North and South Korea Exchange Gunfire

Originally posted by apc
Bah, there's two specific articles I found last month but I can not seem to relocate them. They talked about NK involvement with Hezbollah in the late 80s. It's a conspiracy!$#@

Here's something miniscule though... the inferrence is that NK is providing a means of raising funds rather than providing the funds directly...

Hezbollah and North Korea

It is beyond strange that North Korea manufactures knock off cigarettes and Viagra.

It is even stranger that these are the very items Hezbollah sells in the United States to raise money.

Certainly not conclusive. Google be damned.

You're right, not conclusive at all, since counterfeit cigarettes are common around the world, and the chinese (as they do with many other things) produce them as well, so it's hard to tell where the counterfeit comes from.

Also, Hezbollah, which is funded by Iran and Syria would not need to sell cigarettes on the street for money...that connection seems like a smokescreen at best...

Erm... lots of organizations easily make money on the streets... Hell the title loan industry is an excellent laundering front for multiple terrorist groups. Off hand I dont know of any specific Hezbollah involvement, but it wouldn't surprise me.

>
and yes yes I know that doesn't mean anything about them. I'm still trying to rememeber what keywords I used when I found the original articles. Those were pretty conclusive.

[edit on 2-8-2006 by apc]

Originally posted by apc
Erm... lots of organizations easily make money on the streets... Hell the title loan industry is an excellent laundering front for multiple terrorist groups. Off hand I dont know of any specific Hezbollah involvement, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Are those lots of organizations sponsored by not one but two countries? I don't say it's impossible, just that it doesn't seem logical someone already funded, working the streets for a little extra.
>

and yes yes I know that doesn't mean anything about them. I'm still trying to rememeber what keywords I used when I found the original articles. Those were pretty conclusive.

Well I've looked all over the place but if they did existed, they must have evaporated, or are really well dug, so I'll wait for those articles to surface

The new ATSNN thread about alleged Hezbollah money laundering in the US gave me a 'neener neener' motivation to dig this back up. But, with that motivation came this:

meria.idc.ac.il...

In Lebanon during the 1970s and in Libya and Syria from the 1980s down to the present, North Korean soldiers have also trained terrorists for many groups including the Basque Spanish ETA, Palestinian Abu Nidal organization, Irish Republican Army, Italian Red Brigades, Japanese Red Army, Moro National Liberation Front in the Philippines, Turkish radicals, and others. While many of these links have lapsed, in the 1990s, North Korea added Hezbollah and the anti-Turkish Kurdish PKK group to its roster of clients.

It's not one of the articles I mentioned, but it's something that indicates past ties as I originally asserted. The source material is a hardcopy (Bermudez, Proliferation for Profit, op. cit., pp. 10-14) ... so like I said, a trip to the library is likely in order.

Originally posted by Nygdan
This sort of thing constantly happens on the DMZ. Odd as it seems, its normal.

From what friends of mine who were stationed in Korea told me, you are absolutely right.

there are also more serious and dangerous things that occur from time to time. Business as usual in the DMZ. (Dead Man Zone it was often called)

My question is, if this happens all the time, why, then, was this particular incident reported now, when all the other incidents between this one and the last reported one have been ignored by the MSM?

What makes an incident of gunfire across the 38th parallel newsworthy? From this report, there was a total of 8 or so rounds exchanged, so it isn't severity.

Is it timing? What was so important about this exchange? Was it proximity to the NK missile tests?

I'm betting it's because this whole ceasefire concept going on in Israel is bad news for the media. Peace in general is bad for the media so they're probably focusing attention on North Korea again for the sake of reporting bad news.

erm this was last month.

Id guess just because there was something else going on to say "Hey! Bad stuff happening here too! Bad stuff evvvveerrrywhere!!"

I still hold fast to the notion that almost every time Kim rattles around, it's to further a common agenda with our enemies in the ME. It may not be a true concert... there may not even be any communication or direct interaction... but definitely a common motivation. "If I push over here while they're pushing over there, we'll both be pushing for X" What X equals, however, no clue. Haven't been motivated to think that much about it.

Oh, my bad. Sorry about that.

But I still stick to the idea that the media is only reporting this because peace is bad for business. In theory we could completely fix the DPRK problem if the media simply didn't report anything about them. Although that would have other consequences dealing with freedom of the press possibly, it'd still fix the problem. However the media practically inhales gunfire like oxygen and exhales it as bad news.