HRW put out a new report fearmongering about the 'closing of north Korea' and as with all HRW reports about AES states, it's chock full of CIA funded nonsense.
I know most comrades know about Radio Free Asia and how it was started by the CIA to propagandize against America's enemies, but not enough know about DailyNK. It's funded by the National Endowment for Democracy ('funded' might be putting it lightly, their press kit states that without the NED they couldn't exist). The NED is a CIA cutout as admitted by both of its founders:
In 1986, NED's President Carl Gershman said that the NED was created because "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We saw that in the 1960s and that's why it has been discontinued".[71] Throughout the course of a 2010 investigation by ProPublica, Paul Steiger, the then editor in chief of the publication said that "those who spearheaded creation of NED have long acknowledged it was part of an effort to move from covert to overt efforts to foster democracy" and cited as evidence a 1991 interview in which then-NED president Allen Weinstein said, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."[15]
See also: GrayZone grilling the current VP of the NED
If you get the PDF version of this HRW report, you can search the whole thing including the footnotes for 'Daily NK'. 57 results. There's also 8 hits for Radio Free Asia, of course. Just like Radio Free Asia, DailyNK exclusively uses anonymous, almost certainly non-existent sources. Here's an example, the first DailyNK citation in the report (emphasis mine):
Around 200 North Korean soldiers from several branches of the military have died from symptoms that may have been caused by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), Daily NK has learned.
A Daily NK source inside North Korea’s military reported on Mar. 6 that the military’s medical corps had sent a report detailing the impact of COVID-19 on the country’s soldiers to military leaders.
Every. Single. DailyNK article is like this, just like every single RFA article. They're CIA backed/funded organizations that exclusively use anonymous sources, yet Human Rights Watch and other orgs, along with all of western media, seems fine with citing them for the majority of their DPRK coverage.
The crux of this HRW report is literally based on a mistranslation that was first reported by RFA and then further spread by DailyNK. They purposely mistranslated a word, resulting in them lying about the DPRK issuing orders for soldiers monitoring the border to shoot dead anyone on sight. What they actually ordered, is for warning shots to be fired before switching to live ammunition if absolutely necessary. Here's a good article debunking their nonsense.
The HRW report also draws on the 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry about the DPRK, which is widely cited despite it being based on an admitted liar's testimony, along with testimony from a few western stooges from CIA funded think tanks. Here's the first day of hearings, you can see that the first speaker, the star witness, if you will, is Shin Dong-Hyuk. He's the subject of this Guardian article about how he recanted most of his story. That article is from 8 years ago. We've known that the star speaker for this COI is an admitted liar for 8 years, and HRW still cited it.
If you look at day 2 of the Washington DC hearings, you'll see Victor Cha, who is a former advisor to George W. Bush and now works for CSIS, which is funded by a smattering of American corporations and defense contractors and various governments that are hostile to the DPRK, including, of course, the US. CSIS spread tons of propaganda about the PRC and the DPRK.
You'll also see Marcus Noland and Andrew Natsios at that Washington hearing, both of which also work for organizations with similar funding to CSIS.
Yea... it's CIA nonsense all the way down.