I’m sure you all remember that North Korea had arrested and sentenced two American reporters named Laura Ling and Yuna Lee this summer. President Clinton went over, met with Kim Jong-Il, and obtained the safe release of the journalists. Well, it is possible that we all remember wrong; Yahoo News is reporting that Clinton may have actually met with a Kim John-Il look-alike in his trip over.
From Yahoo News:
A number of analysts here are convinced that not all the photos being released of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, are really photos of Kim Jong-il.
Instead, they say, a look-alike has been standing in for him on some of the 122 trips he’s reportedly made this year to the countryside, factories, cultural events, military units, and all sorts of other venues.
It continues later:
No one here, however, is ready to go as far as Japanese writer Toshimitsu Shigemura, who has written two books and numerous articles claiming that Kim has been seriously ill for the past decade and may even have died.
Mr. Shigemura says that if the real Kim, looking wan and weak, appeared before the Supreme People’s Assembly several days after North Korea fired a long-range missile on April 5, then it must have been a look-alike who hosted former US President Bill Clinton in August.
“They were totally different people,” says Mr. Shigemura, a former correspondent for Mainichi Shimbun, a major Japanese newspaper, who now teaches international relations at Waseda University in Tokyo. “In August, he looked very healthy.”
Shigemura suspects that a skilled actor delivered the lines to Mr. Clinton during their three-hour, 17-minute meeting, which ended with Mr. Clinton flying back to the US with two journalists who had been held for 140 days.
So it looks like Kim Jong-Il could actually be dead or very sick and has not been able to meet with dignitaries and foreigners. What does this say about our foreign policy and investigative abilities? We have the CIA, we should know if someone is dead.
Ironically, North Korea could be run by a dead person right now. How’s that for Halloween?
