On April 30th, North Korea tried and found guilty US citizen Kenneth Bae for "hostile acts" against the state, sentencing him to 15 years of hard labor. A May 15th press release from North Korea's Korean Central News Agency stated that he has now begun serving his sentence within a "special prison." Bae, a devout Christian, is the owner of a North Korea tour company and was in the country with official permission when detained by North Korean authorities on November 3rd. What actually took place leading to his arrest has been the subject of much conjecture, but one thing is certain: Bae, a humanitarian who had compassion for North Korea's starving and abandoned orphans, is not indictable for any crime. Rather, he is a hostage being held to accommodate yet undetermined North Korean agenda.

The Bae case recalls the still unresolved case of a Christian minister and humanitarian, the Reverend Kim Dong-shik, who died in a North Korean prison. In 2000, North Korean agents crossed the border and hunted Kim down in China, where he was operating several underground shelters for North Korean refugees. He was abducted and taken back into North Korea, where he was reportedly tortured and starved to death. Given China's inhumane policy to forcibly repatriate North Koreans who manage to escape their country-gulag (a policy that has led to thousands of deaths and divided Korean families), one can safely assume China tolerated, if not sanctioned, the abduction. Kim was a US permanent resident whose wife and two children, all US citizens, are from Illinois.

Careful examination of Kim's case exposes an unethical and dangerous double standard in United States foreign policy toward North Korea, specifically in reference to human rights violations, terrorism, and mass atrocity. In 2005, then Senator Barack Obama and 19 other Illinois lawmakers co-signed a letter to North Korea's UN mission, in which they promised not to support the de-listing of the DPRK government as a state sponsor of terrorism until a full accounting was given concerning the fate of Reverend Kim. North Korea has never accounted for Kim, and in 2008, when the Bush administration agreed to the removal of the DPRK from the state terrorism list, in an unprincipled (and eventually failed) attempt to broker a deal with Pyongyang on its nuclear activities, the Democratic nominee reversed positions. Kim's case has been essentially ignored by Washington ever since, although his death has been confirmed by South Korean intelligence.

A 2011 report (pdf) from the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea found that North Korea has abducted more than 180,000 people from 12 countries. The committee called on the United States to re-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism because of the abductions, which are categorized under 18 USC Section 2331 as acts of terrorism.

US officials and security analysts continue to make a grave mistake in concentrating their North Korea policy on somehow convincing the DPRK to dissolve its nuclear weapons program; a crisis that history has demonstrated with distinction cannot be resolved while the current regime remains in power. North Korea takes pride in its status as a nuclear state more than anything else and has stated on numerous occasions that their nuclear capability is non-negotiable, referring to it as a "treasured sword." Concurrently, a war with North Korea would never commence by means of a DPRK nuclear strike, which would be tantamount to political suicide, but with covert terror operations such as what took place in Boston on April 15th—the exact form of attack North Korea has repeatedly employed against South Korea and its citizens since its inception. On April 20th, North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency felt compelled to publicly deny any connection to the Boston Marathon bombings, stating that the DPRK "has consistently maintained the stand of opposing all forms of terrorism." The official statement went on to add that "When the DPRK feels necessary to strike the US, it would not resort to such heinous terrorism in hiding." Yet the facts of North Korea's international behavior suggests otherwise.

On April 15, 1969, for example, 31 American crewmen were killed when two North Korean MiG-17s shot down a US reconnaissance aircraft on a routine flight that at no time violated North Korean airspace. The US Navy intelligence plane had flown the identical route over the preceding three months without any occurrence. But this date, which marks the birth of Kim Il-sung, is the most important day of the North Korean calendar, and thus North Korea asserted that the aircraft had flown deep into its airspace and its air defense forces "scored the brilliant battle success." In January of the preceding year, the USS Pueblo was attacked and abducted by North Korean warships in international waters. Eighty-two officers and crew were taken hostage and tortured; one was killed.

In August 1976, US soldiers entered the heavily guarded demilitarized neutral zone that separates North and South Korea to trim a tree that was blocking the view from an observation post. In what was later found to have been a pre-planned attack, 35 North Korean