PCC-772 Cheonan: Newly Revealed Report from March 2010 Proves the Tragedy of the Cheonan is Being Used as Just Another Pretext in the Global Free Market Wars

by Scott Creighton

“In many respects, what’s happening is the Obama administration is going back to the hard-line Bush approach to North Korea that Democrats had criticized,”  Michael Green, senior Asian affairs official in the George W. Bush administration

Just days after former President Jimmy Carter went to North Korea and secured the release of a U.S. citizen, Aijalon Mahli Gomes (a tremendous success in light of current events and yet ”journalists in Washington and Seoul have dubbed the trip a failure at worst or a non-event at best“), President Obama signed an executive order imposing tougher sanctions on the country, supposedly as a response to their now deeply questionable involvement in the sinking of the PCC Cheonan on March 26th of this year. After a U.S. consular delegation visited Gomes a few weeks ago, they returned to report that he was deeply depressed.  Three politicians had offered to go and attempt to secure his release at that time; Bill Richardson, John Kerry, and former president Jimmy Carter. All three were offered a chance to go last week and all but Carter refused.

“It was unclear what had determined the timing of the executive order” Reuters, Aug 30, 2010

That’s an understatement.  The timing is beyond curious, and it goes to show that there is much more to this Cheonan story than meets the eye, as is usually the case in global politics. Ask yourself; “Why would the “CHANGE” administration punish the North Koreans with harsher sanctions just days after an extremely positive development like this?” and you may not like the answer. 

The truth may be that they didn’t want to lose the momentum that has been building since the sinking of the PCC Cheonan offered them the pretext they had been looking for.

You see, they had been planning on imposing these sanctions just prior to the sinking of the Cheonan and Hillary Clinton’s now infamously flawed Joint Investigative Group (JIG) found that North Korea was to blame.  All they needed was a pretext and they were determined to make it stick, no matter what it took.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Wall Street Journal

The executive order that President Obama signed on Monday targets several aspects of North Korean international business, arms dealing, counterfeiting, narcotic production, and banking.  With the emphasis on their banking.  The reported theory behind these new sanctions and asset seizures (that Hillary Clinton announced first back on July 20th 2010) is that it will only target the “elites” of the corrupt North Korean regime and that will cause pressure from within their ranks to force “CHANGE” in leadership.

All of this is based on the pretext of the March 26th 2010 sinking of the Republic of Korea’s naval vessel, the PCC Cheonan. This is the official narrative.

President Barack Obama broadened financial sanctions on North Korea on Monday and froze the U.S. assets of four North Korean citizens and eight firms in part to punish it for the sinking of a South Korean warship.

Obama signed an executive order that lets the United States block the U.S. assets of North Korean entities that trade in conventional arms or luxury products, counterfeit currency or engage in money laundering, drug smuggling or other “illicit” activity that supports the government or its leaders. Reuters, Aug 30, 2010

But again, as is usually the case, the official narrative is incomplete. The real story is a little harder to find, but it goes something like this…

As is mentioned in several of the “news reports” about the new sanctions, they seem to be targeting something in North Korea called “Office 39″ or “Bureau 39, Division 39, Room 39″.  Officially it’s called “North Korea’s Central Committee Bureau 39” – we will call it “Office 39″ for now.

The idea is that Office 39 is a state sponsored criminal activities wing set up by the North Korean government way back in 1974 or so and that it allows the poor nation of North Korea to funnel huge amounts of unreported cash directly to the country’s elites via enterprises like drug manufacturing and counterfeit cigarette sales and so forth. By supposedly targeting the actors in Office 39 (some state agencies and private individuals and businesses), the Obama administration assures us that the general population of North Korea won’t suffer the consequences of these actions (like the people of Iraq did under the Clinton regime imposed sanctions that killed upward of a half a million children)

Back in  mid-March of 2010, the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College (a globalist institution within the war college which actually has an “Art of War” department, believe it or not) published a report called “Criminal Sovereignty: Understanding North Korea’s Illicit International Activities” (link to PDF) by Rexton Kan, Bruce Bechtol, Jr., and Robert M. Collins.

This study specifically dealt with the threats posed by North Korea’s “Office 39″ or “North Korea’s Central Committee Bureau 39” as they put it. Now there is a clue in the title and in case you missed it… “Criminal Sovereignty”… meaning that in the mind-set of the average globalist, trying to maintain the national sovereignty of any nation should be viewed as a “criminal act” these days or at least a case should be made to appear so in the arena of public opinion.

The March 2010 SSI report lays in extensive detail the various criminal enterprises being run internationally by “Office 39″ with not only the tacit approval of the government of North Korea, but actually being assisted by it. The three main sections of the report deal with 1. drug manufacturing and trafficking (heroin) 2. counterfeit U.S. dollars and 3. counterfeit cigarettes. According to the report, these three criminal enterprises are being run via state connections to establish organized crime all over the world from Japan to the U.S. to Russia to China … and all points in between. 

One point stands out among all the others and that is that it seems the biggest argument these guys have with this is that since it is a state agency and they have the internal support of an entire nation behind them, the criminal enterprise of “Office 39″ seems to have an unfair business advantage over all the other drug traffickers.

“Once again, however, North Korea is different. It is a nation-state; Kim Jong-il is not a warlord, nor is the KWP or Office #39 an insurgent group. To commit its criminal acts, Office #39 uses the powers and resources of a nation-state—merchant and military vessels, diplomatic and embassy posts, as well as state run companies and collective farms—that nonstate groups do not possess.” SSI report, page 2-3

Let’s set aside the obvious hypocrisy of the U.S. military calling out any other nation for the production of heroin and growing poppies while since we removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan (who took over in 2000 and immediately banned the production of opium) that country has once again risen to the top of the international heroin production ring (in 2001, after the Taliban took over, opium production in Afghanistan dropped off to about “0″ but in 2002, just a year later, with our puppet regime in charge, Afghanistan was back on top of the illegal narcotics production)  with our puppet president’s brother,  Ahmed Wali Karzai, being the biggest dope dealer in the world and our own soldiers being forced to guard his poppy fields… let’s just pretend those facts don’t exist because if we start to think about all of that, this really starts to look like a mafia war between two state sponsored smack dealers.

Let’s also try to forget about our CIA and Bush family connections to Gen Manuel Noriega and the cocaine empire he ran for decades… and Iran Contra (drugs for guns) for that matter.  Those tidbits of impolite American history might make for a confusing relationship between the “official story” and the facts on the ground. The fact that the CIA (a state supported agency like “Office 39″) has been in the business of drug running since Vietnam would simply confuse the general public… so, let’s not mention that.

The long and the short of the report is that basically, something must be done to hinder “Office 39′s” illicit activities that end up funding the elites in North Korea and keep their entire system afloat. What they called for in mid-March 2010 is strikingly similar to what President Obama signed this past Monday.

According to the mid-March 2010 report, sanctions are not enough:

“Sanctions on North Korea can create pain for the regime, but they will not force an end to the country’s criminal schemes… In fact, the United States unfroze North Korean assets gained from criminal acts as a way to make progress on the prospects for nuclear disarmament…

Crackdowns during 2005-07 by the U.S. Treasury Department on front companies and banks either owned by the North Koreans or used by them (that were conducting illegal activities) apparently caused significant damage to Pyongyang’s illicit economic networks. Recent resumption of these crackdowns may again threaten the viability of these networks— and can be enhanced by cooperation from allies.” SSI report, “Recomendations” page 25

Now, if you think that this is just a report, one of many, that went by unnoticed and all of this is purely a coincidence, think again.

On April 28th 2010, the American Enterprise Institute (a neocon globalist think-tank which helped to bring us such wonders as the Global War on Terror and the illegal occupation and war of aggression on Iraq) held a conference called “Hope for the North Korean People” during which one of the authors of the SSI Army War College paper, Bruce Bechtol, Jr, was present and put forward such issues as “What U.S. government policy could be implemented to improve the outlook for the voiceless in North Korea today?”  I guess we have our answer to that question…

On April the 15th, 2010, the Rosettt Report gleefully parrots the globalist position on “Office 39″ and the significance of the SSI Army War College report…

Bureau #39 embodies an interesting concept — utterly corrosive to any civilized (new?) world order — in which Kim has ruthlessly perverted the modern privileges of the nation state…

Though Bureau #39 has been mentioned in many reports over the years, it usually features as just one more weird and disturbing item in the roster of murky North Korean institutions. But three seasoned analysts of this scene — Paul Rexton Kan, Bruce E. Bechtol, Jr., and Robert M. Collins —  have just published a monograph focusing specifically on Bureau #39 — in which they explore its role as a vital cog within the North Korean government. Rosett Report, April 15th, 2010

Rosett goes on to draw the stereotypical parallels between “Office 39″ and Saddam Hussein and even the Republican Guard (to help continue the neoliberal drive toward yet another illegal invasion and occupation in the ongoing Global Free Market Wars) but he understandably forgets to mention our own troubled past (and present) which I have covered a bit already.

In an unusually direct article published on the same day, April 15th 2010, in Forbes magazine, Rosett goes on to explain the “real threat” behind North Korea, and we have to remember how often we have heard this rationalization for globalist regime change since the old “domino theory” or our “interventions” in Latin America over the past few decades…

Despite all the pomp and nuclear summitry, North Korea keeps sliding down President Barack Obama‘s to-do list. Yet something must be done. The threat here is not solely North Korea’s own arsenal, or its role, despite U.S. and United Nations sanctions, as a 24/7 convenience store for rogue regimes interested in weapons of mass destruction plus delivery systems. The further problem is that North Korea provides perverse inspiration for other despotisms. Forbes April 15th 2010

(Independent nationalism is the enemy of the globalist system of control regardless of the type of government. It can’t be allowed to flourish so it can not be tolerated less it serve as a dangerous example to the people of our client states…. in this case, the people of South Korea and others (think of a shop-keeper who refuses to pay “protection money” to a mob boss). The manner of political systems is far less important to the globalists than is their acceptance of the free market international model.  Take China for instance:  a communist country but it is part of the globalist World Bank/IMF free market system, so their human rights violations are tolerated and even ignored by our MSM.  Our efforts in “democracy promotion” have produced some of the most dangerous and un-democratic regimes the world has ever known, and they too are roundly ignored by our media and government (even praised at times) because their elites have jumped on the globalist bandwagon at the direct expense of the vast majority of their people, who suffer for decades under tyrannical rule. Read Chomsky’s “Failed States” for a more detailed evaluation.)

The fact is, this study stirred up the globalist crowd who have been promoting the idea of regime change in North Korea for quite a while now. The time frame is clearly evident from the samples I have provided, and there are more to choose from, if you are so inclined to research it.

The SSI study specifically mentions certain banking corporations located in North Korea to be targeted (supposedly because they launder drug money yet no one is targeting Wachovia and Bank of America for doing that exact same thing with Mexican drug money), and those are the very same ones mentioned in several reports on the Obama executive order.  This is not mere coincidence; this is the implementation of the Army War College report taking place as a direct consequence of the Hillary Clinton led JIG “investigation” into the sinking of the Cheonan.

(It is important to remember that the member states of the Joint Investigation Group are all our globalist partners, or at least, the big players, and of course, South Korea; Great Britain, Sweden, and Austrialia.)

The JIG “investigation” completed its work on May 20th 2010 and they presented various “mistaken” pieces of evidence, as they admitted sometime later (yet even after “discovering” their mistake, the Ambassador from South Korea came to the U.S. and presented the same “mistaken evidence” to a globalist think-tank four days after the “mistake” was supposedly detected…. hmmm… )

Hillary Clinton made it clear in no uncertain terms, that the official narrative of the sinking of the Cheonan was going to be that North Korea sank her, with a torpedo, and no one should question that conclusion:

“… The international, independent, investigation… was objective. The evidence… overwhelming. The conclusion… inescapable. This was an unacceptable provocation by North Korea and the international community has a responsibility and a duty to respond.”  Hilary Clinton, 5/26/2010

But many have questioned Hillary Clinton’s rigged “investigation”, and have been quite successful at it, I might add…

Only a small coterie in the USA and South Korea know for sure what really happened to the South Korean warship. But, unreported in the Western media, the ‘proof’ that the Cheonan was sunk by North Korea has been thoroughly discredited.  Hilary Keenan

But the one thing that has eluded many of us independent researchers on this topic, is the motive; why did they do it? What did they hope to gain?

An all out war against North Korea would be completely “off the table”; China and Russia would never allow that, not based on this flimsy evidence and Hillary is certainly smart enough to know that going into all this. Continued sanctions targeting their nuclear capabilities will only produce a very specific deterrence, as explained in the SSI Army War College report.

So the question has been, why did they do it? Whether or not they were simply taking advantage of an opportunity that presented itself, as Rahm Emanuel so elegantly explained for us, or whether there was something more sinister that happened, is hard to say.

But what we at least can tell right now, is that they had a plan going into this, that they have implemented at least on the level of an executive order from the president of the United States. That plan was clearly laid out just prior to the sinking of the Cheonan and it is being implemented in its final stages as we speak.

No, it is not being implemented on the scale they wanted… they failed to get the full range of sanctions called for in the SSI report past the UN Security Council, largely due to independent journalism and the Chinese and Russian investigations. But now, just like Bush did with his John Yoo torture memos, President Obama can create for himself a little “get out of jail free card” by signing his own executive order providing for US vessels to board and search North Korea ships, and to seize assets and accounts, that they didn’t have access to before.

Again, the Peace Prize president is doing his best to continue the corrupt and illegitimate policies of the Bush administration, and he is using the sinking of the Cheonan as a pretext for doing so.

Though this new information doesn’t prove one way or the other what actually happened to the PCC-772 Cheonan and what cost those 46 South Korean sailors their lives, it does provide a serious motive for the Hillary Clinton led fraud of the Joint Investigation Group and their frame-up job they released to the public on May 20th 2010. And I think that is a good place to start to continue our understanding of what happened to the PCC Cheonan when it came to be used, one way or the other, as a pawn, just another pretext, in the Global Free Market Wars.

“It is only in folk tales, children’s stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.” Noam Chomsky