Doubts surface on North Korea's role in ship sinkingSome in South Korea dispute the official version of events: that a North Korean torpedo ripped apart the Cheonan.By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times
2:53 PM PDT, July 23, 2010
<snip>
But challenges to the official version of events are coming from an unlikely place — within South Korea itself. Armed with dossiers of their own scientific studies and bolstered by conspiracy theories, critics dispute the findings announced May 20 by South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, which pointed a finger at Pyongyang.
They also question why Lee made the announcement nearly two months after the ship's sinking, on the very day campaigning opened for fiercely contested local elections. Many accuse the conservative leader of using the deaths of 46 sailors to stir up anti-communist sentiment and sway the vote.
The critics, mostly but not all from the opposition, say it is unlikely that the impoverished North Korean regime could have pulled off a perfectly executed hit against a superior military power, sneaking a submarine into the area and slipping away without detection. They also wonder whether the evidence of a torpedo attack was misinterpreted, or even fabricated.
"I couldn't find the slightest sign of an explosion," said Shin Sang-chul, a former shipbuilding executive-turned-investigative journalist. "The sailors drowned to death. Their bodies were clean. We didn't even find dead fish in the sea."
Shin, who was appointed to the joint investigative panel by the opposition Democratic Party, inspected the damaged ship with other experts April 30. He was removed from the panel shortly afterward, he says, because he had voiced a contrary opinion: that the Cheonan hit ground in the shallow waters off the Korean peninsula and then damaged its hull trying to get off a reef. "It was the equivalent of a simple traffic accident at sea," Shin said.
<snip>
Two South Korean-born U.S. academics have joined the chorus of skepticism, holding a news conference this month in Tokyo to voice their suspicions about the "smoking gun" — a piece of torpedo propeller with a handwritten mark in blue ink reading "No. 1" in Korean. "You could put that mark on an iPhone and claim it was manufactured in North Korea," scoffed one of the academics, Seunghun Lee, a professor of physics at the University of Virginia.
Lee called the discovery of the propeller fragment five days before the government's news conference suspicious. The salvaged part had more corrosion than would have been expected after just 50 days in the water, yet the blue writing was surprisingly clear, he said. "The government is lying when they said this was found underwater. I think this is something that was pulled out of a warehouse of old materials to show to the press," Lee said.
South Korean politicians say they've been left in the dark about the investigation. "We asked for very basic information — interviews with surviving sailors, communication records, the reason the ship was out there," said Choi Moon-soon, an assemblyman for the Democratic Party. The legislature also not been allowed to see the full report by the investigative committee — only a five-page synopsis.
"I don't know why they haven't released the report. They are trying to cover up small inconsistencies, and that has cost them credibility," said Kim Chul-woo, a former Defense Ministry official who is now an analyst with the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a government think tank.
A military oversight body, the Board of Inspection and Audit, has accused senior naval officers of lying and concealing information.
<snip>
South Koreans themselves appear to be confused: Polls show that more than 20% of the public doesn't believe North Korea sank the Cheonan.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-korea-torpedo-20100724,0,4196801,full.story Explanation questionable in sinking of South Korean corvette Fortuitous discovery of evidence made public in summary of 400-page report casts uncertain light on whether North Korea is responsible By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun June 18, 2010
<snip>
The five-page summary of what is said to be a 400-page report concludes with the statement that: "The evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the torpedo was fired by a North Korean submarine. There is no other plausible explanation." Well, polls show that about 30 per cent of South Koreans are not convinced by the evidence they have been shown that the scenario played out as the Seoul government of President Lee Myung-bak said it did. In the international forum, both China and Russia have refrained from supporting Seoul's finger-pointing at Pyongyang. The Beijing response is to be expected.
But Russia has become an increasingly important partner of South Korea's in recent years and Moscow sent a team of naval experts to Seoul at the end of May to look at the 400 pages of evidence. The team's report is not due to be completed until early July, but reports from Moscow say the officials were not convinced the evidence convicts Pyongyang.
The Russians are ahead of most people wanting to make a judgment on the issue. They have at least seen the 400-page report, which has not been made public. Most people have had to make do with the five-page summary. The problems with this summary fall into two main categories. One is the process by which the investigation was undertaken and the roles of the people involved. Some statements suggest the international experts played little or no assertive role in the inquiry and simply reviewed what the South Korean team members put before them.
The second is the feeble nature of the evidence that has been made public.
<snip>
For some reason which is not explained, the Swedish representative on this team refused to sign the statement. Indeed, it has been hard to follow up on the report because most of the international experts involved remain anonymous.
So what role the Swedish action played in the forming, late in the day, of another international team on May 4 is hard to judge. This team is called the Multinational Combined Intelligence Task Force and includes most of the countries fighting under the United Nations flag against North Korea in the 1950-53 war on the peninsula. That is: the U.S., Australia, Canada and Britain.
It is the one-page summary of this team's assessment that concludes there is no other credible explanation for the sinking than a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine. Well, the claimed discovery on the seabed of parts of a North Korean torpedo a few days before the release of the summaries on May 20 was fortuitous in the extreme. Without these bits of a torpedo's drive mechanism there would be nothing tangible to justify blaming Pyongyang. The metalwork shows a remarkable amount of corrosion for something that is claimed to have been on the seabed for only a month. But a plate inside is perfectly clean and on it in the characters used in North Korean are the words "No. 1." This is written in bright and clear ink.
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Explanation+questionable+sinking+South+Korean+corvette/3169713/story.html#ixzz0s2EMFaWghttp://www.vancouversun.com/news/Explanation+questionable+sinking+South+Korean+corvette/3169713/story.html#ixzz0s2EI0ETi 
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
