North Korea: A Reminder

"14-year-old Shin Dong Hyok and his father were made to sit in the front row of a crowd assembled to watch executions. The two had already spent seven months in a North Korean prison camp's torture compound, and Shin assumed they were among those to be put to death.

"Instead, the guards brought out his mother and his 22-year-old brother. The mother was hanged, the brother was shot by a firing squad.

'Before she was executed, my mother looked at me,' Shin said in a recent interview. 'I don't know if she wanted to say something, because she was bound and gagged. But I avoided her eyes.'"

This what happens inside Yodok Gulag in North Korea. Full article here.

Here is a satellite picture of the camp itself, which is humming right along while you read this:



Want to read more about Yodok? Start at Wikipedia, or better yet read The Aquariums of Pyongyang.

You can also view the crayon drawings of a child who escaped from North Korea. Here is one of them:



If that's not enough, here is U.S. Senate testimony from another North Korean escapee.

This is the government that is holding two American journalists.

This is a government with nuclear weapons, that is about to launch a missile.