Kerry's Claims and Return of North Korea's Defence Chief from the Dead

The South Korean spy and propaganda agency made the ludicrous claim about North Korea executing one of its top generals, the Minister of Defence, General Hyon Yong-chol, with an antiaircraft gun for disloyalty. Hours later, after the nonsense claim made the news, it completely retracted it. In spite of this, it was repeated by John Kerry, the US Secretary of State in a Press Conference in Seoul, and promptly printed widely by the global media, including major Indian publications such as Times of India and Hindustan Times. None in the global media made any attempt to check on the veracity of the story by going back to the source and doing minimal fact checking. Instead, it printed as gospel truth Kerry's bogus claims, “... of grotesque, grisly, horrendous, public displays of executions on a whim and fancy by the leader against people who were close to him, sometimes on the flimsiest of excuses”.

The original story was circulated by the National Intelligence Service, South Korea's spy agency that Mr. Kim had ordered Hyon Yong-chol to be executed with an antiaircraft gun for disloyalty. General Hyon was accused, among other “crimes”, of dozing off during a meeting Mr. Kim presided over.

The South Korean lawmaker, Kim Kwang-jin had told ABC News that Seoul's spy agency had said in a closed briefing that Hyon was executed on April 29 or 30, as hundreds of high-ranking military personnel watched for “napping” and "behaving disrespectfully", through the use of anti-aircraft machine guns. Once ABC News carried this story, the spy agency immediately revised its statement, saying Hyon was purged, but maybe not executed.

Image Courtesy: flickr.com

The "execution by anti-air gun for napping" was a lie invented, like most "North Korean horror" fairy tales, by the South Korean spy service to push some selected lawmakers to up its budget. Those idiots then talked to the press, causing people to ask why the "disgraced" and "brutally killed" North Korean general was still appearing on North Korean TV! The spy agency had then to retract its claim.

The website Addicting Information reports, “This ranks right up there with the claim that Kim Jong-un fed his uncle to dogs, which turned out to be from a satire website. The true irony is when his uncle turned up alive months later. Indeed, source itself was set up by the United States in 2001, with the goal of toppling the North Korean leadership for replacement by a pro-American regime.”

The problem for North Korea is that the lie is what gets wide publicity, the retraction appears in small print, tucked away in a corner of the paper. If it appears at all. This is the same as the WMD stories in Iraq, chlorine attack by Assad's forces and a myriad such lies. The lie sticks in the public mind even when it has been exposed as fraud.

(The original version of this appeared in MoonofAlabam.org. We have modified it a little here and added a couple of paras)