People believe MSM every day. No surprise there.
I'd be willing to bet you, and all the others that would a) know the source, b) the validity of the source, and c) the political intent of the source can be counted on less than one hand. Care to educate us rather than throwing smug comments? We like to teach CEPS participants to challenge what is given to them, so how would you teach someone to challenge an article like this? What would they look for and how would they determine if it is an outrage, or outrageous?
OK I'll take that challenge, every time I see something of questionable veracity I will try to outline the track record of that source and what their objective is and how I evaluate the credibility of the story, this is something journalists should do but don't bother. I Question what I read always, working from the position they are usually lying or bending a truth to fit an agenda. The game is to work out what is the agenda and how bent the truth is. The current state of the media is so poor and the propaganda so weak and lazy it is easier than it used to be.
I am not saying I know more, but I am not the one incessantly calling for war with NK or Iran. I know my information is too imperfect and I know war is so abhorrent to make any call like that and I will call out anyone making that call from a what is a low information position, not that it makes any difference in the great scheme of things.
Maybe the USA has an inherently weird view of the world and it is perhaps fundamental to the nature of the USA, because the 'refugees' end up in the USA and obviously they are not happy with the state in the country they left. For example the cubans in Miami, a lot of those were people in cahoots with Batista, they gambled and lost in the cuban revolution, so even if the Cuban revolution had been good for the majority of the cubans (and I am not saying it was) the vocal losers in the USA would make a lot of noise and try and lobby the US to fight to reclaim cuba for them. so they could retake their privileged position. Iranians who left Iran after the fall of the Shah are exactly the same. The Venezuelan blancos in Florida the same. Nuland and the other neocons over Ukraine the same.
As the US political capital and economic power has become exhausted on the global stage, frittered in dumb ways in Iraq and elsewhere the US is left with the military option alone as the only card it has left, which makes the current time the most dangerous in the last 40-50 years. The US still has a lot to offer the world but it has to do it cooperatively which means compromise after 30 years of being able to do whatever the hell it wanted. I think the Atlantic Alliance is in serious danger of driving so many wedges between itself and Europe, China, Russia India and the rest the world that the rest of the world will turn its back on them and then the dollar, and when that happens the US Empire falls because the USA cannot afford its war machine based on domestic production.
The flag for me with the NK execution story was that it appeared simultaneously in multiple places, with a single anonymous source without any corroboration. I also remembered the same newspaper reported the death by machine gunning of NK celebrity Hyon Song wol who then appeared alive and well at the Olympics a while later. So it is mainly a memory game. Fool me once an all that. There is a lot of game playing around North Korea and everything has to be looked at through that prism.
South Korean intelligence have a vested interest in creating bad press for NK, not that NK aren't perfectly capable of creating bad press for themselves all on their own. The anonymous source in this story is not likely to be a high ranking NK official, after all what would they gain, because if it was for real and people were being executed, then Kim would be looking for someone who was leaking stuff to the South and execute them too, instead it is likely there is no NK source just a South Korean intelligence source cough cough US intel making shit up and a pliant media (propaganda outfit) not checking.
For example I also have grave doubts NK had anything to do with the murder of Kim Jong Nam in Malaysia, Kim Jong Un was not threatened by him, instead it seems likely that this was the South Koreans or foreign ntelligence agencies who have operated freely in Malaysia for quite some time. The Mossad murdered a Palestinian lecturer in Malaysia in april 2018 crime unsolved.
I also get that Kim is capable of executing people using anti aircraft guns, but not for minor reasons, but because his uncle challenged his position and was betrayed by senior army people to Kim. Kim may be obnoxious and his regime odious but he is a rational player of the game.
