North Korea Is Definitely a State Sponsor of Terrorism

Since 2009, each edition of the State Department's annual Country Reports on Terrorism has contained a cheerful fiction: State has given the nation that it insists on calling the "DPRK"—using the anti-democratic, anti-people, and anti-republican Pyongyang government's laughable official appellation, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea—a clean bill of health. North Korea "is not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987," last year's document reads. The country has therefore remained safely off the United States' list of state sponsors of terrorism.

This year's report, due to be released by April 30, will require a revision. For what last year was—at a minimum—a highly questionable judgment now looks utterly indefensible in the wake of North Korea's brazen assassination of its dictator's older half-brother at Kuala Lumpur's airport on February 13.

In the waning days of his administration, George W. Bush removed North Korea from the State Department's terror list. Pyongyang had been on the list since that aforementioned 1987 bombing, which killed 115 innocent people. Call it the audacity of hope: Bush figured that by rewarding Pyongyang with a delisting, the North Korean regime would agree to halt its development of nuclear weapons and allow international weapons inspectors inside the country. Like many dubious propositions, Bush's move gained widespread bipartisan support. Then-senator Barack Obama praised the deal, calling it a "modest step forward."

Four nuclear weapons tests later, we see how well the denuclearization component of the arrangement has worked. And in the meantime, North Korea has continued to aid and perpetrate acts of terrorism, rendering the claim that it "is not known" to have sponsored terrorism true only if one has never cracked a newspaper.

Writing in these pages in July 2015, attorney and sanctions expert Joshua Stanton noted that

under U.S. law, and according to the precedents of the State Department's past Country Reports, international terrorism includes both material support for terrorists and terrorist organizations, and also the use of a state's own clandestine agents to commit violent, politically motivated acts against noncombatants, across international boundaries, that are unlawful in the place where they are committed, with the intent to influence the conduct of a government or members of the civilian population.