Blaine's latest...

... is a terrific and sad front-page piece about North Korea's concentration camps. Truly horrifying places, where people survive on next to nothing until they are worked to death. And yet the US Govt, Hollywood and DPRK allies like China don't say or do anything about them.

The Post added a neat multi-media display with a map and details of five labor camps, and more precise details of one camp, Camp 15.

Here is the lede:

N. Korea's Hard-Labor Camps: On the Diplomatic Back Burner
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 20, 2009

SEOUL -- Images and accounts of the North Korean gulag become sharper, more harrowing and more accessible with each passing year.

A distillation of testimony from survivors and former guards, newly published by the Korean Bar Association, details the daily lives of 200,000 political prisoners estimated to be in the camps: Eating a diet of mostly corn and salt, they lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken and, as they age, they hunch over at the waist. Most work 12- to 15-hour days until they die of malnutrition-related illnesses, usually around the age of 50. Allowed just one set of clothes, they live and die in rags, without soap, socks, underclothes or sanitary napkins....

..."We have this system of slavery right under our nose," said An Myeong Chul, a camp guard who defected to South Korea. "Human rights groups can't stop it. South Korea can't stop it. The United States will have to take up this issue at the negotiating table."