Ever wonder why North Korea’s the most secretive country in the world? Why a nation would line its railways with walls so high foreign passengers can’t see the passing countryside? It’s a place where media and television are a distant wonder and no U.S. citizen can get a visa to visit. North Korea is the most tyrannical, repressive and brutal country on earth, a place of starvation, fear and death and atrocities that are unimaginable in the outer world.It’s a place where leaders routinely counterfeit U.S. currency and execute any and all who denounce their practice. It’s a place where nearly all homes are fitted with speakers or one channel TVs blaring propaganda from morning to night. It’s a place where the drug trade is a government-sponsored affair and one in five mature males are drafted into a standing army that fights no wars. Many U.S. politicians consider North Korea a military threat, especially because of North Korea’s threat to make nuclear weapons. Yet despite North Korea’s threat to world security, especially to South Korea and Japan with whom the United States has military treaties, the Bush administration has consistently fumbled on how to deal with North Korea and the threat it poses. Military action, akin to Iraq, is out of the question because of North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons that could instantly obliterate Seoul. “The U.S. government is teaching the world a very ugly lesson,” said MIT’s Noam Chomsky, “if you want to keep us from attacking you, you’d better have a credible deterrent.” But domestically North Korea’s inflated military takes a back seat to the humanitarian atrocities that North Korea’s neighbors know but chose to ignore. Yet, the problem is nevertheless immense. According to the U.S. Committee for Human Rights, Kim Jong Il’s gulags l hold an estimated 175,000 prisoners in conditions that are likened to Stalinist internment camps. At one of the most infamous camps outside of Haengyong (an area recently closed after strong international protests) over 50,000 prisoners toiled each day in conditions that killed one out of every four. Kwon Hyok, a deserter and former head of security at Haengyong, has disclosed instances of chemical experimention carried out on prisoners in specially constructed gas chambers. Official North Korean documents listing individuals transferred for “the purpose of human experimentation with liquid gas for chemical weapons” confirmed Hyok’s testimony. Video footage and stolen records have recently been made available through the BBC and Australian television – news stories that have obviously seen little to no air time in the United States. North Korea’s military dictatorship is funded by heavy counterfeiting, drug trafficking and heroin production. In 1995, North Korea’s Ranam Pharmaceutical Plant was thought to have produced over 40 metric tons of heroin, which was then distributed to surrounding countries by way of government-supported shipping routes. That money isn’t buying clothing for citizens. North Korea was designated by the Secretary of State as a country that has “repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism.” and continued heavy gun trade with Russia hasn’t been bringing home the baked goods either. North Korea is a place in need of education, liberation and reform. It is a place of repression – a place in need of global humanitarian attention.