Daily Kor for Saturday, May 26, 2012

Regarding story #4, would "bread-and-butter issues" sound better as "rice-and-kimchi issues"? I can't possibly be the first person to entertain that notion, can I?

1. US Treasury report says South Korean intervention in Korean won is keeping KRW undervalued (Reuters, WSJ, Yonhap)
• KRW at seven-month low despite intervention (WSJ)
2. China reportedly launches five-month crackdown on "illegal immigration" from North Korea in Jilin Province's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture (BBC, Chosun Ilbo)
• China sentences ROK national to death for trafficking nearly 12 kilograms of methamphetamine (Korea Herald)
3. South Korea launches "Code Adam" to more quickly deal with missing children cases (WSJ)
4. Ruling party picks twelve "bread-and-butter issues" on which to focus during first 100 days of new session of National Assembly opening this month (Yonhap)
5. ROK President Lee Myungbak hails opening of Ara Waterway linking Han River to Yellow Sea and making Seoul a "waterfront city" (Yonhap)
6. Two "remorseless" men sentenced to five and ten years in prison for raping teenager after smashing into her with their car (Korea Times)
7. ROK Defense Ministry says North Korea "is ready to test" its next nuke (CNN)
8. South Korean shares snap two-week losing streak (Reuters)
9. On heels of open support for same-sex marriage, US President Barack Obama proposes making Stars & Stripes gayer (Fox News)

...

LAPD takes Jindo K9s off the menu

Do you know Chindo?

From the Los Angeles Times we get word that the Great Chindo K9 Experiment of 2011 has been a bust:

In a canine experiment in better policing, the LAPD recently spent months training a pair of South Korean-bred Jindo puppies as possible new street enforcement partners.

But the Jindos are in the doghouse as a replacement for more traditional European bloodlines, such as German shepherds or Belgian Malinois. The loyal but excitable Jindos, officials said, just didn't take to the exacting work of crowd control, weapons detection and drug sniffing.

"We worked hard with the dogs to develop their skills of sniffing out the odor of guns for detective work," said Sgt. Doug Roller, chief trainer for the K-9 platoon of the Los Angeles Police Department's Metropolitan Division. "They pretty much mastered the task, but once they got out of the training environment, they got distracted in the real world.... A leaf would blow, and they'd go chase it."

The Jindos — named Daehan and Mingook, which together translate as "Republic of Korea" — have been placed in private homes after trainers determined they lacked sufficient focus and consistency.

So the Chindo dogs were essentially canine versions of Korean yuhaksaeng: well disciplined and highly capable, but going hog wild when let loose abroad.

I don't really know what to say about this. I think Chindo dogs (sorry, but I don't like the "Jindo" spelling) are great as watchdogs, but it might take a lot more special breeding and training in Korea for them to be ready for prime time in the wild-and-woolly American police context.

For that matter, are Chindo dogs actually used much in Korean law enforcement? I suppose employing them more in a Korean situation to find out which strains are better equipped for real-world police work would be a good next step.

But the dogs used as drug-sniffers at Incheon International Airport are, famously, cloned canines, but not Chindo: they're Lab retrievers, straight from the lab. I suppose cloning some more of them and successfully getting them out in the field in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, or Peoria would also be a win for national pride.



...

A trip down memory lane

Remember back in 2002, when we had the World Cup, and everybody was just hoping Korea Republic would at least get off the ground floor, just win at least one match in actual World Cup play, maybe if we're lucky we'd move on to the next round? And remember how Korea Republic kept winning, and winning, and it was like, ohmigod, can you believe how well we're doing, and Korea Republic kept pulling these amazing victories out of thin air, and we made it all the way to the semifinals?

And remember how some of the wins were actually pretty controversial, and some people say that Korea Republic didn't really deserve them, like that one against Italia, where they were eliminated after some calls that maybe kinda sorta perhaps could have gone the other way, but the referee stood by his calls, and Korea Republic went on while Italia went home muttering about unfair officiating? Remember all that?

That ref has been sentenced to 2½ years in prison on heroin-smuggling charges.

...

Ending the war on pot

The War on Drugs is a contentious issue for a number of reasons. Some say it isn't working, some believe it does more harm than good, while others say it prevents drug abuse from getting even worse than it already is.

It seems to me that there may actually be a large portion of Americans who might be comfortable with the idea of not ending the War on Drugs, but simply taking marijuana off the battlefield, which is exactly what Democratic House member Barney Frank of Massachusetts and libertianish Republican Ron Paul of Texas were supposed to have proposed today.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Reps. Paul (R-Texas) and Frank (D-Mass.), though technically on opposite sides of the aisle, have often spoken out against the war on drugs and will propose a bill "tomorrow ending the federal war on marijuana and letting states legalize, regulate, tax, and control marijuana without federal interference," according to a statement from the Marijuana Policy Project via Reason.

The bill would allow the individual states to decide how they want to deal with pot. Currently the federal government bogarts U.S. law, oftentimes arresting owners and employees of medical marijuana facilities, for example, who thought they were operating legally under city, county and/or state laws.

"The legislation would limit the federal government’s role in marijuana enforcement to cross-border or inter-state smuggling, allowing people to legally grow, use or sell marijuana in states where it is legal," according to the MPP statement.

The legislation, co-sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), is the first of its kind to be proposed in Congress that would end the 73-year-old federal marijuana prohibition that began with the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.

Though the co-sponsors all appear to be Democrats, it would seem that this kind of bill would appeal to a great many Republicans for two reasons. First, it aims to limit government, a mainstay policy among many conservatives, in an area where Democrats often complain about the excesses of the Federal government.

Second, it promotes "states' rights" in lieu of control by the Feds, another a rallying cry of conservatives. But it's a state's-rights issue that's not about limiting the rights and freedoms of minorities, so it might not resonate with the constituency.

Ahem. At any rate, one has to wonder if this will pass. Most Democrats wouldn't think of voting yes on this unless a whole bunch of Republicans did the same to give them cover. And if it did end up on President Obama's desk, would he sign it? As the article notes, at different times he has been in favor of and then opposed to decriminalizing marijuana.

Only you can smoke prevention...
Wait, hold on...
Only you can prevent smoke potting...
Wait, wait, I've got this...
Only you can presmoke fired forests...
[laughs hysterically]
Line!

But as the bill suggests, this is not about decriminalizing it. It's about leaving that up to the states. As a moderate, I eschew the liberal notion that the Federal government or any government is always the best solution for every problem, as well as the conservative ideology that government is generally the worst solution to any problem. Instead, I believe that it is necessary to carefully pick and choose which issues are best left up to local jurisdictions to handle publicly or privately and which are more effectively dealt with at the Federal level, again through public or private means. While the nature of insurance markets and health care needs favor a national approach, I think that marijuana legislation (but not necessarily enforcement pertaining to harder drugs) is more appropriate at the local level where local values and concerns can be better represented.

We'll have to see how this goes. I wasn't even aware of this until I saw it in the LAT's "In case you missed it" column. I apparently had.

A Colombia at our doorstep?

[source]

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton seem not to agree on the dangers posed by all the drug violence in Mexico's estados fronterizos (which is fueled by US drug demand and US guns).

The war at our doorstep

News came today of the death of a consular employee of the US consulate in Ciudad Juarez, just south of El Paso, Texas. She was gunned down along with her husband, who worked for the El Paso County Sheriff's Department. Their baby survived the attack, and police found her crying in the backseat.

In a separate attack, a third person related to the consulate, the Mexican husband of a Mexican consular employee, was also killed.

The White House is "furious." Quoting the Washington Post:

The White House said President Obama was "deeply saddened and outraged" by the slayings, which occurred in broad daylight. They appeared to be the latest sign of the surge of drug violence in Mexico in recent years, which has claimed thousands of lives in border areas such as Ciudad Juarez. But it was unusual for U.S. citizens to be slain -- particularly an American government employee.

State Department officials said authorities were still investigating whether the victims were targeted by drug gangs, but it did not appear that the slain consular employee was involved in counternarcotics work. Her in-laws identified her as Lesley A. Enriquez, 35, of El Paso, just across the border. She was a locally hired employee of the consulate whose job involved helping U.S. citizens, American officials said.

The Los Angeles Times also has the story, from which I took the picture of the crime scene above.

The attacks were vicious. From WaPo again:

According to Diario de Juarez, gunmen firing bullets chased the couple's white van shortly after 2 p.m. Saturday, and it swerved out of control, crashing into oncoming traffic near the bridge linking the two countries.

About the same time, the third victim, the husband of a consulate employee, was killed as he traveled in another part of Juarez in his late-model Honda, according to Diario de Juarez. The gunmen boxed in the man's car, shot him and wounded his two children, according to Reuters.

Were Ms Enriquez somehow connected to the execution of the Drug War, there could at least be some perverse comfort in thinking that the battles raging in the Mexican states that abut California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas were being neatly confined, but I don't think we have that luxury anymore. Innocent people are being taken down, along with the bad guys and the good guys trying to take down the bad guys. It's a mess.

And it's not a new mess. In fact, I cited this at One Free Korea as a good reason to first think long and hard about the idea of arming North Korean citizens to fight their current oppressors: after KJI and his cronies are gone, an armed thugocracy with a drug empire to defend would be in a position to get the guns and terrorize the populace, perhaps with comparable bloodshed with the present day.

Does that sound far-fetched? Consider these numbers: according to the Los Angeles Times, nearly ten thousand people have died in Mexico's drug war since January 2007 (WaPo says 18,000 since December 2006), with over four thousand occurring in Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas, the six Mexican states that border the United States.

Chihuahua, at the doorstep of New Mexico and Texas and where Juarez is located, is where a whopping 2500 of those deaths occurred. In Baja California, just south of San Diego, another 900 have died. Residents of American border communities — both rural and urban — are already complaining that the violence has spilled over to their neighborhoods. This is becoming our war.

If Ms Enriquez and her husband were in some far-flung outpost, this would be an international incident. But with Mexico so close to the United States, and with Americans so inured to stories of violence just south of the Rio Grande, this may end up being little more than the outrage du jour. And what a tragedy it is that such violence is visited upon innocent Americans and Mexicans alike and the public just shrugs and accepts that that's just the way it is.

Requiescant in pace, Ms Lesley Enriquez, Mr Arthur Redelfs, and Mr Jorge Alberto Salcido.

Eighty-year-old nanas in wheelchairs tired of getting frisked at the airport

Proponents of racial profiling argue that when such-and-such racial/ethnic group is more likely to be involved in some crime like drug trafficking or terrorism, it makes sense to for the the police, the Feds, or the TSA to target members of those groups in higher numbers. 

A favorite icon of the pro-profiling crowd is the proverbial eighty-year-old nana in a wheelchair, who is being taken aside and patted down by the authorities while mean-looking hombres from Colombia or Egypt who smell of gunpowder and coke move unimpeded to their destination. It's an oft-repeated meme designed to point out the silliness of the idea that anybody could be a terrorist or a drug trafficker. 

The elderly lady trying to get to her grandkid's birthday was a highly effective symbol, I thought. Little did I know that these women actually were suffering from an inordinately high number of "extensive searches," a euphemism for treatment by airport security that is only about two shades better than how prisoners of war stateless enemy combatants are rendered at Guantanamo Bay. And I'm not talking a handful — it's hundreds every day.

Well, if you've ever had a curmudgeonly elderly neighbor who would just as soon stab your volleyball that went into her yard with a knitting needle rather than give it back, then you won't be surprised to learn that the old ladies are mad as hell and they aren't going to take it anymore.

That's right. The 80-year-old wheelchair-bound nana so heavily scrutinized at the airport has had enough. Indeed, wheelchair-bound octogenarian grandmothers have become so beleaguered that they have formed a nationwide lobbying organization so that the TSA will stop harassing them: Committee to Restore Ordinary Nana Existence (CRONE).

At left is Mabel Perkins of Palm Beach, Florida, the founder of CRONE. She has grown tired of being held up by "dumb-ass TSA workers" who think she has condoms full of cocaine shoved up her butt. "I've missed four flights to see my kids," she says. "And that's four flights too many." When she read that other senior citizens were also being held up due to them being targeted for extensive security checks, she knew she needed to spearhead an organization aimed at bringing back racial profiling "to get those PC nincompoops off our backs."

But, she makes clear to her Black neighbor and close friend at the Sea Coast Senior Living Center, she's not including elderly Black women in her list of who the heat should be turned back onto. "Just the young men," she explains, "and women who look skanky." She would also include Hispanics, and Whites with long hair, but probably not Asians (unless there's a war with North Korea, then all bets are off).  

One of CRONE's first experiences in the national spotlight came last summer, when they provided legal assistance to eighty-three-year-old Iris Knudsen of Anoka, Minnesota (below). Mrs Knudsen was given a one-year suspended sentence for disorderly conduct after she refused to let TSA workers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport examine her girdle for C-4.

Though the case resulted in a conviction and a requirement that Knudsen register as a sex offender, CRONE considers this a victory: Federal prosecutors had pushed for life imprisonment for the Democrat-registered voting rights advocate. 

Perkins is very serious about her mission. She has notebook after notebook detailing thousands of episodes where seniors lost their dignity and sometimes their purse. 

On page twelve of the notebook she shows me is a photo of ninety-year-old Rosa Chung of Daly City, California. Mrs Chung has reportedly been strip-searched thirteen times in the past three years. 

In the margins are notes from an interview with Mrs Chung's relatives, who brought the case to Perkins's attention. "It's very disturbing," says granddaughter Linda Chung. "We think she's beginning to like the attention."

Perkins got me in touch with one Olive Baumann of Englewood, Colorado, who says she's frequently taken aside and frisked thoroughly before she's able to get on an aircraft. When asked if her anti-war paraphernalia may be part of the reason, she replied: "Well, duh! That's why I have them."

Okay, okay. Time to come clean. The above was all a little joke. Actually, I'm quite happy that racial profiling is being set aside and everyone gets scrutinized as much as they do. Clean-cut Timothy McVeigh and his all-White co-conspirators, for example, wouldn't have triggered any of the racial profiling checks (but Jordanian-American Ibrahim Ahmad was tracked down to Amman because it was initially assumed that a Middle Easterner — especially one leaving Oklahoma City that day and heading for Jordan — must be behind the blast).

And then there's folks like Orange County resident Adam Gadahn or John Walker Lindh, American supporters of al Qaeda who would blend in very nicely if they shaved off their beards. The same is true of many light-skinned Muslims of Lebanese or European, or even far North African descent. Some of them have blond hair and blue eyes even!

Yep, al Qa'ida in fact had reportedly planned to use such "European-looking" hirabi to do terrorist attacks.

So it's not just Arabs (Iranians, by the way, are not Arabs) or people we might think "look Arab." A terrorist can look like any one of us. Yes, even an Islamist terrorist can look like any one of us. See, by making sure that everyone has a somewhat equal chance at being carefully scrutinized, they can't use our own prejudices against us.

What I'm saying is that whining about apocryphal 80-year-old nanas in wheelchairs being frisked is wrongheaded (though any contact should be conducted professionally and with dignity) because our security at airports needs to be across the board, not just against those we fear the most. Terror organizations are looking for weak points, and using racial profiling would be a foolish exercise in narrowing our security focus.

[above: Scrutinizing even retired grannies as part of the War on Drugs™ is necessary to catch drug mules like this woman, if she is still in this line of work in fifty years. Which she might be. I mean, despite her gorgeous looks and her Oscar nomination for Best Actress, they haven't exactly been knocking down Catalina Sandino Moreno's door. Just sayin' is all.]

So to summarize, what I'm saying is that relying primarily on racial profiling would be idiocy for a number of reasons: 

1. First, al Qaeda is already in a position to get around such profiling by using European-looking operatives for their taks. People who don't look any more "Muslim" or "Arab" than Ben Affleck or Johnny Depp. Al Qaeda has already reportedly been discovered years ago to be working on this with great seriousness.  
2. Second, racial profiling of "Muslim-looking people" (whatever that means) ignores that fact that there are other terrorist threats. In the UK, for example, there was until very, very recently the threat of Irish Catholic nationalists blowing things up in London. And in the US, until 9/11, far and away the largest terror attack ever to occur was by a bunch of clean-cut White guys born and bred in America. 
3. Third, treating a group of people with hostility because of what they look like is a very good way to engender hostility from some of them, especially the ones who didn't feel that way in the first place. This is true of almost any group, Muslim or otherwise.

A similar argument could be made for "Latin American" drug dealers. I am by no means saying that we should ignore the fact that Islamist terrorists (or Latin American drug dealers) remain such a massive threat to American security. But they are not the only threat, and we can't always tell who they are just by looking (and they know that).

* We in the West have co-opted the term jihad and jihadist when the very use of those words may be causing our own goals to become murky even among those who aren't supporters of armed struggle with non-Muslims. Some prefer the terms hirabah and hirabi in lieu of jihad and jihadist.

Here's an interesting bit from NPR on the subject:

Professor Douglas Streusand says that's why U.S. officials should stop using the term altogether. Streusand is an Arabic and Farsi speaker with a doctorate from the University of Chicago. He teaches Islamic history at the Marine Corps Staff College in Quantico, Va. In a paper written for and circulated among top military brass in the Pentagon, Streusand argues that describing Islamist militants and insurgents in Iraq as "jihadists" is hurting U.S. policy.

Why? Because according to Streusand, "for a Muslim, jihad is a good thing. It literally means striving in the path of God." By describing insurgents or terrorists as "jihadists," he argues, we imply we are fighting meritorious Muslims. To make the point clearer, he says it would be as if al-Qaida called its enemies "freedom."

His suggestion? Use Islamic legal language. The term he suggests is "hirabah" —literally, an unjust form of warfare.

Yeah, calling bin Laden and his minions jihadists seems like the wrong tact if we just end up inadvertently praising them as "strivers in the path of God." The best parallel with Christianity I could think of was someone trying to bash those among the Christian faithful for their support of the War on Terror by calling them "Christian soldiers." Well, that simply would not have the negative ring that was intended, would it?

Calling them hirabi (committers of hirabah) would be much more fitting to Muslim audiences as it rolled off the tongue of President Obama or UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: they're a bunch of unjust fighters, pirates, and spreaders of disorder, a serious punishment in the Qur'an.

If nothing else, I would like to see hirabah/hirabi replace jihad/jihadist in our rhetoric about these murderers and would-be murderers. It may end up making little difference to the people already in these groups, but to people on the sidelines, it might underscore the bad-faith acts of these killers and bringers of mayhem, bringing a clearer perspective to why it is that their actions are wrong even though they are of the same faith.