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South Korea Releases Cheonan Investigation Report

The report obviously won’t do anything to budge the doubts of the roughly 30% of South Koreans who refuse to believe North Korea did it, regardless of the evidence.

Bruce Klingner’s comments are, as always, worth reading.

Hat tip to a friend.

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  1. OP:

    the doubts of the roughly 30% of South Koreans who refuse to believe North Korea did it, regardless of the evidence

    I think it is a function of society that there will usually be a group of contrarian outliers who, no matter the merits of the case at hand, will doubt or outright refuse to believe it.

    From Truthers to Birthers (whose numbers are embarrassingly high) to these Southersâ„¢, their existence, as annoying as it may be to thoughtful people, is quite normal.

  2. Mr. Klingner says, “South Korean and U.S. progressives also advocate searching for ‘an exit strategy’ from the Cheonan as if the attack that led to the death of 46 South Korean sailors was an inconvenience that should be swept under the rug.” I wonder who these U.S. progressives are. Anyone well known and influential?

    [Sure. Don Gregg, Mike Chinoy, and Selig Harrison, to name a few. – Joshua]

  3. Instead, policymakers and the public should focus on North Korea’s continuing threat to peace and stability in northeast Asia and discuss the proper means to redress it.

    Yeah, sure. Go ahead Bruce, whenever you’re ready. Stop shooting fish in a barrel, and look up at the stars.

    And Bruce; please, try to be fair. I don’t really like the theories either, but I believe they have a place in social discourse; dismissing them as inane is not appropriate.

    Just for an example, I have no idea whether Bill Goldman (comments on the Klingner article page) has the faintest clue about what he is saying (talks a good fight, though, huh!), but what I do know is that dismissing him as part of a small, unhelpful lunatic fringe is not helpful.

  4. Now I’ve said that, try this on for size instead; Democratic Party = ethical vacuum?

    First, I read this, and it just made me a bit tired, frankly. There is always so much to criticize about North Korea, I reminded myself, so why was anyone bothering to criticize them for asking China for help? Would it have been better to just give help to them gratis so they didn’t have to face the ignominy of asking, I pondered? Was that your point, I asked myself?

    Anyway, I got over that, but no sooner had i recovered than I read this article, and then I was sure. Seriously? Opposing a human rights law, even a bad one, is just… just what?

    Extraordinary.

  5. I think the Korean character and Korean democracy includes in some form and to some extent the right to hold ridiculous opinions contrary to reality. Considering how many Koreans go off to receive higher education, in my life, I think rather than Koreans forming new opinions on what they learn, they use newly acquired knowledge to reinforce pre-existing beliefs. I think Korean racial superiority here would be a good example.

    But, on a more anecdotal level, this reminds me of an English conversation partner I had a couple years ago, who is doing a post-doc in bioengineering — something to do with stem cells, though I was lost when he got into the technical details of what he does, at a major U.S. research university. On one of our first meetings, I told him I’m rather indifferent to going to Church. A couple of our next meetings were his claim — backed by his masters and phd from SNU — that evolution does not and could not have happened…

    I’m resigned to the notion that there will always be people like that and more so in Korea than any other country… with her high educational attainment rates and emotional nature of her national character (e.g. in language or the…South Korean left)…

  6. Joe wrote:

    I think the Korean character and Korean democracy includes in some form and to some extent the right to hold ridiculous opinions contrary to reality.

    Thank you for clearing that up. So it’s Korean character responsible for this. So I guess the one in four Americans who think President Obama is a Muslim are all the kyopo, right? They must be skewing the numbers of Republicans (59 percent) who believe Obama favors Muslims over other groups of Americans.

    Sheesh.

    Maybe, just maybe, such contrarian outliers tend to exist in most societies, such that it is a normal byproduct or function of society, rather than a function of “the Korean character.” That the SoKo Southersâ„¢ at 30 points are six percentage points higher than the US Faithersâ„¢ at 24 points may be where we want to focus, and I think that past propaganda efforts in pre-democratic South Korea has resulted in a climate of skepticism whenever the government (particularly a right-leaning government) insists on any particular viewpoint.

    Considering how many Koreans go off to receive higher education, in my life, I think rather than Koreans forming new opinions on what they learn, they use newly acquired knowledge to reinforce pre-existing beliefs.

    And this would make Koreans unique how?

    And how would the “correct” Koreans who do mostly or completely believe the Ch’ŏnan report fit into this? Aren’t they also merely “using newly acquired knowledge to reinforce pre-existing beliefs” as well? Great paradigm then: All Koreans are lemmings, some just jump off the cliff to the left and the others jump off the cliff to the right.

    Again, the Southersâ„¢ are not particularly larger a group than, say, the Birthers (and I’m lumping the Obama-is-a-Muslim argument in with that one, though we could call them Faithersâ„¢) and the Truthers, who also selectively pick and choose (and search for or ignore) what will reinforce their pre-existing beliefs or scare off evidence to the contrary.

    I think Korean racial superiority here would be a good example.

    It seems you are the ones making racialized statements about Koreans. All you did was take a nigglingly contrarian group and make a sweeping indictment of the whole country based on your self-serving body of evidence.

    (BTW, the US has a lot of obstinate creationists, too. In fact, Korean creationism has its roots in American creationism.)

  7. Actually the 30% is for the South Koreans trust the government report.

    35% say they are “not convinced,” 25% say they “tend to distrust” and about 10% who “completely distrust.”

    This is quite sad. On the one hand it shows how little credibility the government has, but it also seems impossible to have a reasonable debate in Korea anymore. By any standard, finding parts of a torpedo and traces of explosive residue that matches on the torpedo part with the salvaged hull has to be pretty strong evidence.

    And then there are submariners who say that the time the Cheonan was sunk was precisely the only time a sub attack would be possible because there are really treacherous currents any other time that evening. This should be really strong circumstantial evidence.

    But unfortunately there are memes on the Korean internet that are pretty crazy. They tend to quibble about the various perceived mistakes in the procedures and come up with counter proposals that really do not raise a reasonable doubt.

    For instance, the USS Hawaii, a US submarine began repairs in Pearl harbor a few days after the incident. Here are conspiracy theories that the Hawaii was involved in a collision with the Cheonan. Of course, the conspiracy theorists never tell us how we ended up with all that explosive residue if the Cheonan collided with a US sub!

    The Russian team that visited Korea for a week (the other team took more than a month!) and somehow manged concluded that it could have been an old mine that got caught up in a net (??!!) and then exploded has not been helpful at all either.

  8. Joshua, Don Gregg, friend of Bush 41, participant in Iran-Contra ain’t no progressive. Mike Chinoy was a foreign correspondent for CNN. To my knowledge (and you can help me here) he never took a progressive stand on any internal issue in the United States. Also to my knowledge (again you can help me) he has very little influence on US policy. Selig Harrison seems more influential, but what has he done that’s progressive? Has he strengthened unions in the US? Helped immigrants legalize their status? Preserved Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Fought for the Clinton and Obama health care plans? Opposed the death penalty? Promoted common-sense regulation of gun rights? Does he favor expiration of the Bush 43 tax cuts, but only for incomes below a quarter million? Anything progressive at all?

    You gave me three examples. One is definitely not progressive, the second is dubiosly influential, and both the second and third have no progressive record that I know of.

    [The views and affiliations of Chinoy, Gregg, and Harrison with respect to other issues lend zero support to your argument. And it’s a howler to cite an affiliation with CNN as evidence of conservative or non-progressive views. As if. — Joshua]

  9. Kushibo, you’re showing that the homgeneous Koreans and the heterogeneous Americans are the same kind of animal. That’s consistent with both creation and evolution!

  10. Frankly, as a political moderate who is registered as a Democrat, I think we’re doing the North Korean people a disservice by focusing too much on right or left, progressive or conservative, etc., especially if we get into bashing “the other side,” whoever that side may be. I know nothing of his politics, but the only thing that concerns me of Selig Harrison’s views are that he’s part of the ignorati elite.

  11. At least Selig Harrison’s views are the result of multiple visits to North Korea. I suspect the worst that should be levelled at him is a surprising degree of gullibility for a man of his age and stature.

  12. Well perhaps, but it can be useful; when one has Selig Harrison testifying to Congress on the one side and Victor Cha on the other, then one can safely disregard both and it sets the scene nicely for an appreciation of roughly where the middle ground lies.

  13. You don’t have to be South Korean to believe that the “evidence” in the Cheonan incident is possibly fake.

    I believe it was an unfortunate accident which was conveniently blamed on North Korea; a state of affair that supports continued US meddling in that area, and probably suits lots of South Koreans too.

    And it is certainly not outside of the realms of the possible that the USA cooked something up! It’s been done before many times, even in Europe. In the 1980s the USA faked countless submarine intrusions on Scandinavian territorial waters, lots of people spotted these submarines and public opinion and suspiciob strongly turned against the Soviet Union, nearby. But recent investigations have shown that the whole drama (which went on for years) started with an accident which was later exploited by the USA to turn public opinion primarily in Sweden, against the USSR. They deliberately continued secret exercises, leaving Scandis to believe it was the Russians.

  14. I find it amusing that anon would rather put his money on the us cook up than NK and foul play. At least your man enough to stand by your claim…without posting your name. Radical troll is a bad troll.

  15. Though I hate discussing thing with various anonymoi, since the “radical” opinion is not that uncommon, I think it’s fair to address it.

    Simply put, the argument does not hold water because of a number of reasons.

    First, with a new conservative leadership in South Korea and an American and global public keenly nervous about a belligerent North Korea, the US had utterly no need whatsoever to support its “continued meddling in that area,” as it was in no danger in the first place.

    Second, given how much the real prospect of war in the wake of then-Pres George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” comments directed at North Korea and Iran at the same time he was preparing to invade Iraq had turned into an orgy of anti-American sentiment in 2002 and 2003, it is actually a tremendous disadvantage for the US to be seen as on the cusp of North Korea, even if the North is at fault. Don’t get me wrong: dire situations may require military action, but this is the exact opposite of a scenario that the US should be engineering.

    Third, South Korea and the US practically fell over themselves trying to avoid a direct military confrontation following the sinking of the Ch’ŏnan. Their pattern of behavior simply does not fit the response of someone who had engineered a false flag attack for the purposes of ramping up their military game.

  16. Anonymous explains “Whiskey on the rocks” (the 1981 stranding of Soviet submarine S-363 just outside Karlskrona on an espionage trip inside Swedish territorial waters) as “an accident which was later exploited by the USA.” Oh no — it was front page news in Sweden, a cause of enormous fun, surprise, diplomatic concern and genuine alarm. It was followed by the discovery of Soviet tractor or crawler submarine tracks, and the realization that the Soviet Union had actively aggressive policies towards neutral Sweden.

    Were there also NATO intrusions — almost certainly so, as Tunander suggests. Was there any direct US involvement — almost certainly not, because nuke boats are far bigger than diesel boats. Nuke boats can’t operate safe from detection in fjords and inlets. The US hasn’t operated diesel boats for decades.

    As for the Cheonan being an accident — it’s about as much of an accident as the 1968 attack on the Blue House, the 1976 DMZ ax murder, the 1987 destruction of KAL 858, the 1996 and 1998 midget submarine incursions, or the 2004 sale of a nuclear plant to Syria. May I respectfully suggest you change your screen name from “anonymous” to “uninformed”?

  17. david woolley, although I would not be at all surprised if KAL 858 turned out to be all Kim Jong-il’s doing, I think that incident is less than a slam dunk.

  18. kushibo, you may know something I don’t about KAL858, but here’s a link to a recent DailyNK report about the surviving, confessed, terrorist: KAL 858 Bomber to Meet Abductee Families –http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk00100&num=6613. best regards

  23. I have not read Kim HyŏnhÅ­i’s book (anyone who’s heard or read my take that Lings, Lees, Parks, and Gomeses shouldn’t be profiting from their foolish acts can imagine how I might feel about plunking down some coin to read the confessions of someone who admitted to killing 115 people in cold blood), but I would say that both sides of the argument lack a preponderance of evidence. A true confession is an easy thing to fake.

    But… my niggling concerns and my devil’s advocacy aside, I believe North Korea probably was behind the bombing.

    More importantly, even if it turned out that the military dictatorship of Chun Doohwan really did engineer or fake the KAL 858 incident, it has no real bearing whatsoever on what a murderous regime the DPRK is. Just as all the wrongdoing committed by the ROK or even the US forces during the Korean War do not mitigate North Korea’s responsibility for that war or the atrocities committed during it.

    Even if my devil’s advocacy argument were true, it is clear that South Korea has since democratized and become a country where transgressions like those of the past would be very difficult or impossible to reoccur. North Korea, by contrast, has spiraled into an even worse hell run by people ready and willing to continue with even worse methods of keeping down the populace.

    In other words, my view of North Korea does not rest in any way on whether or not Pyongyang was behind the KAL 858 incident.

  24. I wrote:

    Just as all the wrongdoing committed by the ROK or even the US forces during the Korean War do not mitigate North Korea’s responsibility for that war or the atrocities committed during it.

    I meant to present this as a Bruce Cumings reference.

  25. “I have not read Kim HyŏnhÅ­i’s book (anyone who’s heard or read my take that Lings, Lees, Parks, and Gomeses shouldn’t be profiting from their foolish acts”

    That’s too bad because Kim Hyun Hee’s book is a great read and goes into great detail about her spy training.

    I am not sure what you mean by “profiting”- are you talking money? The book proceeds were to go to the families of the victims- not that it makes up for murder. How would she have profited?

  28. Lisa Ling told me herself that she’s donating her proceeds of Somewhere Inside (which I’m still getting through, Glans, but grad school readings take precedence) to various worthy charities, and now that you mention it, I seem to recall the proceeds of her book being given away, but do you have a link or other evidence to substantiate that?

    Even if it’s true, though, I don’t know how enthusiastic I’d be about reading it. If the official version of KAL 858 is correct, then it boils down to a self-serving “I’m so sorry I killed 115 people” tome, perhaps one that ROK intelligence tainted or directed for their own ends. (And if KAL 858 isn’t really what it’s made out to be… then it’s just a propaganda piece, but I won’t go there).

    With Hwang Jang-yop and Kim Hyonhui now that she’s taken up the cause of the Japanese abductees, I’m always a bit dismayed that people responsible for mass deaths have become icons of the anti-Pyongyang right.

    Give me Kang Cholhwan any day.

  29. “I’m always a bit dismayed that people responsible for mass deaths have become icons of the anti-Pyongyang right. “

    Icons? I wouldn’t go that far.

    But that’s me.

    It’s a good read because it goes into detail about one person’s story from beginning to end- how one can be brainwashed from birth to the point where he/she can carry out such a horrible mission.

    I dunno. I think anyone can become susceptible to brainwashing.

  30. Theresa, I used the same link as you posted. The $228.00 was the most expensive new book out of the 8 listed. $98.88 is the most expensive used book and yes they are coming from booksellers, not the author.