Amid reports of ROK-US military drills near the “five western islands” near the disputed Northern Limit Line and zombie computers spearheading DDoS attacks against South Korea, Doug Bandow asks, Why Are U.S. Troops Still In Korea?

During the Cold War the two Koreas were part of a “great game” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The peninsula mattered not because it was intrinsically important to America — just consult any atlas — but because the battle between the two Koreas was tied to the larger global struggle. Today conquest of the South by Pyongyang would be a humanitarian tragedy and create an economic loss, but would have little geopolitical impact on America. And now, in contrast to 1950, the ROK is well able to defend itself.

Some advocates of permanent defense subsidies for Seoul point to the DPRK’s nuclear program. There is no easy answer to the threat of North Korean nuclear proliferation: It might be better for the South to have its own nuclear deterrent than for the U.S. to stay involved. In any case, America’s conventional forces do nothing to deter a North Korean nuclear attack. To the contrary, the U.S. has provided 28,500 nuclear hostages for Pyongyang to threaten. The North’s nuclear program actually is yet another reason for America to bring home its troops.

Just what Seoul finds important became murkier after a “senior South Korean government official” implied, that six-party talks and inter-Korean denuclearization talks were separate tracks, and that a North Korean apology for the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island and the sinking of ROKS Cheonan was only aprecondition for the former. (Yonhap and Hankyoreh)

In another report, Amnesty International provides new information about North Korea’s gulags.

A rights group has published satellite images of what it says are North Korea’s political prison camps, saying they appear to be growing in size. In a linked report, Amnesty International also provides new witness testimony to shed light on the conditions in the camps. The document details accounts of torture, starvation and mass executions of political inmates.

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Filed under: Human Rights, Korea, Link Dumps, Military, USA, WMD Tagged: amnesty international, ddos attacks, doug bandow, gulags, north korea, roks cheonan, six party talks, South Korea, yeonpyeong