Friday, April 06, 2007

We Paean North Korea.

One last (I hope) post about the recently released hostages. They have been criticised in some quarters for the 'confessions' they made, personally I don't see the problem because everyone knows that obviously coerced statements are fake, but wouldn't it have been nice if they could have done something similar to what Lloyd Bulcher, commander of the USS Pueblo, did when he and his crew were captured by the North Koreans in 1968:
Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, Commanding Officer of the Pueblo was tortured and put through a mock firing squad in an effort to make him confess. Eventually the Koreans threatened to execute his men in front of him, and Bucher relented. None of the Koreans knew English well enough to write the confession, so they had Bucher write it himself. They verified the meaning of his words, but failed to catch the pun when he said "We paean the North Korean state. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung."

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