Those 22 North Koreans returned to DPRK by the ROK National Intelligence Service (NIS) on February 8 have been apparently executed (Curiously, this fourth graph is omitted in the print version). It might be the NIS' swan song.

Rumors are spreading among North Korean defectors that the 22 have all been executed. The security agency in South Hwanghae Province reportedly put them in front of a firing squad. If this is true, our government has sent the 22 North Koreans to their death. Before these suspicions grow further, South Korean authorities must reveal what exactly the 22 North Koreans said during questioning and discover whether they are alive or dead.

Robert Koehler also reports on NIS' official explanation for the executions. I'll allow readers to discover the "humor" of it themselves. It's a travesty of intelligence-gathering. And, it's another reason to overhaul the NIS.

Putative GOP presidential candidate, Senator John McCain recently singled out DPRK as "…the most horrible regime probably on earth." But then, Jack goes too far, when he says, "That is one of the major things left out of the negotiating table throughout the six-party talks…" Yet, US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill does talk, or will talk, about human rights.

Well, people who are well informed on this issue understand that as we get through this declaration, we will then go to something called the Third Phase. Now what we would like in the Third Phase is for North Korea to not only dismantle all of their programs, but also to give up, to abandon, pursuant to the September 2005 agreement, to abandon their separated plutonium, and any other fissile material they have. Now, in order to get that, we’re going to put a few things on the table. And one of them is normalization with the United States, a bilateral normalization process. As part of normalization, we will of course be discussing human rights, and we have been discussing human rights. And I don’t think we should ever be afraid to discuss human rights.

Human rights needs to be understood by the North Koreans as really the price of admission to the international community. So as we discuss our normalization, of course this subject will be discussed. But what we would like the North Koreans to come to understand is that human rights is something that they don’t have a choice on, that if they want to join the international community, they have to start living up to some human rights standards. This is not just some desiderata on the part of the United States. This has to do with international obligations. And so, to the extent that we can convey this, of course we’ll convey it through this bilateral process of leading to normalization.

Obviously, neither Hill nor McCain can save these 22 North Koreans the NIS improperly identified. And, even President-elect Lee Myung-bak's putative Unification Minister (or "Un-Minister") will be too late to join the bureaucratic battle against unification policy in ROK.