Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Remember the Pueblo
Consider, for instance, the USS Pueblo. Forty years ago this week, the USS Pueblo was captured by North Korea, and 82 seamen were thrown in POW camps.
From the Daily Reckoning:
The Pueblo was taken into port at Wonsan, North Korea and the crew interred in prisoner of war camps. The U.S. sailors later reported they were often starved and frequently beaten and tortured. The beatings got worse when their captors discovered that many of the crewmen were making obscene gestures with their hands when they were forced to pose for propaganda photos.
In December 1968, the United States won the release of the 82 sailors by issuing a written apology to North Korea for spying on the communist country. The statement promised we would not do so again. On December 23, 1968, the crew was taken to the South Korean border and permitted to walk across "The Bridge of No Return." As soon as they were safely in South Korea, the U.S. government rescinded its apology and assurances.
Read the whole thing.
5 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Jan 24, 10:05:00 PM:
My brother was a member of that crew.
It is personal to me, so I give no pretense of being non involved.
I know what he went thru and what happened.
Perhaps it has been offset by these days when people are beheaded and blown up at the wiff of a whim. But back then it was considered a more important breach of international protocol.
Downward spirals are so predictable, if you let them start.
By , at
Wed Jan 24, 11:48:00 PM:
And how come we have never had a appology from NORTH KOREA for this act of piracy maybe intead of all this stupid diplomacy the USS PUEBLO should have sunk the north korea gunboat
By , at
Thu Jan 25, 03:58:00 PM:
Shortly thereafter, the NK shot down a Navy EC=121, killing its crew, with no great reaction by the Nixon administration, who had used the Pueblo incident to illustrate the weekness of the Johnson Administration.
By 
Hiraethin, at
Tue Jan 30, 05:25:00 PM:
The captured crewmembers repeatedly displayed the 'bird' in DPRK propaganda photos, so much so that they were asked about it by their captors, to which they responded with the pre-discussed story that it was a 'Hawaiian good luck sign'. It was, of course, a symbol of defiance, a way of communicating the coercion to which they were being subjected, and an attempt to spike the DPRK's propaganda effort. The meaning of the prisoners' gestures was explained in Time magazine, and unlike Japan (who missed the reportage of their codes being broken in WW2), the DPRK found out. What I cannot forget is that while the prisoners must have known their actions had the potential to intensify their travails, Time was balancing newsworthiness against suffering of helpless prisoners.
Good article on the USS Pueblo incident here: http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=588
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