For days, we have been hearing that the leaker of National Security Agency surveillance secrets, Edward Snowden, is hiding out in Hong Kong. Or, to put it in a variety of other ways — all culled from the recent news — he has gone to ground, dropped out of sight, is in hiding, disappeared, vanished. Though he has somehow managed to continue giving interviews, from what the International Business Times describes as “a secret base” in Hong Kong. It sounds like a plot setup from that old master of spy thrillers, Eric Ambler — complete with the twist that a man who has just achieved world fame by exposing surveillance is now trying to stay in the spotlight without actually being spotted. And of course he has gone to ground, disappeared, vanished, in Hong Kong — a place I suspect is still vaguely linked in public imagination to the old romance of Asian ports, of Taipan, intrigue in the tea rooms, Suzie Wong in the bars and back alley mazes into which one can simply disappear (some of that accurate and some of it by now hallucinatory).

OK, whatever else this case is all about, if Snowden has genuinely dropped out of sight in Hong Kong, I am in awe. I lived in Hong Kong from 1986-1993, and have returned fairly often over the years since. There is plenty about modern Hong Kong that I most certainly do not know. But this much I do know. If there is one thing that is insanely difficult to do in Hong Kong, at least for a gweilo — to use the Cantonese word for folks of Snowden’s non-Cantonese ethnic origins — it is nearly impossible to truly drop out of sight.

For starters, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated enclaves on the planet. With 7 million people packed into a relatively small area, the population density is on average about 6,540 persons per square mile. In its most densely populated district, Kwun Tong, the average is 54,530. That does not mean, however, that it is easy for someone like Snowden to get lost in the throng. According to Hong Kong government statistics, 93.6% of those people are of Chinese descent. Only 6.4% are foreign nationals, and of those, a scant 29,000 or so are Americans. In other words, if you are an American in Hong Kong, and people have reasons to be curious about you, it is very hard to hide in a crowd.

So, what about hunkering down in a windowless flat, or a place with curtains drawn, and whiling away the days without ever going out? Well, he’d still have to have gotten there. Even before we get to the basics that Hong Kong is a special autonomous region of the hack-happy surveillance realms of the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong is wired. It’s a city of cameras — traffic cameras, private security cameras, mobile phone cameras. Plus, try though you might to take a solitary stroll in the city shadows, with that many people crammed into that little space there just isn’t a lot of solitude. There’s almost always someone, sweeping a curb, shuttering a shop, taking an early morning delivery.

For the moment, I’ll leave it to others to sift through the credentials of Samantha Power, President Obama’s nominee to become the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Let’s talk about what awaits a new ambassador at Turtle Bay.

In terms of creature comforts, there is plenty to enjoy. The UN is completing a $2 billion renovation of its New York headquarters, 22% of that at America’s expense. The asbestos is gone, the refurbished stonework gleams, the digital eco-age has arrived. For the U.S. Mission to the UN, which underwent its own re-do in recent years, there is a new building — bigger, more secure, and located conveniently across the street from the main UN complex. The diplomatic parties are never-ending, the delegate’s dining room — overlooking the East River — caters to the kind of parties at which Sudan, in 2009, celebrated its chairmanship of the G-77 by serving lobster, shrimp, and strawberries dipped in chocolate.

But for anyone who must ultimately account to the American people — especially someone with big hopes to save the world — today’s UN can be at best a mud pit, and more likely a minefield. When Obama announced on Wednesday that he was nominating Power for the job, he described her as “someone who showed us that the international community has a moral responsibility and a profound interest in resolving conflicts and defending human dignity.” Presumably the idea is that she will now take this crusade, hands-on, to the UN.

But the UN, for all its high-minded rhetoric, is not about moral responsibility and human dignity. Not in practice.

The UN today is a place where Iran heads the 120-member so-called Non-Aligned Movement (119 member states plus the Palestinian Authority) — the second largest voting bloc in the 193 member General Assembly. Currently Iran is also chairing the UN’s Disarmament Conference in Geneva, and sits on the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

The list goes on. The UN is an institution whose special envoys and assorted officials have been wringing their hands over the carnage in Syria, but for more than two years have failed to stop it. The UN is a place where dictatorships field tremendous clout, where the favorite mascot of many committees is Cuba. Where any Security Council resolution, before it can pass, must meet with the approval of China and Russia. Moral vertigo is often the best one can hope for.

That may sound like a hospitable climate for what the Wall Street Journal described as Samantha Power’s “Mea Culpa” doctrine — a reference to her prescription for America in a 2003 article she wrote for the New Republic. But at the UN, a mea culpa won’t get you much in the way of morally responsible behavior or defense of human dignity. If anything, it’s likely to lead to a demand for more mea culpas.

Iran’s global extravaganza of state-sponsored terrorism is getting some well-deserved attention this week, with the release of the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism, plus the sentencing of dual national Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar (for conspiring with Iran’s Qods Force to try to bomb the Saudi ambassador in Washington), plus the massive indictment issued by Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman (whose investigation of the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center, AMIA, in Buenos Aires, has uncovered Iranian terror networks throughout Latin America).

But spare a thought, also, for Iran’s partner in proliferation and exemplar of evil — North Korea. The State Department roster of State Sponsors of Terrorism is weirdly short, with just four countries listed: Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria. Why isn’t North Korea on the list?

The short answer is that from 1988-2008, the U.S. did indeed list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism — a distinction that North Korea had richly earned, with its career of bombings, abductions, and weapons traffic and training for fellow terror-sponsoring states.  The Bush administration removed North Korea from the list in late 2008, in a desperate last-ditch attempt to salvage the ill-conceived, duplicitously conducted, and utterly failed 2007 nuclear freeze deal piloted by special envoy Chris Hill.

Since then, North Korea — in its official Non-Terrorist-Sponsoring incarnation — has carried out a slew of missile tests (including long-range ballistic missiles); conducted two nuclear tests,  in 2009 and 2013; torpedoed and sunk a South Korean frigate, the Cheonan (killing more than 40); shelled the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong (killing four);  dispatched weapons shipments to Iran and Hezbollah; and threatened nuclear strikes on Washington, Seoul, and the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam.

In addition, according to the State Department, North Korea has yet to provide a full accounting for at least 12 Japanese citizens believed to have been abducted by North Korean “state entities” in the 1970s and 1980s. (Think about that — being kidnapped and held in North Korea for more than 30 years. At what point, for the abductees and their families, is that no longer supposed to qualify as state-sponsored terrorism?).

Chilling as it is to read the search warrant for the emails of Fox News reporter James Rosen, we can at least say this much regarding the relevant officials of the Justice Department: They were thorough. The 36-page document goes into all sorts of detail about Rosen’s cultivation of a source, and the comings, goings, phone calls, and messages potentially related to his June 11, 2009 story reporting information on North Korea leaked from a CIA report.

By contrast, the leaked CIA report itself appears to have contained a remarkable amount of slop, to judge by Rosen’s account.

He reported that “the Central Intelligence Agency has learned, through sources inside North Korea” that there were four actions the North Korean regime planned to take in response to a United Nations sanctions resolution that was expected to pass later that week. These four actions:

1) Another nuclear test

2) Reprocessing all North Korea’s spent fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium

3) A major escalation in North Korea’s uranium enrichment program

4) The launch of another Taepodong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile

What’s wrong with this collection of CIA secrets about North Korea? Well, speaking entirely without benefit of classified information, or any sources inside North Korea, I’d argue that the CIA was wrong in the first place to suggest such actions would be responses to UN sanctions. These were actions North Korea was going to take anyway, with or without UN sanctions resolution #1874, which did indeed pass on June 12, 2009, the day after Rosen’s article appeared.

North Korea’s nuclear program is a core element of its totalitarian, weapons-vending, extortionist regime. North Korea has been busy for years with its pursuit of both plutonium and highly enriched uranium for bomb fuel, as well as with the development of ballistic missiles (to deliver the bombs). Also, with such furbelows as vending missiles to Middle East terror sponsors such as Iran and with helping Syria build a plutonium factory — in the form of the clandestine nuclear reactor destroyed by an Israeli air strike in 2007.

Short of regime change, North Korea is highly unlikely to abandon these endeavors. You don’t need secret intelligence reports to know that; you just have to be able to read the open source histories. The questions turn on the specifics: the where and how and when. When were they going to press ahead with these four steps?

If the message of the CIA report was that all four steps were imminent (in response to the 2009 UN sanctions resolution), then the CIA got at least two of the points wrong. Possibly three.

In the parade of United Nations absurdities, here comes Iran’s four-week presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament — an arrangement that the U.S. Mission to the UN has described as “unfortunate and inappropriate,” and Hillel Neuer of UN Watch has more accurately compared to “putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a women’s shelter.”

But should anyone be surprised? This is how the UN works. Being a despotic state that sponsors terrorism while pursuing nuclear weapons — while under multiple UN sanctions — is no bar to holding fancy posts at the UN. Clearly, Iran’s regime has become expert at availing itself of this setup. Currently, and through 2015, Iran heads the second-largest voting bloc in the UN General Assembly (the Non-Aligned Movement, which includes 119 states plus the Palestinian Authority). Iran also sits on the UN Commission on the Status of Women (of course), as well as the executive boards and governing councils of such major agencies as UNICEF, the UN Development Program, and the UN Environment Program. For a fuller list, here’s a link to my article last month, “At the U.N., Iran is a Powerhouse, Not a Pariah.”

In the case of the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament, the good news — in keeping with another of the UN’s dysfunctional aspects — is that this body has been gridlocked for years. When Iran takes charge, from May 27-June 23, that’s unlikely to change. The bad news is that this conference serves as a yet another UN platform for dignifying a procession of the world’s worst regimes. Among the 65 members of the conference, alongside such staple UN players as Russia and China, are Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, and Zimbabwe, as well as Iran. The presidency rotates through all the members in alphabetical order, so they all get a turn as president. When North Korea took the top chair, in 2011, I labeled it “Beyond Parody.” But let’s face it. Moves that in any sane or morally competent venue would qualify as beyond parody are treated as nothing out of the ordinary at the UN. They are standard procedure.

It is also standard procedure that some of the developed democracies that bankroll the UN, especially the U.S. (and in recent years, Canada), issue a denunciation of such proceedings as Iran presiding at the disarmament conference, and maybe even withdraw their ambassadors — but nonetheless, appear helpless to stop such outrages. So, let’s just note that there are ways to avert this sort of thing. Back in 2003, as the alphabetical rotation of the disarmament conference’s presidency would have it, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was due to take the top chair. It didn’t happen. Saddam’s regime did not get its turn that round, for the dramatic reason that the U.S. and a coalition of the willing toppled Saddam. Not that I’m expecting the U.S. administration to launch a ground invasion of Iran. Just sayin’ — if there’s no way to change UN procedure, and no way to change the alphabet, there’s still more than one way to clean up some of the monstrosities at the UN.

You remember Richard Falk — the UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur who last month wrote an article blaming America for the terrorist bombings of the Boston Marathon. Falk suggested these horrific attacks were part of the post-colonial world’s natural “resistance” to “the American global domination project.” In response, more than two dozen members of Congress called for Falk — an American academic — to be fired from his UN post.

Now, according to a dispatch by Fox News editor-at large George Russell, the U.S. State Department is saying that Falk cannot be fired — because the rules of the Human Rights Council contain no provision for firing any of the Council’s dozens of special rapporteurs. That’s quite plausible; the UN also lacks any provision for removing a secretary-general (as became evident during the Oil-for-Food scandal, on Kofi Annan’s watch). It is also absurd, and in practice not quite credible. When UN senior officials want to, they can be quite creative about sidelining or ousting inconvenient personnel — though such maneuvers seem more often reserved for whistleblowers than for those peddling the anti-American or anti-Israel vitriol in which the UN specializes.

But in the case of Falk, it looks like both the State Department and the UN Human Rights Council will defer politely to the UN’s lack of rules for firing a special rapporteur. His earliest departure date will be May of 2014, when his six-year term expires. At which stage, as Russell notes, Falk could run for another post as a special rapporteur for the Human Rights Council, which is packed with countries sympathetic to his style.

It gets worse. Russell has also unearthed the information — buried in a 183-page report from the UN’s External Board of Auditors — that Human Rights Council special rapporteurs, such as Falk, are not required to disclose any support they might get from institutions or individual governments. The basic arrangement is that these rapporteurs usually work for a token $1 per year, but the UN Human Rights Council covers their expenses which, according to documents obtained by Fox, can range from about $240,000 to almost $600,000 per year.

In other words, while UN special rapporteurs appear to be doing altruistic work for a token fee, the Human Rights Council has effectively issued them a license to operate under the UN logo, expenses paid by the UN — and at the same time, allows them to accept funding from who-knows-whom with who-knows-what-agenda, and no requirement to disclose any of it. Oh, and P.S., there is no provision for firing them (see above, and read Russell’s piece in full). It may happen that some of these special rapporteurs try to operate with integrity. But this is yet another instance in which, if the UN had set out to design a crooked setup, it’s hard to think how they could have done a better job of it. It’s time to think bigger than firing Richard Falk. How about finding a way to fire the entire Human Rights Council?

(Artwork based on a modified Shutterstock.com image.)

The news is full of reports that Israeli air strikes have targeted Iranian-supplied missiles in Syria, which Israeli officials believe were intended for Hezbollah — Iran’s satellite terrorist organization in Lebanon. Midway through a New York Times story on this development comes a reminder that :

Hezbollah is now believed to have more missiles and fighters than it had before its 2006 battle with Israel, when Hezbollah missiles forced a third of Israel’s population into shelters and hit as far south as Haifa.

“More missiles” may be putting it modestly. In 2011, Israeli authorities said that Hezbollah had rearmed to the extent of amassing more than three times the weapons it had prior to the 2006 war. Supplementing their allegations with detailed maps, Israeli officials charged that Hezbollah had created a network across southern Lebanon of almost 1,000 rocket and missile facilities, including 550 bunkers and 100 weapons storage units.

All of which raises the question of what’s going on with the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, known as UNIFIL (UN Interim Force in Lebanon). UNIFIL was beefed up, at significant cost, after the 2006 war, with the professed aim of ensuring that Hezbollah would not rearm. As spelled out in 2006 in UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which was supposed to secure peace, UNIFIL’s mandate included helping Lebanon’s armed forces ensure that southern Lebanon, bordering on Israel, would be — to quote from the UNIFIL web site — “an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL deployed in the area.”

Obviously — see the information above — that mandate for ensuring an area free of Hezbollah munitions has not worked out. So what is UNIFIL doing?

For a good rundown on Richard Falk, a special rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council, see the scathing coverage by Geneva-based UN Watch, which blew the whistle last week on Falk’s  article blaming America for the terrorist bombings in Boston.

But let’s connect a few more dots. Falk’s article ran not only on the boutique venue of a 9/11 conspiracy theorist’s blog site, where it appeared April 21st under the headline “A Commentary on the Marathon Murders.” The same article by Falk — in slightly shorter version — ran two days earlier on the web site of Al Jazeera, under the headline “Collective Self-Reflection in the Wake of a National Tragedy.” On Al Jazeera the sub-headline, plucked from the text, was precisely Falk’s contention that America is to blame: “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.” (One of Falk’s points being that “In some respects the U.S. has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks…” — In other words, the two Chechen brothers who received asylum in America, and then used bombs packed with nails to murder and maim Americans, were simply engaging in a bit of post-colonial response, brought on by American policies.)

That Al Jazeera would carry such stuff is no surprise. Falk has lots to offer a Qatar-based news network prone to whipping up anti-American sentiment. He is American — presumably the basis on which he presents his views as an exercise in “collective self-reflection” — and he comes wreathed in credentials as a Princeton University professor emeritus and a UN special rapporteur for Palestinian rights (though the result of his labors has been less to support the rights of Palestinians than to support the interests of the thugs who run Hamas).

And that brings us to former Vice President Al Gore, who just this past January, in a $500 million deal, sold his Current TV cable channel to Al Jazeera — the recent outlet for Falk’s meditations. Having acquired access to an American cable TV audience, thanks to Gore and his business partners, Al Jazeera is now preparing the launch of Al Jazeera America.  When Gore came under fire for this deal, he vigorously defended Al Jazeera as a marvelous addition to news coverage in America, describing Al Jazeera as “respected…capable,” and comparing favorably with American networks as an “honest-to-goodness news channel.”

Really? Will Al Jazeera America, like its mothership network, soon be bringing us the ravings of Richard Falk? Would Al Gore perhaps like to comment on this brand of commentary, and whether giving it a platform is a service to the American public?

Following the past week’s marathon of terror in Boston, the news is full of articles trying to explain the Tsarnaev brothers. What would motivate two young men, granted asylum by America, to answer that welcome by assaulting a crowd with bombs packed with nails and ball bearings, with maiming and murder?

Given the Chechen origins of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the search for answers has quite reasonably entailed a crash course in the history of Chechnya. The terrorism in Boston was clearly a case of jihad, and Chechnya over the past generation has become a jihadi hub; though plenty of details have yet to be discovered about the precise path that took the Tsarnaev brothers from emigre boys to terror suspects — one now dead and the other in custody after a manhunt that shut down all of Boston.

But creeping into this discussion is another line of analysis, of which we should be very wary. That would be the suggestion that the terror in Boston was the product not only of radical Islam, but more broadly a result of the agonies suffered over generations by the Chechens. For instance, in a meditative article on the two brothers, The New Yorker’s David Remnick writes, “The Tsarnaev family had been battered by history before — by empire and the strife of displacement, by exile and emigration. Asylum in a bright new land proved little comfort.”

Remnick is quite right that the Chechens have endured a long history of hell. The conquest of Chechnya by Czarist Russia in the 18th century translated into the brutalities of Soviet rule in the 20th century. During World War II, to prevent the Chechens from collaborating with the Nazis against the Soviet Union, Stalin deported the entire Chechen population in cattle cars to Central Asia. Many died. When the survivors began returning to Chechnya, in the late 1950s and 1960s, many found ethnic Russians living in their homes.

Browsing the reports of North Korea’s state mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency, can be — in its own strange way — a ramble of discovery. Even setting aside such fare as the threats to “turn the strongholds of the enemies into a sea of fire,” there are intriguing glimpses of some of the official comings and goings in Pyongyang. More often these reports serve to inspire questions rather than answer them — but perhaps even that can have some value.

One such item turned up among the April 18 KCNA postings, headlined “Palestinian Ambassador to DPRK gives reception.” It caught my eye, as an interesting bit of background to North Korea’s frenzy of threats plus missile and nuclear tests. Although a lot of attention has been paid lately to the ties between North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Iran’s terrorist clients such as Hamas and Hezbollah, the news has not been rife with stories about how Palestinian Authority officials are amusing themselves these days in Pyongyang — which treats the Palestinian Authority as a state, complete with embassy (scroll down here for a photo). According to KCNA, it’s a case of mutual affection, with the Palestinian envoy to Pyongyang, Ismail Ahmed Mohamed Hasan, recently delivering to Kim Jong Un, on behalf of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, a floral basket to celebrate both the birthday of North Korea’s founding tyrant, the late Kim Il Sung, and the first anniversary of Kim Jong Un’s ascension to first secretary of the North Korean Workers’ Party.

As shindigs go this PA reception in North Korea sounded as dreary as the surrounding streets of the Pyongyang diplomatic district (or maybe you had to be there to appreciate the more festive aspects).  KCNA provided a perfectly tedious account of how the Palestinian envoy “gave a reception at his embassy on Thursday to mark the birth anniversary of President Kim Il Sung.” There was a list of North Korean officials who attended, and a reminder of the special bonds between Pyongyang and the Palestinians, going back to the days of Kim Il Sung and Yasser Arafat. The recitation closed with the North Korean assertion that “The Korean people will extend invariable support and solidarity to the Palestinian people in their just cause to retake the legitimate national rights and found an independent state with Kuds as its capital.”

No surprise there. But it did leave me wondering. If the Palestinian Authority maintains in Pyongyang a facility that North Korea regards as an official embassy, complete with receptions and gifts of floral baskets, then what does the North Korean government enjoy, in the way of reciprocity, in Ramallah? Presumably there are experts who know the answer, but I have done some looking online, and have yet to find it. Is there an office? A trading company? A restaurant?A news service? Just asking…