Trump's Afghan War: No Mission, No Margin

More U.S. military dead in Afghanistan this year, and more U.S. troops are deploying to the world's most inhospitable place for foreign armies. /AP photo

With the Trump administration sending more U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan, America's longest war is getting longer.

The commander-in-chief has yet to offer the country an explanation why Americans are dying under his watch during in the latest interminable Afghan war.

Borrowing and inverting a business-world motto that could appeal to President Trump, America's war in Afghanistan is now a "no-mission, no-margin" scenario. In business, even the best-intended enterprises are doomed unless they can turn a buck, generating the marginal income necessary for long-term financial survival. No margin, no mission.

It is impossible to turn a buck--or generate any other gain--if there is no mission to execute at the outset of any enterprise.

What is the U.S. mission in Afghanistan under President Trump?

Trump loves to win. If winning is the mission, then Americans should brace for a long struggle and consider making Afghanistan the 51st state.

Editor's Note: More to come

War on 'mainstream media' menaces democracy

Defying President Lyndon Johnson's administration in 1968, legendary CBS journalist Walter Cronkite had the courage to tell the truth about America's disastrous war in Vietnam. /CBS News video

Nothing is more patriotic than speaking truth in the face of power.

Journalists in the so-called mainstream media are not inclined to defend themselves against misguided assaults on their integrity and commitment to telling the truth, even when their reputations and lives are under threat.

With powerful politicians peddling alternative facts, these are dark days for the free press, which has served as a bulwark of democracy in the United States for more than two centuries. The professionals who staff newsrooms at America's best news media organizations such as The New York Times need to accept that producing high-quality editorial content is no longer sufficient to ensure continuation their pivotal role in American society.

When the president of the United States declares war on the news media, journalists have a patriotic duty to defend themselves. When President Trump and his sycophantic supporters attack members of the press, it is not just journalists who are under siege; one of the pillars on which democracy stands is under assault.

When I decided to pursue a journalism career more than two decades ago, my grandest aspiration was to work at CBS News, The New York Times, The Washington Post or Time Inc., David Halberstam's powers that be. My dream came true on a modest scale in the first week of April 2013, when I started working weekends as a digital media producer at WBZ, the CBS News affiliate in Boston.

A couple of days after joining the WBZ staff, terrorists detonated two bombs along the route of the Boston Marathon. On television, radio and online, WBZ journalists provided world-class coverage of the heinous crime and the manhunt for the perpetrators that followed. I witnessed firsthand the professionalism and dedication of journalists employed in one of the bastions of the "mainstream media."

On April 19, 2013, WBZ was the first news media organization to broadcast live video of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the boat where he had taken refuge after a shootout with police in Watertown, Mass./ Massachusetts State Police image

Despite my devotion to journalism, I know even the best U.S. news media organization are far from perfect.

In addition to participating in coverage of the Marathon bombings, one of my most memorable experiences at WBZ was having lunch in the station's cafeteria with Jack Williams. The veteran newsman told me about how CBS had treated his friend, Walter Cronkite, at the end of his career.

Cronkite was still "the most trusted man in America" when CBS replaced him as anchor of the evening news with Dan Rather. As he recounted the succession story, Williams could barely control his disgust. Cronkite had plenty of journalistic "life in his tank" when CBS executives forced him into retirement, Williams told me.

Here is the key fact about the best news media organizations: for every misstep that reputable journalists make, there are thousands of examples of high-quality information provided to the American people.

Here are just a few examples of courageous and groundbreaking journalism generated at news organizations that Trump and his supporters are gleefully tarring as the "dishonest mainstream media" in America:

In 1954, CBS News icon Edward R. Murrow challenges Red Scare demagogue Sen. Joseph McCarthy. /CBS News video

In 1963, Eric Sevareid of CBS News interviews "Silent Sprint" author Rachel Carson for a CBS Reports documentary. Under pressure from the industrial chemical industry, three of the documentary's five commercial sponsors withdrew from the broadcast about Carson's book, which exposed the dangers of pesticides and revolutionized humanity's views of the environment. CBS aired the documentary despite the financial blow. /CBS image via Getty Images

In June 1971, Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham and the newspaper's editor, Ben Bradlee, are elated as they depart U.S. District Court after a federal judge upheld their right to continue publishing the Pentagon Papers. The documents, which had been obtained from whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, exposed years of U.S. government deception about the war in Vietnam. /AP photo

Bradlee talks with reporters Bob Woodward, left, and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post newsroom. Woodward and Bernstein exposed a criminal conspiracy in the White House that ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. /Image via Outside the Beltway

In 1975, New York Times photo journalist Dith Pran and correspondent Sydney Schanberg stayed in Cambodia when other members of the news media fled the country's Khmer Rouge reign of terror. Both men were captured and Pran endured several years in brutal work camps. After Schanberg escaped, he earned a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Cambodian genocide. /New York Times-AFP image

After publishing 600 stories in 2002 about sexual abuse perpetrated by priests, The Boston Globe was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. The Globe's coverage included the revelation that the Archdiocese of Boston's leader, Cardinal Bernard Law, had allowed a pedophile priest to prey on parishioners for years. /Boston Globe image

Trump Transition: Conservative Christmas

Energy secretary nominee Rick Perry, a former Texas governor and a longtime conservative government standard-bearer, visits Trump Tower in New York during the president-elect's Cabinet hiring spree in December. /Getty Images photo by Drew Angerer

Conservative Americans found an unexpected haul of presents under the Christmas tree this year: a bigly box bursting open with a business-tycoon president-elect and a Cabinet stuffed with billionaires and plutocratic ideologues.

Several of the executive-department nominees are more akin to a wolf pack guarding the whole farm than a fox guarding the hen house.

Trump's nominee for Housing and Urban Development secretary, Ben Carson, is a retired neurosurgeon and former Republican primary-season rival of the president-elect. He has no public housing experience and a self-help ideology that seems ill-suited to providing an essential safety-net service. /Getty Images photo by Andrew Burton


Trump's nominee for Education secretary, Michigan Republican Party bigwig billionaire Betsy DeVos, has no experience in public education, including with her own children. She favors private-school vouchers and charter schools as solutions--and likely poison pills--for struggling public schools.

Trump's nominee for Energy secretary, two-time GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry, has advocated dismantling the department. While calling for the agency's demise in an epic 2011 debate gaffe, he forgot the department's name.

Trump's nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, U.S. Rep. Tom Price, R-Georgia, favors a free-market approach to medicine that includes slashing HHS regulations and privatizing Medicare.

Trump's nominee for Environmental Protection Agency administrator, E. Scott Pruitt, has been a fierce critic of the EPA in his current role as Oklahoma attorney general. Pruitt is among the named petitioners in a 25-state lawsuit against the EPA over greenhouse gas regulations.

As the country embarks on Republican government in the White House, both houses of Congress, and a majority of statehouses, a host of hurdles that require united effort confronts the apparently partisan Trump administration: healthcare reform; national governments that threaten global security such as North Korea; external economic threats from powerful competitors and volatile global markets; internal economic challenges including a dilapidated infrastructure, an aging population, a skewed concentration of wealth, and disruptive waves of automation that upend the workforce; roiled race relations; immigration reform; and climate change.

Tackling these hurdles from the right, or any single-minded approach, is doomed to failure measured in blood and national treasure.

Russian hacking: Putin winner in U.S. election

Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin gained multiple advantages in the U.S. election that elevated Donald Trump to the White House, including the defeat of a potentially formidable adversary: Hillary Clinton. /image via itv.com

Evidence and logic show the Russian Federation government was involved in hacking efforts that were designed to impact the 2016 U.S. election.

The evidence of Russian meddling is compelling, and it was convincingly presented last week by Eugene Kiely for FactCheck.org:

• All U.S. intelligence agencies and at least three companies have investigated election-related hacking such as the cracking of John Podesta's email account and concluded that the Russian government was involved
• CrowdStrike, the company hired to investigate the May 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee, concluded that "two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries" were responsible for the electronic espionage
• Fidelis Cybersecurity, another Internet security firm, not only concurred with CrowdStrike's findings but also declared "this settles the question" of Russian government involvement in the DNC hack
• On Nov. 17, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before a House committee, stating the utmost care was taken before the U.S. intelligence community identified the Russian government as the source of election-related hacking: "We gave considerable thought to diming out Russia."

Logically, the case is just as convincing. Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin had powerful motives to push for a Donald Trump victory:

• Hillary Clinton, who had foreign policy experience as secretary of state, would have likely been an adversary on the world stage if she had become president.
• Donald Trump, who has no foreign policy experience beyond financial dealings, has signaled willingness to cooperate with Putin, including openness to recognizing Russia's annexation of Crimea and fighting in tandem against ISIS in the Middle East.
• The chaotic spectacle of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, including Clinton winning the popular vote, is a huge PSYOP victory for Putin. The hacking exposed dirty tricks and fueled unsubstantiated suspicion of vote rigging.

On Oct. 7, the Department of Homeland Security reported the agency was "confident" that the Russian government was involved in hacking attacks on the U.S. election. /www.dhs.gov 

Dakota Access Pipeline: Photography from frontline

Editor's Note: There has been little in-depth coverage of the opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Reservation in North Dakota. Recent images from Cannon Ball, N.D., where "water protector" demonstrators are camped near the pipeline's path, shine light on the struggle over completion of the 1,172-mile oil artery.

On Nov. 20, law enforcement officers fire a water cannon to douse Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) demonstrators at a state highway bridge in Cannon Ball. The temperature was about 26 degrees F and several protesters were injured, Youth Radio correspondent Avery White reported. /Avery White photo

In late November, musician, author and photographer D. Randall Blythe visited one of the "water protector" encampments in Cannon Ball. He wrote about what he witnessed for Rolling Stone. /David Rollingcloud photo

Blythe volunteered to participate in "direct action" demonstrations involving face-offs with law enforcement. The Lamb of God frontman witnessed a police line stand-off at Turtle Island near the Dakota Access Pipeline's proposed crossing of the Missouri River. The Sioux tribe relies on the river as a water resource. /D. Randall Blythe photo

"The ridge line at the top of the hill became crowded with heavily armed police officers and men in tactical gear staring down at us. I saw rifles, grenade launchers, safety-orange shotguns, large pepper-spray canisters resembling fire extinguishers and a few water hoses that were rolled out. Hooded men with binoculars and video cameras walked the hilltop, filming and scanning our faces constantly."
--Randy Blythe for Rolling Stone

During the clash with protesters on Nov. 20, law enforcement fired water cannons and non-lethal projectiles at protesters. A Native American security guard told Blythe that he collected these non-lethal rounds, which include a buckshot beanbag, from the scene of the confrontation. /D. Randall Blythe photo

Medics have treated several demonstrators for head wounds that are likely the result of law enforcement officers  firing non-lethal rounds at protesters. /August White image

Military veterans observe the police-barricaded bridge near the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Reservation that has become a demonstration flash point. More than 2,000 veterans are vowing to serve as human shields to help block eviction of the demonstrators from their camps. /Associated Press photo via voaanews.com

Veteran Trek Kelly of Venice Beach, Calif., is among the veterans supporting DAPL demonstrators facing eviction. /Reuters photo 

With a Dec. 5 eviction deadline from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers looming, DAPL demonstrators also are facing brutal weather conditions as winter bears down on their camps in Cannon Ball. /Reuters image

Dakota Access Pipeline: Sacred Stone Camp stand

CNN reported today that there are thousands of Dakota Access Pipeline protesters hunkered down in frigid winter conditions at the Sacred Stone Camp in Cannon Ball, N.D. /CNN image

This weekend, more than 2,000 military veterans, including U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, are vowing to serve as human shields for Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protesters at the Sacred Stone Camp, Reuters reported today.

The protest camp is within a couple miles of the energy project's last unfinished segment. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has set a Dec. 5 deadline for protesters to leave Sacred Stone Camp or face arrest.

The Corps decided last month to delay the final unfinished leg of the pipeline project, which features tunneling under Lake Oahe, a drinking water reservoir for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. The Corps said the project pause is necessary because "additional discussion and analysis are warranted" on several grounds, including "the history of the Great Sioux Nation's dispossessions of lands" and the resource value of Lake Oahe to the Standing Rock Sioux.

Despite the delay, the Dec. 5 eviction deadline has set the stage for another confrontation over the 1,172 mile long pipeline, The project price tag is pegged at $3.7 billion.

In August, hundreds of DAPL protesters were based at the Sacred Stone Camp. /KFYR-TV image 

In spring 2016, a Google Maps image shows the barren and sparsely populated landscape at Sacred Stone Camp.

Dakota Access Pipeline another black mark

During a cold late-fall night in Standing Rock, N.D., police target a water cannon at protesters who have been trying to block completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Nov. 20, 2016, clash also included police firing tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters, Youth Radio correspondent Avery White reported. /Avery White photo

In the 21st century, there should be no more Native American treaty violations or disruption of natural resources on Reservation land. The Dakota Access Pipeline is an affront to both of these fundamental deal-breakers.

The pipeline cuts through land promised to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in an 1851 treaty. The petroleum project also poses an environmental threat to the tribe's primary water source--the Missouri River--which runs along one side of the tribe's Reservation.

The drumbeat of human rights abuses against Native Americans--muted for a generation since conflict rekindled during the 1970s at Wounded Knee in South Dakota--is back with a vengeance with the Dakota Access Pipeline.

In October 2016, armed soldiers and law enforcement officers move in formation during the eviction of protesters who had camped on private land in the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Associated Press reported at least 117 protesters were arrested and at least one was injured. /AP photo by Mike McCleary

American indigenous people have been on the receiving end of violence on a societal scale since the arrival of the first European colonists in the early 1600s. Accounts and accusations of germ warfare against Native Americans begin in the Colonial period, with war crimes including mass executions and concentration camps accelerating through the 1800s, then closing with The Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.

The U.S. government has been signing treaties with American indigenous people since the founding of the country, reaching a pact with the Delaware Nation in 1778. Many thousands of Native Americans were segregated into Reservations under hundreds of these treaties, which grant the right of self government to indigenous people, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled.

Ever since the first treaties were negotiated, Native Americans have variously staved off or succumbed to incursions targeting treaty-protected territory. Greed is always the motive: land grabbing and resource robbing have driven the exploitation for centuries.

The Dakota Access Pipeline traverses more than 1,100 miles of environmentally sensitive terrain, including two dozen river crossings: full illustration. /New York Times graphic, above; Washington Post graphic, below

In September 2016, thousands of protesters march to a burial ground site that bulldozers disturbed during construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in Cannon Ball, N.D. /Robyn Beck photo via Getty Images

During the Nov. 20 clash, police fired tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets on protesters near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. With the temperature around 26 degrees, hundreds of protesters were treated for hypothermia, tear-gas inhalation, and rubber-bullet injuries including head wounds, according to sacredstonecamp.org. One tribal elder went into cardiac arrest; but medics performed CPR and resusitated him, the website reported. /ABC News image

North Korea reaches nuclear-tipped tipping point

North Korea tests a ballistic missile in December 2012, deploying "an object" in Earth's orbit, according to the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The three-stage rocket could be capable of delivering a warhead to Alaska or the West Coast of the United States. /Image via AP

City-buster nuclear bomb: Check!

Intercontinental ballistic missile: Check!

Miniaturized nuclear warhead: In development.

With Friday's test of a Hiroshima-scale nuclear bomb, North Korea has firmly staked the totalitarian country's claim to nuclear-power status. The South Korean military estimates the explosive yield of the blast at about 10,000 tons of TNT. The nuclear bombed dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 packed 12 to 15 kilotons of explosive yield, leveled 90 percent of the city and killed 80,000 people in a flash.

The nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945 reduced the city to rubble. Dubbed "Little Boy," the American nuclear bomb had about the same explosive force as the atomic device that North Korea tested last week, according to the South Korean military. /Image via www.nbcnews.com

North Korea has either successfully tested or is actively developing enough elements of a fully capable nuclear-weapons arsenal that the time has come to seriously face the reality that the world's most powerful totalitarian nation will soon be threatening at least half the Earth with atomic Armageddon.

With last week's Earth-shaking blast at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, the Orwellian regime of Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang has proven the ability unleash Hiroshima-scale destruction with atomic bombs. To become capable of threatening at least half the world with thermonuclear blackmail, all that North Korea has to prove now is the ability to miniaturize atomic bombs to equip nuclear-tipped missiles.

The North Korean military is actively developing and testing missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads to regional neighbors such as Japan, including truck-mounted and submarine-fired ballistic missiles. Just as disturbingly, a North Korean statement on last week's atom bomb test says the outcast country can produce "at will, and as many as it wants, a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power."

The Kim regime's intercontinental ballistic missile capability ambition is also nearly within grasp, with multiple tests of the three-stage Unha-3 missile, including the successful delivery of a payload into space in December 2012. While it is unclear whether the Unha-3 is presently capable of accurately delivering a warhead to Alaska or the U.S. West Coast, which includes the technological challenge of a nuclear-tipped warhead's fiery plunge into the Earth's atmosphere from space, the Russians proved with Sputnik in 1957 that the ability to place satellites in orbit is a relatively small technological step away from launching nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.

According to North Korea state news agency Rodong Sinmun, these images show a successful test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile in August 2016. The North American Aerospace Defense Command confirmed and assessed the missile's 300-mile trajectory, which was tracked from the North Korean coast east toward Japan. /Image via CNN

The maturation of North Korea's nuclear weapons program begs an existential question: How do you contain a rogue totalitarian regime that is capable of incinerating the cities of its regional neighbors and half the world? The containment policy that most of the international community has relied upon for more than half a century to limit the North Korean regime's threat to the rest of humanity is on the verge of collapsing.

The governments of regional and world powers such as China, Japan, Russia and the United States can either rise to this challenge, or humanity will slip back into the nuclear-weapons-fueled terror of The Cold War.

/BBC graphic and Geoeye image

Muhammad Ali: Great quotes from The Greatest

In 2002, legendary boxer Muhammad Ali visits Kabul, Afghanistan, as a peace ambassador for the United Nations Children's Fund and the World Food Program. Ali died June 3 at a hospital in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 74. /Reuters photo by Radu Sigheti

Muhammad Ali is the greatest boxer of all time, but he also was a master of the English language. Here are some of his all-time greatest quotes:

"I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'"

"He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life."

"I know where I'm going and I know the truth, and I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be what I want."

"If you even dream of beating me you better wake up and apologize."

"Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even."

"Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are."

"Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change."

"I've made my share of mistakes along the way; but if I have changed even one life for the better, I haven't lived in vain."

"To be able to give away riches is mandatory if you wish to possess them. This is the only way you will be truly rich."

"No one knows what to say in the loser's locker room."

"It isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe."

"The man who has no imagination has no wings."

"I am an ordinary man who worked hard to develop the talent that I was given. I believed in myself, and I believe in the goodness of others."

"My principles are more important than the money or my title."

"I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world."

'Rhapsody in Black' shines light on racism

Actor and writer LeLand Gantt recounts a life colored by racism in his one-man play, Rhapsody in Black. /Image via dutchesstourism.com

The capital of New Hampshire is a perfect place to awaken white people to the reality of growing up black in America.

In a stunning and revealing sharing of his life's story this weekend at the Capitol Center for the Arts, New York-based actor and playwright LeLand Gantt performed his theatrical masterpiece on race in America, Rhapsody in Black. From grammar school in Pennsylvania to his adulthood in New York, Gantt relives seemingly endless episodes of racially fueled alienation, injustice and self doubt.

For me, the most gut-wrenching moments of the night came after Gantt's performance, when the artist sat down with his legs dangling over the edge of the stage and fielded more than a dozen questions from the audience about the play and the legacy of racism in the United States.

One question cut into my heart like butcher knife.

A white woman in the front row of the predominantly white audience from the overwhelmingly white state of New Hampshire asked Gantt for guidance in helping one of her elementary school students. The woman teaches at a school in the N.H. North Country, where community demographics are as white as the driven snow on Mount Washington. One of the teacher's students is The Only Black Girl in the school.

Classmates accepted the black girl when they were all little children, the teacher said. But that changed in fifth-grade, when the ignorant brand of racism that is prevalent across The Granite State had infected many minds of the elementary school's fifth-graders. At age 10, The Only Black Girl was learning harsh lessons about being black in America, including how the color of your skin can tattoo a bull's-eye in the center of your back, making you a target for cruelty and abuse.

I was in the black section of the audience, with my wife, who is half African-American, and members of a black family who were seated in front of us.

My wife was raised on Barn Door Gap Road in a little New Hampshire town. When she was growing up, Jen was The Only Black Girl in most of her elementary and high school classes.

As I watched Gantt offering the teacher some consolation and advice for helping her Only Black Girl, I could not bear to look at my Only Black Girl. I knew what I would see in Jen's face because the pain and anger associated with her childhood experiences were oozing out of every pore of her light brown skin.

I knew the emotions I would see in my wife's face because I could feel them piercing deep into my heart.

During her school-age years, Jen Cheney was The Only Black Girl in most of her classes, which is where she learned many emotionally brutal lessons about racism in America. /Family photo 

Journalist death toll rises in 2015

Last year, 69 journalists were killed with the motive linked to the performance of their professional duties. Another 25 journalists lost their lives in killings with unconfirmed motives. /Committee to Protect Journalists

The number of journalists killed in the line of duty ticked upward last year, rising from 61 dead in 2014 to 69 lost.

In 2015, the bravery required to work as a journalist in countries engulfed in war or riddled with corruption is evident in the statistics:

• In the 47 journalist murders last year, no one has been brought to justice in 83% of the cases
• In the murder cases, 60% of journalists were threatened prior to their killings, 21% were taken captive before they were killed, and 15% were tortured
• Politics was by far the most dangerous beat to cover in 2015, accounting for part or all of the motivation behind 68% of journalist killings
• Political groups (52%), military officials (16%) and government officials (12%) were the leading suspects in orchestrating journalist killings

A free press is a bulwark of democracy, and journalists continue to man the front lines in the struggles against tyranny around the world.

MLK holiday: 'Tame the savageness of man'

On April 4, 1968, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy delivered one of the greatest speeches in U.S. history.

Kennedy was in Indianapolis for a campaign event in his run for the presidency. At the rally, the New York senator and brother of a slain president delivered timeless remarks about civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., who had been assassinated earlier that evening.

This speech overflows with wisdom, but I do have a favorite gem of sage advice:
"Dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."

North Korea: Inaction in the face of genocide

This image was drawn by a concentration camp internee who escaped North Korea with help from Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, a nongovernmental organization based in Tokyo. /Image via robpongi.blogspot.com


The admissions of regret are as inevitable as the spring following the winter. Once the hideous enormity of genocide is laid bare for the entire world to see, international leaders who chose to do little or nothing at all to stop it emerge from their secure locations to explain their inaction and make shrill pronouncements of "never again."

Although few people outside Pyongyang know the exact figure, about 250,000 political prisoners are suffering and dying in North Korea's concentration camps. The handful of the doomed who have escaped these hell holes report that starvation, brutal living conditions and torture are the genocidal instruments of choice employed in the camps.

The day will come when the totalitarian regime that has governed North Korea for the past half century will be held to account for its crimes against humanity. After the survivors bear what is left of their souls, after the images of emaciated human forms flood the media, after a museum is erected in the vain hope that such cruelty can be averted for all time, politicians will step forward to ease our collective conscience with a slathering of well-chosen words.

One of the masters of apologetically explaining inaction in the face of genocide is President Bill Clinton.

During a visit to Rwanda in 1998, Clinton offered the following artfully crafted rhetoric in describing why he and other world leaders failed to answer the call when hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were slaughtered over the course of 100 days in 1994:

"The international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy, as well. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide. We cannot change the past. But we can and must do everything in our power to help you build a future without fear, and full of hope.

"We owe to those who died, and to those who survived who loved them, our every effort to increase our vigilance and strengthen our stand against those who would commit such atrocities in the future here or elsewhere.

"Indeed, we owe to all the peoples of the world who are at risk because each bloodletting hastens the next as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable. We owe to all the people in the world our best efforts to organize ourselves so that we can maximize the chances of preventing these events. And where they cannot be prevented, we can move more quickly to minimize the horror.

"So let us challenge ourselves to build a world in which no branch of humanity, because of national, racial, ethnic, or religious origin, is again threatened with destruction because of those characteristics, of which people should rightly be proud. Let us work together as a community of civilized nations to strengthen our ability to prevent and, if necessary, to stop genocide."

North Korea has been committing genocidal acts on thousands, possibly millions, of its own citizens for decades. World leaders have done little to nothing to stop these crimes against humanity.

When will we rise to the challenge? When will we save our North Korean brothers and sisters from the same fate the Jews endured in the gas chambers, the Cambodians experienced in the killing fields and the Rwandans bore at the hands of machete-wielding thugs?

What too-little-too-late apology will we offer for our inaction?

'I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist'

Albert Einstein's theory of relativity became one of the scientific building blocks for atomic bombs. Five months before he died in 1955, Einstein offered the following observation about nuclear weapons: "I made one great mistake in my life ... when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification -- the danger that the Germans would make them."  /Image via hebus.org

Albert Einstein, who was born on March 14, 1879, is widely viewed as the greatest physicist of the 20th century. But his standing as a committed humanitarian and advocate for peace is less well known.

Here are a few of his comments about the human condition:

"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

"Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile."

"Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding."

"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."

"There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle."

"Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools."

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."

"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind."

"An empty stomach is not a good political adviser."

"Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."

"Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts."

"The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives."

"In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same."

"I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war."

"Love is a better teacher than duty."

"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"

"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it."

"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

North Korea: Concentration camp horrors

This image was drawn by a North Korean who escaped the country with help from Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, a nongovernmental organization based in Tokyo. /Image via robpongi.blogspot.com


The growing tensions over North Korea's nuclear weapons program are playing out on the international stage, but unknown thousands are struggling in anonymity to survive in the Hermit Nation's concentration camps.

This week, as President Obama and Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, pledged to pursue tougher actions at the U.N. Security Council over North Korea's recent missile and nuclear bomb tests, two escapees from North Korean concentration camps shared their stories at a human rights conference in Geneva.

"People think the Holocaust is in the past, but it is still very much a reality. It is still going on in North Korea," Shin Dong Hyuk told The Japan Times in a story published Friday.

Shin was born in Camp 14, one of five known concentration camps in North Korea. The 30-year-old escaped from the camp seven years ago, when he and another prisoner made a dash to a high-voltage security fence. The other internee was electrocuted; Shin escaped to China by scrambling over the dead man's body.

The Times reported as many as 200,000 North Koreans are enduring torture and starvation in the camps. But no one outside of the isolated country knows the total number of prisoners for sure because the repeated attempts of human rights organizations to extract information about the camps from Pyongyang have been rebuffed or ignored.

Here are some excerpts from the Times report:

"While Shin’s comparison with Nazi concentration camps, where the majority of the 6 million Jews who perished during the Holocaust were murdered, may seem extreme, another camp survivor, Chol Hwan Kang, agreed with the analogy.

"'Fundamentally, it is the same as Hitler’s Auschwitz,' Chol said, referring to one of the Nazi era’s most notorious death camps.

"With whole families in North Korea thrown into camps together and starving to death, he said that the 'methods may be different, but the effect is the same.'

"Chol, now 43, was sent to Camp 15 with his whole family when he was 9 years old to repent for the suspected disloyalties of his grandfather. He spent 10 years there before his family was released and later managed to flee to China and later to South Korea — the same route taken by Shin." ...

"After meeting Shin and hearing his harrowing account in December, U.N. human rights Commissioner Navi Pillay called for an in-depth international inquiry into 'one of the worst, but least understood and reported, human rights situations in the world.'" ...

"Shin, who says his father and grandfather were sent to the camp because two of his uncles apparently defected to South Korea, said he was expected to spend his entire life in them under a system that calls for up to three generations of family members of an accused to also be punished.

"'The birth of a baby is a blessed thing in the outside world, but inside the camp, babies are born to be slaves like their parents. It’s an absolute scandal,' Shin said.

"Both Shin and Chol described life in the camp as defined by hunger and violence.

"'Daily I saw torture, and every day in the camp I saw people dying of malnutrition and starvation. I saw lots of friends die and I almost died myself of malnutrition,' Chol recalled.

"Shin still carries the scars of his experience on his body. Resting his right hand on the table in front of him, he revealed the missing tip of his middle finger, which he says was chopped off by a prison guard as punishment after he dropped a piece of machinery in a factory."