Activist Tells of Torture in North Korea Prison By MARK McDONALD

SEOUL, South Korea — An evangelical activist from Arizona, imprisoned by North Korea last year after he illegally entered the country on Christmas Day, appeared Wednesday on South Korean television and spoke for the first time about his treatment by his captors.

The activist, Robert Park, 29, a Korean-American who was released in February after 43 days of detention, gave a harrowing account of his imprisonment, which he said included beatings, torture and sexual abuse.
“The scars and wounds of the things that happened to me in North Korea are too intense,” Mr. Park said in an interview with the South Korean broadcaster KBS. “As a result of what happened to me in North Korea, I’ve thrown away any kind of personal desire. I will never, you know, be able to have a marriage or any kind of relationship.”

Mr. Park said he attempted suicide soon after he returned to the United States. He told the magazine Christianity Today that he had been “in and out” of psychiatric hospitals for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. He had crossed into North Korea over the frozen Tumen River, which forms the border with China. He carried only a Bible and some letters urging the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, to close prison labor camps in the North, free all its prisoners and resign.

Analysts in Seoul said such personal affronts to Mr. Kim were forbidden in the North and typically drew long prison terms or death sentences. But Mr. Park told friends in Seoul before he left that he would die with political prisoners in the North if Mr. Kim refused to free them.

Mr. Park read a confession on North Korean television, after which North Korean officials said they “decided to leniently forgive and release him, taking his admission and sincere repentance of his wrongdoings into consideration,” according to a report at the time by the North’s official news agency, K.C.N.A.
But Mr. Park said Wednesday that the apology was a fake, and that the statement had been dictated to him.
He said that he had a new appreciation for the harshness and cynicism of the North Korean government, which he vowed to devote his life to fighting.

“They have really thought about this,” he said. “How can we kill these people? How can we starve these people? How can we enslave these people? How can we control these people?”
Robert R. King, President Obama’s envoy on North Korean human rights issues, has called North Korea “one of the worst places in terms of lack of human rights.”

Drug Trafficking... What do you think?

Clinton: U.S. can do more to help Mexico fight drug cartels

By the CNN Wire Staff

October 16, 2010 5:33 a.m. EDT

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said drug cartels in Mexico are acting like terror groups in terms of their organization and brutality.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Clinton speaks at a club in San Francisco
• She compares drug cartels in Mexico to terror groups
• Remarks come the same week she talked about the Falcon Lake case

(CNN) -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. can do more to help Mexico battle drug cartels that have started operating more like terrorists and insurgent groups.
"It is one of my highest priorities," Clinton said Friday during a speech in San Francisco at the nonpartisan Commonwealth Club. "This is one of the most difficult fights that any country faces today. We saw it over the last couple of decades in Colombia."
"We are watching drug traffickers undermine and corrupt governments in Central America, and we are watching the brutality and barbarity of their assaults on governors and mayors, the press, as well as each other, in Mexico," she added.
Clinton said the U.S. can do more than sending the Blackhawk helicopters it promised Mexico.

 

Video: 'Pirate Lake' mystery

 

She said the U.S. is helping Mexico create an anonymous tipline to report drug cartels. However, she said, it can also help Mexico rebuild its criminal system and train its police force.
She likened recent drug cartel violence to terror groups.
"For the first time, they are using car bombings," Clinton said. "You see them being much more organized in a kind of paramilitary way."
Clinton's remarks come the same week she discussed the U.S. effort to find David Hartley, an American believed to have been shot by drug bandits on the border of Mexico and Texas.
The United States is "supporting local law enforcement, supporting the authorities on the border, doing everything that we know to do to try to assist in helping to find the body and helping to find the perpetrators," she said.

Hartley is reported to have been shot during a September 30 boating trip by gunmen investigators believe are linked to a Mexican drug gang.