re: this North Korea rail disaster - how could a train crash kill (maybe) 3,000 people??

Yeah those aren't the two trains you want to meet. . .

1) CIA plot to kill him
2) North Korea is borrowing from our proposed "Operation Northwoods" and will use this as an excuse to attack South Korea, China, us, who knows

Another newspaper, Dong-a Ilbo, said there were apparently apartment blocks near the station.

The officials presumed the explosion didn't appear to be an attempt to assassinate Kim.

I should note that we haven't exactly proven CIA involvement over the course of twenty posts here.

Now this is true.

destroy: "Mouth-to-Mouth Resuscitation Instructor" t-shirts

What a mess...

Accidents happen - there are train accidents around the globe, this just happens to be the worst possible combination of trains to crash.

Also, how would the CIA pull this off exactly? How would they commondeer two trains in North Korea and sequence them to crash into each other.

This is a ridiculous theory.

They certainly didn't believe many of the administration's claims. They finally did back up the presence of the all-encompassing "WMDs". But this may have been an intentional error - CIA wanted Iraq to fail, Bush to blame CIA, and the public to start questioning why he won't fire Tenet accordingly - or hopeful recklessness - without a precursor from the intelligence community, Bush would have launched a war that would have set an even more dangerous precedent.

Not being all-knowing doesn't mean they know nothing either.

This is true. They may have known about the trip.

http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20040423/i/r4095247590.jpg

All of this without arousing any suspicion.

All in a day's work at the CIA.

The CIA's track record in Latin America, for example, is pretty horrible. But this notion that the CIA are agents of death, or something, is kind of hyperbole, isn't it?

I don't think this is true. Before Sept. 11th, the U.S. was able to pinpoint bin Laden's location with some regularity, but there was a reluctance to pull the trigger.

Taken with a grain of salt, this guy has an obvious bone to pick with the CIA (arguably rightfully so), but most everything from the '70s-'80s isn't classified or the domain of conspiracy theories.

"Before Sept. 11th, the U.S. was able to pinpoint bin Laden's location with some regularity, but there was a reluctance to pull the trigger."

Nope. Clinton's administration had a standing kill order. AND supposedly Ashcroft did too (although with him who the fuck knows.)

Moreover, the order was to capture bin Laden, not kill him. If he had been killed in the attempt to capture him, then so be it.

I believe this was in '98, after the USS Cole attack and after the African embassy bombings.

As part of his strategy to blame everyone but himself for failures in counterterrorism policy, Attorney General John Ashcroft brashly told the 9/11 panel in his opening statement yesterday that when he entered office in 2001, after a "thorough review," he discovered there was "no covert action program to kill bin Laden" in place from the previous administration. So he "recommended that the covert action authorities be clarified and be expanded to allow for decisive, lethal action. We should end the failed capture policy, I said. We should find and kill bin Laden."

But the 9/11 panel hinted not so subtly yesterday that there was indeed such a "kill order" in place dating from the Clinton years. As the Washington Post described this morning: "Commissioners were vague on details, citing secrecy rules, but indicated that the document rebutted assertions by Ashcroft and others that no clear kill order existed." The highly-classified document seems to be one of a raft of materials the Bush White House withheld from the 9/11 commission. During questioning yesterday, 9/11 commissioner Fred Fielding stated that if Ashcroft were to see the Clinton-era document it would "alter [Ashcroft's] evaluation of existing authorities in February of 2001."

There's more on the kill order controversy at LiberalOasis.

All the live links are here

Ok, thanks. I was going off of memory.

I am no CIA apologist, by the way.

What happened with that Supreme Court hearing on the Guantanomo inmates? When do they rule on that?

It seems that the court might rule in favor of the detainees, but it doesn't seem like it matters that much. My very shakey understanding is that the detainees would win the right to insist that the evidence against them be presented to a federal judge. I believe that is what is at stack.

150 Said Dead in N. Korea Train Explosion
(AP) - The fearsome picture of devastation from the North Korean train explosions near the Chinese border took shape Friday with initial reports saying 150 were killed, 1,249 injured and 1,850 households destroyed. North Korea's government said the explosion occurred when train cars carrying dynamite touched power lines, according to Anne O'Mahony, regional director of the Irish aid agency Concern. "It says 150 people died, including some school children," O'Mahony told Irish radio station RTE by telephone from Pyongyang, the North's capital.

reports now say only 150 dead, more in keeping with past train accidents, which haven't exceeded 800 (xpost)

maybe it's just that i've never seen the movie (i don't see many movies these days), but people who refer, even ironically, to a pop culture touchstone, and one created in part by a right-wing nut, any time someone brings up a "conspiracy" or deniable action seem a little like sheep. you might even call it a conspiracy.

1) Chinese plot. Let's add up all the evidence. Jong-Il was leaving from a secret meeting with China. The Chinese want stability, and they know he's a danger to their region. If you believe some reports, (http://marmot.blogs.com/korea/2004/04/cheney_threaten.html) Cheney recently as much as ordered them to take care of North Korea or we'd arm Taiwan and Japan. The accident was near the Chinese border, in a town with strong ethnic ties to China (in other words, 100,000 times easier to infiltrate by the ChiComs than by some white dudes in Langley).

2) Internal North Korean plot. No one knows better than the top NORK generals that Kim Jong-Il is an complete lunatic and an absolute train wreck (sorry) for their country and their people. No one else has better motive or better means or better opportunity to pull this off. And top NORK government officials have pretty much proven that they've got zero respect for human life anyway, so 3000
in collateral damage is nothing to them. They kill that many before breakfast every day.

3) Al Qaida plot/Islamist plot/Iranian plot/Yakuza plot/other. Obviously there's no evidence for any of this, but we can say for certain that North Korea has a lot of secrets with a lot of very dangerous people. When deals go bad with criminal gangs like these, bad things happen.

4) CIA plot. Possible, yes, but if the 9/11 hearings have taught us anything it's that the CIA is not the CIA of the movies. It's a big ass-covering bureaucracy. Do you think a plan that involved a low chance of assassinating Kim Jong-Il and a certainty of catastrophic civilian casualties would really work it's way through the bureaucracy and gets dozens of officers staking their careers on signing off on this? And if it's the CIA, why such an appaulingly violent lo-tech method? Why not a Predator drone or Tomahawk missle taking out Jong-Il's train directly, you know, within 9 hours of the time he was in it?

5) MI6 plot/Russian plot/Japanese intelligence plot/etc. Again, the amusing tender-hearted assumption by people here that America is the only country in the world with blood on its hands, or the only country in the world that wants KJ-Il dead, is awful sweet. Keep reading the Chomsky, kids.

Nah, too outlandish.

My list was for starters, and raised the possibility that North Korea (Kim) engineered the thing itself. I'm admittedly America-centric, but I think that you're inventing the assumption you describe. And I am amused by the idea that I'm a Chomskyite.

if the 9/11 hearings have taught us anything it's that the CIA is not the CIA of the movies

I'm more informed by Bob Woodward's Veil, for instance, than a movie.

rampant speculation about causes is all fine, since NONE OF US HAVE A FUCKING CLUE EVEN WHAT ACTUALLY BLEW UP! sez Matt DC in taking the fun out of horrible mass death shockah

Big disaster like this happen all the time in poor countries, look at the train/ferry disasters in India/African nations.