. I mean, the plot of this film, which very few people have seen, was actually screened in rough-cut form at the State Department. And the content of this film is supposedly—you know, it’s about the CIA using Hollywood entertainment and a talk-show host sort of vehicle as a kind of cover to assassinate the leader of North Korea. What’s interesting about this film is, on the one hand, it’s framed in the United States, in U.S. media, as a kind of free speech issue, but this is really a red herring. You know, what’s interesting to me about this is the fact that if you actually look at what the Sony executives did, they consulted very closely with the State Department, which actually gave the executives a green light with regard to the death scene. And they also consulted with a RAND North Korea watcher, a man named Bruce Bennett, who basically has espoused in thesis that the way to bring down the North Korean government is to assassinate the leadership. And he actually stated, in consulting with Sony about this film, that this film, in terms of the South Korean market, as well as its infiltration by defector balloon-dropping organizations into North Korea, could possibly get the wheels of a kind of regime change plot into motion. So, in this instance, fiction and reality have a sort of mirroring relationship to each other. . . .

TIM SHORROCK: Well, first of all, the person she just mentioned, Bruce Bennett, who was a consultant on this film, works for the RAND Corporation, which is a think tank for the U.S. military and has been for decades. And it so happens that the Sony CEO happens to sit on the board of directors of the RAND Corporation. It has—Sony has extensive ties with the U.S. national security system. Its CIO used to work for the secretary of defense, in terms of their—guarding their internal security. That’s one point.

But, you know, second, I think that—you know, that this attack began in late November, early December. At that time, this cyber-attack was run by this group that you mentioned, this GOP, Guardians of Peace. They made no mention whatsoever of the film. It was all about Sony and its internal racism and that kind of thing. I have seen no indication whatsoever that there was any similarity—some real similarity of this attack to anything that North Korea has been accused of before. And, you know, many cyber experts, from Kim Zetter of Wired to Marc Rogers and others, have raised real questions about the FBI evidence. . . .

And, you know, we have a massive build-up going on in Asia, military build-up. And I think, you know, we need to keep North Korea as the enemy, as the armed enemy that’s going to attack us at any moment, so we can defend these bases in Japan, particularly in Okinawa, which are the focus of a massive public protest. You may have noticed—Americans didn’t notice, but Okinawans and Japanese voted to pull these bases out in recent elections. . . .

So, I think there’s a lot of political, you know, situation going on here, a lot of politics going on that’s completely unnoticed. And I think it’s shameful of The New York Times, once again, to be in the leadership of spinning out these claims, dubious claims, and, you know, possibly instigating another war, another confrontation.

AMY GOODMAN [Democracy Now Anchor]: Tim Shorrock, I want to ask Christine Hong about the issue of what this means right now for North Korea and China relations and what evidence there is that in fact North Korea has hacked Sony. But, Tim, I wanted to ask you: Would the U.S. allow a film that was about the assassination of a U.S. president?

TIM SHORROCK: Well, you know, I can imagine what our response would be, not only to an assassination of our president, but showing his head being blown apart and his skull flying all over the place. I mean, you know, this is a racist kind of—racist kind of imagery. For these white, rich stoners to be laughing to the bank all the way about this, I think, is disgraceful and disgusting.

It’s not a matter of freedom of speech. I mean, these people—Seth Rogen and his pals over there at Sony are just, you know, the lowest of the low of the U.S. propaganda on North Korea. Look at the New York Times interview he did yesterday. He has no knowledge. He knows nothing about North Korea, the past of the United States, the U.S. bombing during the Korean War, the standoffs, the military crises over the last, you know, 20, 30 years, the cost to the Korean people of this militarization, the cost to the Korean people, North and South. All he’s interested in is making money and getting stoned. And I think it’s shameful that, you know, people are all over Hollywood, George Clooney, are looking at this as some kind of like big freedom issue, you know? Well, you know, let’s look at the real role of the U.S. in Korea and try to—you know, you can make comedies about Korea. You can make comedies, like M*A*S*H. But let’s have some—you know, let’s have some humanity in these films. . . .

[A]re there North Korean agents all over Hollywood that really understand Hollywood like this and know who’s who in these studios? I kind of doubt it. And I think it’s—you know, if you look at the early stories of this hack, which is important to do, because before North Korea even came up as the source, there were many articles in the tech press and the Hollywood press about this. And it shows, you know, extensive knowledge of Sony, who is who, where their emails are kept, where all the stuff is kept inside their servers. I just find it ludicrous to think that the North Koreans, so isolated, so crude in their technology, have been able to completely penetrate and, you know, almost destroy an American Hollywood studio like this . . .

CHRISTINE HONG: . . . .when it comes to North Korea . . . Americans have a wealth of conviction and belief, but they have very little by way of knowledge, and even less so, as Tim mentioned, any knowledge about a very brutal, multi-decade legacy of U.S. interventionism on the Peninsula and a policy of regime change that is several decades old, that has essentially failed. . . .

[J]ust to go back to the narrative of Red Dawn 2, which . . . replaced China with North Korea in post-production . . . the U.S. policy toward Asia and the Pacific region, the Obama "pivot" policy basically is aimed at containing China. But it uses the pretext of a nuclear-armed and dangerous North Korea as a very convenient devil function. And this has justified the acceleration of a missile defense system. . . .