More On Ignatius

This is worse than I “first thought.”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1363/shorter-david-ignatius

Can anyone think of any events at all concerning North Korea that have been left out of this little narrative? Like, say, the ones Philip Z “glossed over”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1364/shorter-philip-zelikow?

Treasury *applied the new tools to North Korea in September 2005,* when it put a bank in Macao called Banco Delta Asia on the blacklist. There was no legal proceeding — just a notice in the Federal Register summarizing the evidence: Banco Delta Asia had been providing illicit financial services to North Korean government agencies and front companies for more than 20 years, according to the Treasury notice.

*snip*

Wham! [Pow! KaBlammo!] The international payments window shut almost instantly on Pyongyang’s pet bank. Transactions with U.S. entities stopped, but the Treasury announcement also put other countries on notice to beware of Banco Delta Asia. The Macao banking authorities, realizing that they needed the oxygen of the international financial system to survive, took regulatory action on their own and froze the bank’s roughly $24 million in North Korean assets. And around Asia, banks began looking for possible links to North Korean front companies — and shutting them down.

Wham! indeed. Not just a shitty 80s band, I guess.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *