Report: Syrians, 'equipment' were in N. Korea train blast

Syrian technicians accompanying unknown equipment were killed in the train explosion in North Korea on April 22, according to a report in a Japanese newspaper.

A military specialist on Korean affairs revealed that the Syrian technicians were killed in the explosion in Ryongchon in the northwestern part of the country, according to the Sankei Shimbun. The specialist said the Syrians were accompanying "large equipment" and that the damage from the explosion was greatest in the portion of the train they occupied.

The source said North Korean military personnel with protective suits responded to the scene soon after the explosion and removed material only from the Syrians' section of the train.

The technicians were from the Syrian technical research center called Centre d'Etudes et de Recherche Scientific (CERS). Although CERS was established to promote science and technology development, it has been viewed as a major player in Syria's weapons of mass destruction development program


http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/breaking_10.html

so now more speculation, but no clear answers. :shrug:

but North Korea asked for international help with the explosion so if they had had something to hide from this, I doubt the secretive North Koreans would have asked for help, but I wouldn't be surprised with anything that North Korea does.

... on the Syrian section of the train. Remove any incriminating evidence, and *then* international aid can come in.

Perhaps we'll be treated to pamphlets from the Heritage Foundation as well?

The incessant flashing of the CBC ad at the bottom of the article says it all.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

Having no faith in this particular news source means having absolute faith in some other news source?

That's a strange logic indeed, my friend. Kinda a "with us or agin us" logic, I suppose, which is nice for self-stroking, but hardly applicable to the world.

In any case, this Hoover Institution Rag is little more than a propaganda organ for the radical right foreign policy. Whether al-Jazeera is a propaganda rag for some other ideological perspective is beside the point. However, if I was pushed, I would say that al-Jazeera is just as suspect in its ideological orientation. Would you admit that this World Tribune radical right mouthpiece is suspect?

listed on World Tribune Website!!
News Sources
The New York Times
The Washington Times
The Washington Post
The Los Angeles Times
The Drudge Report
WorldNetDaily
NewsMax.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

a tad suspect to me. :)

that's always a dead giveaway. Republicans can't spell. Very strange.

As well as to call someone a Rep, disruptor, etc.

I hope I spelled all that correctly, better use the spell checker just in case.

(snip)
Fit to Print?
Aficionados of the Drudge Report may have noticed several striking headlines recently linking to stories from the World Tribune, an enterprise with a title as grand and ambitious as it is unfamiliar. One such story last week began, "U.S. intelligence suspects Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have finally been located." The apparent scoop-of stop-the-presses significance-was unsigned, and billed as a "special to World Tribune.com." The Times, the Journal, and the Washington Post, meanwhile, not only got beat but failed even to acknowledge the news in the days that followed. What gives? Not everyone ignored it: Rush Limbaugh, for instance. "There's a piece in the World Tribune today-one of the papers in the United Kingdom-exactly as theorized on this program early on," he said on his radio show. "It's unconfirmed, but it's a story that many of the weapons of mass destruction are at present buried in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon." In fact, the World Tribune is not published in the United Kingdom, nor is it, to be precise, a newspaper. It is a Web site produced, more or less as a hobby, in Falls Church, Virginia, and is dedicated to the notion, as its mission statement explains, that "there is a market for news of the world and not just news of the weird." (Nonetheless, the site includes a prominent feature, Cosmic Tribune, with an extraterrestrial focus, and it links to a Mafia journal called Gang Land News.) Its editor and publisher, Robert Morton, is an assistant managing editor at the Washington Times and a former "corporate editor" for News World Communications, the Times' owner and the publishing arm of the Unification Church, led by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. (Morton and his wife, Choon Boon, are themselves followers of the Reverend Moon.)
The New Yorker - September 9, 2003 Issue
(snip)

http://www.earthside.com/big-lie-archive4.html

;-)

a 'white hat' clandestine operation to stop a nuclear weapons transaction between N Korea and Syria?

Of course, it is hard to prove or disprove this contention, isn't it?

nebulous, not based anyplace, anybody can claim to be al qaeda and manipulate policy.

Makes ya wonder who exactly IS al qaeda and is behind it all.

:tinfoilhat:

Sowe can have a handy reference on who the players of Al Qaeda are.

Odd that this administration was quick to give us the Iraqi cards to help us keep track of the non-AQ Iraqi "evil-doers", but precious little on the Al Qaeda, after 3 years of WOT.

Would it be because almost all of the cards would have House of Saud connections?

If it was as you speculate, it was the intelligence agencies taking matters into their own hands- and hiding it even from the boss.

I haven't heard or seen anything on him since the explosion.

worldtribune-i`ve got to get my boots on, the crap is getting deep.....

News Sources
The New York Times
The Washington Times
The Washington Post
The Los Angeles Times
The Drudge Report
WorldNetDaily
NewsMax.com

That stuff can explode really big and leave behind dangerous residue. Thanks goodness they got in and out of there quickly before NK asked for help and let rescue people in.

We don't know what caused the explosion any more than you do. The World Tribune article doesn't bring us any closer to that knowledge, in any case.

North Korea a gift of fuel and fertilizer. There was speculation that this was the train that exploded.

...mouths anxious to get us involved in additional wars around the globe.

Pure unadulterated buffalo chips stacked to the ceiling.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030908ta_talk_mcgrath

Not everyone ignored it: Rush Limbaugh, for instance. “There’s a piece in the World Tribune today—one of the papers in the United Kingdom—exactly as theorized on this program early on,” he said on his radio show. “It’s unconfirmed, but it’s a story that many of the weapons of mass destruction are at present buried in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.” Fox News, catering to a similar demographic, enlisted a military analyst that evening to discuss potential ramifications—military intervention in Lebanon?—on “The O’Reilly Factor.” According to the story, the weapons were probably delivered to the Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah stronghold, in a caravan of tractor-trailers that was spotted leaving Iraq in January, two months before the war began, as part of a multimillion- dollar storage deal between Saddam Hussein and the Syrian government.

In fact, the World Tribune is not published in the United Kingdom, nor is it, to be precise, a newspaper. It is a Web site produced, more or less as a hobby, in Falls Church, Virginia, and is dedicated to the notion, as its mission statement explains, that “there is a market for news of the world and not just news of the weird.” (Nonetheless, the site includes a prominent feature, Cosmic Tribune, with an extraterrestrial focus, and it links to a Mafia journal called Gang Land News.) Its editor and publisher, Robert Morton, is an assistant managing editor at the Washington Times and a former “corporate editor” for News World Communications, the Times’ owner and the publishing arm of the Unification Church, led by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. (Morton and his wife, Choon Boon, are themselves followers of the Reverend Moon.) Among the World Tribune’s other recent half-ignored scoops are that Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for last month’s blackout and that a North Korean defector stressed, during a meeting in July with White House officials, the need for a preëmptive military strike against Kim Jong Il.

Morton said last week via e-mail that he founded the site as an experiment, back in 1998, while serving as a media fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank. “I didn’t expect World Tribune.com to last for more than a few months,” Morton wrote, but now, despite having no dedicated staff (“Everyone involved with World Tribune.com has a day job”), the site receives more than a million page views per month. And, unlike the Washington Times, which has lost at least a billion dollars in its twenty-one-year existence, World Tribune.com, in concert with the subscription-driven weekly intelligence briefing Geostrategy-Direct.com (a partner site), has paid for itself.

The secret of its success seems to involve well-placed informants (“Over the years I have developed an informal, international network of sources and writers I can trust,” Morton said) and an emphasis on immediacy. Although Morton said, “We emphasize newspaper standards to counter the half-baked, unfiltered content on some online sites,” World Tribune.com more fairly qualifies as something between a newspaper and a rumor-mongering blog. Call it “blews.” In this sense, it is part of a loose network of mostly conservative sites—WorldNetDaily, Dr. Koontz’s National Security Message Board, debka File (produced by a pair of Jerusalem-based journalists thought to have moles in Israeli intelligence)—whose dispatches sometimes serve as the journalistic equivalent of trial balloons: a story may not be based on knowable facts, but it nevertheless may occasionally turn out to be right. (Much of the time, of course, it more closely resembles a Bat Boy update in the Weekly World News.)

---snip---

make their case for going into Syria.

And every day the paper boy brings more...;-)

I'll see you on the dark side of the moon

That's my take on it.

Funny. How in the hell did the Washington Times--and only the Washington Times--come up with this? (Note: World Tribune = Washington Times)

Somehow I doubt their reporters are welcome in NK.

Oh, now I see. Their source is: "A military specialist on Korean affairs..." That's probably Wolfowitz.

Just a labour of love, by a few dedicated souls in their spare time. I very much doubt this, and I expect that there is big neo-conservative foundation money behind it. And I bet the Sankei Shimbun, the source they give for this story, is a Japanese version of the same thing.

If you google the terms "Sankei Shimbun neo-conservative" you get plenty of hits of this nature:

"The conservative Sankei Shimbun...paper, known for its hardline stance on Pyongyang,"
"right-wing Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun"
"The Sankei Shimbun, inclined toward the extreme right"

That doesn't necessarily prove that it is an unreliable source, but it does show that it has a definite ideological position. I would want plenty of corroborating sources before putting much stock into this claim of Syrians on the train that blew up.

Yeah, I about figured that. Everybody on the World tribune editorial page has some ridiculous right wing past or other (and I mean the kooky version), so there's little surprise that they have a series of set alliances and news sources among like-minded ideologues.