Port McClellan, via Drudge, links today to a nighttime satellite photo of North and South Korea that is, well, night and day.
The article featuring the photo is from the Daily Mail of London, not exactly the New York Times of credibility (though the NYT isn’t exactly the NYT of credibility any more, either). The story begins:
North Korea might now have The Bomb, but it doesn’t have much electricity
As the world grapples with how to rein in the “axis of evil” state which this week conducted a nuclear test, this spectacular satellite photo unveiled yesterday by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shows in stark detail the haves and have-nots of the Korean peninsula.
The regime in the north is so short of electricity that the whole country is switched off at 9 p.m. – apart from the capital of Pyongyang where dictator Kim Jong-il and his cohorts live in relative luxury. But even there, lighting is drastically reduced.
The result, as shown in this picture taken one night earlier this week, is a startling contrast between the blacked-out north and the south, which is ablaze with light, particularly around major cities and the capital, Seoul, in the north-west of the country.
Mr Rumsfeld showed the picture to illustrate how backward the northern regime really is – and how oppressed its people are. Without electricity there can be none of the appliances that make life easy and that we take for granted, he said.
A Hoax?
While the photo is illuminating, the absolute darkness in North Korea outside of Pyongyang is almost too absolute. Then there were some things in the Mail article that kind of tweaked my antenna. Reading over it again, I couldn’t find any reference to just where Secretary Rumsfeld was and who he was talking to “yesterday” when he showed that photo.
Could it be a hoax? It’s easy to be alert to fake or misleading information coming from the left, and in fact this skepticism has had to become standard procedure. I hope, however, that I can be as sensitive to similar bad vibes even if the pictures or news line up with my own expectations or world view. A lie is a lie, whether “left” or “right”; in fact I’d be even more outraged if I discovered a lie that was from “my side”. The truth is sufficient for our arguments.
Therefore I did a little checking. I couldn’t find anything about a similar speech by Secretary Rumsfeld on the CNN, Fox or Snopes sites (or anything about “Rumsfeld North Korea Satellite Image”), but a Google search did turn up a presentation he gave that included this satellite imagery — on December 23, 2002, linked on GlobalSecurity.org.
It appears the image is authentic, even if the latest reporting is suspect. I’m glad I took the time to poke around a bit before passing it on.
As for the conditions the people of North Korea are living under, I suggest that the not give up on Kim Jong Il just yet. He is showing that he won’t rest until his whole country is glowing in the dark. (But that’s just my opinion).
