Jeremy Scahill: Who Approves the Drones?

Global race for 'rare earths' metals

Korea's effort to find new sources making little headway

Global tension over rare earth metals — often identified as rare earths — has intensified as the United States, European Union and Japan recently teamed up and took it up a notch in pressuring China over persistent trade disputes.


Last month, the trading power players filed a complaint at the World Trade Organization challenging the world’s largest rare earths supplier to remove its export restrictions on the scarce elements used in high-tech goods.

As China continues to tighten its export policy, Korea, a resource-poor country with strong demand for rare earth metals for its high-tech manufacturing, is attempting to stay the course with its biggest trading partner while at the same time, catching up with other nations in the search for alternative reserves.


Late starter READ MORE

Joseon: Korea’s Confucian kingdom

The statue of King Sejong the Great sits at the Gwanghwamun square in central Seoul.  / Korea Times file

By Kim Tae-gyu and Kevin N. Cawley

This is the sixth of a 10-part series on Korean history from its mythological, ancient beginning until the present day. This project is sponsored by several companies and public agencies including Merck Korea, eBay Korea, Daewoo Securities and Korea Post. — ED. 

Joseon was the last kingdom in the long history of the Korean Peninsula and founded the framework of modern Korea, such as the capital of South Korea, and the northern boundary of North Korea. Culturally, it helped shape Korea’s unique identity that distinguishes it from its East Asian neighbors.

Joseon lasted over 500 years, making it the longest-lasting Confucian kingdom in world history. From its establishment in 1392, it respected the hegemony of the powerful Chinese empire, but it shaped its own destiny. While it was a part of the great Classical Chinese literary tradition, it nevertheless created its own unique alphabet named Hangeul.

The kingdom’s fortunes waned in the late 16th and early 17th centuries when its closest neighbors staged devastating wars.

Thereafter, Joseon savored around two centuries of peace, but it failed to catch up with the economic development and technological advancement of Western societies partly because it held too fast to the ideals of Confucianism, which led to policies of isolation, as well as endless internal feuds between political factions.



The country, with the moniker of the “Hermit Kingdom,” was eventually annexed by the colonial forces of Japan in 1910 amid a wave of 20th century imperialism that ravaged the country for the next 35 years.

Final kingdom on Korean Peninsula READ MORE

Ancient Aliens Season 4 Episode 6 - The Mystery Of Puma Punku

What the Laws of War Allow Do the WikiLeaks War Logs Reveal War Crimes -- Or the Poverty of International Law? By Chase Madar

 

Anyone who would like to witness a vivid example of modern warfare that adheres to the laws of war -- that corpus of regulations developed painstakingly over centuries by jurists, humanitarians, and soldiers, a body of rules that is now an essential, institutionalized part of the U.S. armed forces and indeed all modern militaries -- should simply click here and watch the video.

Wait a minute: that’s the WikiLeaks “Collateral Murder” video!  The gunsight view of an Apache helicopter opening fire from half a mile high on a crowd of Iraqis -- a few armed men, but mostly unarmed civilians, including a couple of Reuters employees -- as they unsuspectingly walked the streets of a Baghdad suburb one July day in 2007.

Watch, if you can bear it, as the helicopter crew blows people away, killing at least a dozen of them, and taking good care to wipe out the wounded as they try to crawl to safety.  (You can also hear the helicopter crew making wisecracks throughout.) When a van comes on the scene to tend to the survivors, the Apache gunship opens fire on it too, killing a few more and wounding two small children.

The slaughter captured in this short film, the most virally sensational of WikiLeaks’ disclosures, was widely condemned as an atrocity worldwide, and many punditsquickly labeled it a “war crime” for good measure.

But was this massacre really a “war crime” -- or just plain-old regular war?  The question is anything but a word-game. It is, in fact, far from clear that this act, though plainly atrocious and horrific, was a violation of the laws of war.  Somehave argued that the slaughter, if legal, was therefore justified and, though certainly unfortunate, no big deal. But it is possible to draw a starkly different conclusion: that the “legality” of this act is an indictment of the laws of war as we know them.

The reaction of professional humanitarians to the gun-sight video was muted, to say the least.  The big three human rights organizations -- Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, and Human Rights First -- responded not with position papers and furious press releases but with silence.  HRW omitted any mention of it in its report on human rights and war crimes in Iraq, published nearly a year after the video’s release.  Amnesty also kept mum.  Gabor Rona, legal director of Human Rights First, told me there wasn’t enough evidence to ascertain whether the laws of war had been violated, and that his organization had no Freedom of Information Act requests underway to uncover new evidence on the matter.

This collective non-response, it should be stressed, is not because these humanitarian groups, which do much valuable work, are cowardly or “sell-outs.”  The reason is: all three human rights groups, like human rights doctrine itself, are primarily concerned with questions of legality.  And quite simply, as atrocious as the event was, there was no clear violation of the laws of war to provide a toehold for the professional humanitarians.

The human rights industry is hardly alone in finding the event disturbing but in conformance with the laws of war.  As Professor Gary Solis, a leading expert and author of a standard text on those laws, told Scott Horton of Harper’s Magazine, “I believe it unlikely that a neutral and detached investigator would conclude that the helicopter personnel violated the laws of armed conflict.  Legal guilt does not always accompany innocent death.”  It bears noting that Gary Solis is no neocon ultra.  A scholar who has taught at the London School of Economics and Georgetown, he is the author of a standard textbook on the subject, and was an unflinching critic of the Bush-Cheney administration.

War and International “Humanitarian” Law READ MORE

Tom Hayden: Reclaiming Participatory Democracy

dispatches - inside Britain's Israel Lobby