But is that an adequate explanation for these events? Before examining the facts surrounding them, let's introduce a bit of history. Take a look at the map below, which includes both Baengnyeong and Yeonpyeong Islands.

Contested seas. The NLL is represented by the blue A line. The MDL is represented by the red B line.

1: Yeonpyeong Island (artillery clas); 2: Baengnyeong Island (Cheonan sinking); 3: Daecheong Island. [source]

Demilitarized Zone

The armistice that ended the Korean War fighting established the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) which separates North Korea from South Korea. At that time, the U.S. government unilaterally established another dividing line, one intended to create a sea border between the two Koreas. That border is illustrated on the map by line A, the blue Northern Limit Line (NLL).

As you can see, instead of extending the DMZ westward into the sea, the U.S. line runs northward, limiting North Korea's sea access. The line was drawn this way for two reasons: First, when the fighting stopped, South Korean forces were in control of the islands off the North Korean coast and the U.S. wanted to secure their position. Second, control over those islands enhanced the ability of U.S. forces to monitor and maintain military pressure on North Korea.

North Korea never accepted the NLL. It argued for an alternative border, illustrated by line B, the red West Sea Military Demarcation Line (MDL). Acknowledging the reality of Southern forces on the islands off its coast, North Korea sought recognition for a sea border that went around the islands but otherwise divided the sea by extending the DMZ line.

The critical point here is that the South Korean and U.S. promoted NLL is not recognized by international law; it has no legal standing. Don't take my word for it. The following is from Bloomberg News:

?Then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in a 1975 classified cable that the unilaterally drawn Northern Limit Line was ?clearly contrary to international law.? Two years before, the American ambassador said in another cable that many nations would view South Korea and its U.S. ally as ?in the wrong? if clashes occurred in disputed areas along the boundary. ...

?The line snakes around the Ongjin peninsula, creating a buffer for five island groups that South Korea kept under the armistice that ended the 1950-1953 Korean War, in which U.S.-led forces fought under a UN mandate against North Korean and Chinese troops. The agreement doesn't mention a sea border, which isn't on UN maps drawn up at the time.

?The 3-nautical mile (3.5-statute mile) territorial limit used to devise the line was standard then. Today almost all countries, including both Koreas, use a 12-mile rule, and the islands are within 12 miles of the North Korean mainland. The furthest is about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the closest major South Korean port at Incheon.

??If it ever went to arbitration, the decision would likely move the line further south,? said Mark J. Valencia, a maritime lawyer and senior research fellow with the National Bureau of Asian Research, who has written extensively on the dispute. ...

?North Korea, after spending two decades rebuilding its forces, sent vessels across the border 43 times between October and November 1973, sparking confrontations, according to the South Korean Navy's website. At a meeting with the UN Command, the North's claim that it was operating within its own waters because the NLL was invalid was rejected.

?Kissinger and other U.S. diplomats privately raised questions about the legality of the sea border and South Korea's policing of it in cables that have been declassified and are available to the public.

??The ROK and the U.S. might appear in the eyes of a significant number of other countries to be in the wrong? if an incident occurred in disputed areas, U.S. Ambassador Francis Underhill wrote in a Dec. 18, 1973, cable to Washington, using the acronym for Republic of Korea.

?South Korea ?is wrong in assuming we will join in attempt to impose NLL? on North Korea, said a Dec. 22, 1973, ?Joint State-Defense Message? to the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. ...

?The line ?was unilaterally established and not accepted by NK,? Kissinger wrote in a confidential February 1975 cable. ?Insofar as it purports unilaterally to divide international waters, it is clearly contrary to international law.??

I doubt that discussions of the two events noted above mentioned this history.

Current Tensions

Tensions in the region are not just the result of past political decisions. Critical decisions continue to be made. For example, in October 2007, an inter-Korean summit meeting between Roh Moo-Hyun (the previous South Korean president) and Kim Jong Il (the North Korean leader) produced a commitment by both sides to negotiate a joint fishing area and create a ?peace and cooperation zone? in the West Sea. This agreement could have greatly reduced tensions between the two countries and helped to promote a peaceful reunification process.

However, a few months after the summit, the newly elected and current South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, rejected the agreements reached at that summit and the previous one held in 2000. Lee openly derided past South Korean efforts to improve relations with, and called for aggressive actions against, the North. The U.S. government supported Lee's position.

With this as background, let's now consider the first event, North Korea's alleged sinking of the Cheonan. The Lee administration claims that a North Korean submarine was responsible for the sinking of the Cheonan and the deaths of 49 sailors. The Cheonan was an anti-submarine ship, participating in war games at the time of its sinking in the disputed waters surrounding Baengnyeong Island. Significantly, after weeks of official investigation into the cause of the sinking, Lee publicly blamed North Korea only one day before local elections were scheduled, elections that the ruling party was predicted to lose. In fact, Lee's party did take a beating at the polls.

But what about the evidence for North Korean responsibility? North Korea has denied any involvement in the sinking. In fact, there is good reason to believe that the Cheonan sank because it hit a reef; that is what its captain reported when he radioed the South Korean coast guard seeking help.

As I noted in a previous posting, perhaps the most compelling evidence casting doubt on South Korean government claims that the Cheonan was torpedoed by a North Korean submarine is the fact that all the Cheonan victims died of drowning, nearly all of the 58 surviving crew members escaped serious injury, and the ship's internal instruments remained intact. According to several scientists, if the Cheonan had been hit by a torpedo, the entire crew would have been sent flying, leading to fractured bones and the destruction of instruments.

Aggressive War Games

What about the most recent incident involving the North Korean artillery attack on Yeonpyeong Island? The South Korean position is that its military was merely engaged in ?routine? war games (involving over 70,000 troops), which also happened to include the firing of live ammunition into the sea from a military base on the island. It had done nothing to provoke a North Korean artillery attack on the base.

In reality, the South had been strengthening its artillery on the island for some time, engaging in ever more aggressive (non-live ammunition) artillery drills with the apparent aim of boosting its capacity to inhibit the movement of the North Korean navy even in its own waters. These drills were a direct threat to North Korean security given how close the island is to its coast.

Moreover, although the South claims that its war games and artillery fire were routine, it may be the first time that the South has staged major war games and simultaneously engaged in firing live ammunition into territory claimed by the North. The North fired on the South Korean artillery batteries located on Yeonpyeong Island only after its repeated demands that the South stop its live ammunition firing were rejected by the South.

Many unanswered questions remain about the Cheonan sinking and the Yeonpyeong attack. However, what does appear clear is that there are many complexities surrounding these events that are never made public here in North America, and that these omissions end up reinforcing a view of North Korean motivations and actions that is counterproductive to what should be our goal: achieving peace on the Korean peninsula.

What might help? How about encouraging the U.S. government to accept North Korean offers to engage in good faith negotiations aimed at signing a peace treaty to officially end the Korean War as a first step toward normalized relations. The fact that our government is reluctant to publicly acknowledge the contested nature of the NLL or pursue an end to the Korean War raises important questions about the motivations driving foreign policy. ?

Martin Hart-Landsberg is Professor of Economics and Director of the Political Economy Program at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon; and Adjunct Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, Gyeongsang National University, South Korea. This article first appeared on his blog Reports from the Economic Front.

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The 10 Leading Theories For Dead Birds And Fish

Thursday, January 6, 2011

By Nicholas West and Zen Gardner
Activist Post

As the mainstream media attempts to downplay the latest die-off event, which has now gone global, it is worthwhile to keep track of the story lines.  Feel free to add your own to the comments section, and we will update accordingly.

Mainstream Explanations: Lightning, hail, mid-air collision, power lines, and New Year fireworks for the birds . . . but disease for the fish.  This is even rolling eyes in the mainstream media.  Birds are incredibly sensitive to their environment (think Canary in the coal mine), and the thought that they were caught by surprise, or that they "fowled" up their flight pattern is patently ridiculous.  And where are the roasted birds from this lightning strike?  And what about fish dying in the same region?  Just a "disease" coincidence.  One mainstream headline has to be enshrined as the saddest attempt at sensationalism, while revealing an obvious natural conclusion Falling Birds Likely Died From Massive Trauma.  Really?

Meteor showers: We are in a period of intense seasonal meteor showers, and several perennial YouTubers reported hearing sonic booms in the area that could have indicated a local shock wave.  This would be one non-conspiratorial, natural cause that actually makes sense, but it is hard to connect to both birds and fish, unless it produced a disabling frequency.  There were indeed other sound anomalies according to the report highlighted above. 
New Madrid Fault Line:  An excellent article by The American Dream collated data about the recent earthquake activity along this fault line that runs along the mid-eastern section of the U.S.  Combined with gas fracking, the immense geological activity in the region, and the BP oil drilling disaster, which off-gassed the dispersant, Corexit, into the atmosphere, and we should be wondering about any mass deaths in the region.  Nevertheless, this has turned into a global event, so the above could be a side effect of something larger, or a direct contributing factor.

Government testing: The long history of government testing has been exposed by many researchers.  The strange component to this die-off is that only certain species have been affected, but within the entire region.  And some reports have indicated that the organs of these birds were liquefied, which could indicate a possible virus. Could this implicate species-specific bio-weapons? It is on record that discussions have taken place about race-specific bio-weapons; perhaps this is a test of delivery capability?

GMO mutation: Mike Adams of Natural News sets forth an interesting theory: this latest event is local, but the die-offs are happening across species as bee populations and bats are also declining.  Adams points out that Monsanto has a corporate office in Arkansas.  Just wondering.

Geoengineering: Could spraying in the area have caused this type of fallout?  Perhaps something new added to the mixture? Chemtrails have quickly moved from conspiracy theory to documented fact.  So much so, that the powers-that-be have had to admit to the program, but a beneficial one in their view.  Between cloud seeding and possible connections to HAARP, chemtrail fallout must be considered, especially as it is being conducted nearly worldwide.  Rosalind Peterson has been at the forefront of connecting geoengineering to GMOs as a combined source for oxygen-depleting algae blooms that very well could affect a wide spectrum of natural systems. Furthermore, some believe that the delivery system for chemtrails can also disperse pathogens.  If there is a flu or disease outbreak in the coming days or weeks among the human population in areas where the birds have fallen, the chemtrail connection could be made.  If this happens, the contagion could be blamed on a new, deadly bird flu.  A last possibility connected to chemtrails would be nanoparticles.

HAARP: Birds and fish can be susceptible to subtle frequency alteration.  An interesting YouTube post from a long-time fisherman mentioned the "pearl" plate behind the eye of the affected type of drum fish in this event.  He made a plea for anyone in the area to look for signs of damage to this plate.  Both birds and fish navigate in highly coordinated ways that indicate that they move and communicate via frequencies.  Could the HAARP array in Alaska have short-circuited their navigation systems?  Or, perhaps this is the beginning of a cascading effect from decades of electromagnetic pollution emanating from EMF and ELF waves shot around the planet via a wide range of modern communications.

Scalar Weapons:  These directed energy beam weapons can be deployed via satellite and create a wide range of "natural disasters" that can be tuned to certain frequencies.  Their radius is reported to be several miles.  Even crazier is that we have been told that the dead birds encountered massive trauma.  One of the reported abilities of scalar weapons is to create a Tesla shield of plasma, like a bubble, that could explode anything that enters its airspace.  Some have speculated that this technology is in full operation.  But what if it truly is still at the testing phase?  Remember, this is happening in South America, too.

Project Blue Beam: Were they testing a sound generator for the global theater of alien invasion?  This one is "out there" for sure, but NASA itself has announced its preparation for such a scenario. Project Blue Beam, like its counterpart HAARP, uses the natural energy present in the ionosphere as both a visual and acoustical device.  Again, perhaps they are not at the ready stage yet, but, like Tesla, have made an unintentional misstep. 

Geomagnetic and other Earth changes:  As anyone can see from the above range of possibilities, we are facing an array of human tampering.  However, the backdrop to this are the anomalies beginning to take form with the apparent wandering of our magnetic pole, as even National Geographic reported that the north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia.  Add to this a dwindling magnetosphere and falling oxygen levels, and the deaths among more delicate species might portend a larger problem.  Finally, an increase in sun activity and magnetic storms might be weakening our overall natural habitat.

The widespread die-off of nature should lead us to look more intently at the world around us, and to question our relationship to it, and our effect upon it. Perhaps this is what we should have been doing all along.

* Zen Gardner is the Contributing Editor for Alternative News at Before It's News, and also posts at ZenGardner.com.   

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The greatest Ponzi Scam Ever Perpetrated