Nearly a year after President Obama was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, someone in his administration has finally gotten around to denouncing the human rights record of a regime that carried out 901 known public executions in 2007 and holds roughly 200,000 men, women, and children in the most extensive gulag system on earth:

A U.S. envoy says that the human rights situation in North Korea must improve before the country can normalize relations with the United States. President Barack Obama’s special envoy on North Korean human rights Robert King is visiting South Korea this week to discuss the issue with government officials.

King said of North Korea, ”It’s one of the worst places in terms of lack of human rights. The situation is appalling.” He also said that the situation is preventing the normalization of ties between Washington and Pyongyang. King said, ”Improved relations between the United States and North Korea will have to involve greater respect for human rights by North Korea.”

The statement from King, the Administration’s Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, is a good start, and a measurable improvement from where President Bush’s negotiator Chris Hill was taking us — the complete removal of human rights as an impediment to full diplomatic relations. It is also something of a debut for King, who was confirmed only last November. Since then, King’s few public statements have generated little controversy or coverage.  He proposed what struck me as a completely implausible concept at North Korea’s recent “universal periodic review” at the U.N. Human Rights Council: King proposed that North Korea should create its own “independent” human rights monitor. (Naturally, the U.N. review has come to nothing. King, who is visiting Japan and Korea, will meet with the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in North Korea, Vitit Muntarbhorn in Seoul.)

For a moment, I could almost hear the groaning at Foggy Bottom all the way out in the suburbs. There is a perception among many in the foreign policy establishment that human rights are a distraction from more pressing diplomatic priorities. Adherents of this view tend to avoid talking about, for example, such hideous places as Camp 22. Camp 22 is not an extermination camp on the scale of Auschwitz, but the life-crushing brutality and hunger there may well rival the depravities of Mauthausen and Dachau. Before you agree that it is necessary to marginalize the fate of the men, women, and children held at this very moment in Camp 22, at least give them the small dignity of knowing how they suffer. I’ve published Google Earth imagery of Camp 22 at this web page, along with the descriptions of surviving witnesses, some of them on video. If, having read and listened to those accounts, you still believe that this is a regime with a sincere interest in the preservation of human life, and therefore in the preservation of peace — if you still believe that this regime is amenable to the transparency that will be needed to verify North Korea’s disarmament — please show me what I’m missing. North Korea denies that the camps exist, after all, but the guard posts, fence lines, and barracks are clearly visible on Google Earth.

Another of those camps is Camp 16, which is directly adjacent to North Korea’s nuclear test site at Mt. Mantap. Given the rumored use of prisoners from Camp 16 to dig the tunnels for North Korea’s nuclear tests, it’s going to be tricky to verify the history of that site without asking any probing questions about the fate of its surplus labor.

Yet even these are not tragedies on the scale of North Korea’s culpably preventable famine that killed between 600,000 and 2.5 million of its people, and here, I cannot fail to recommend Barbara Demick’s deeply moving and meticulously researched new book, “Nothing to Envy,” which chronicles the worst of the nightmare years in North Korea. Demick has written the best book about North Korea I’ve read yet — a book you should read even if you read nothing else about North Korea. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, North Korean diplomats recently told the U.N. Human Rights Commission that there is no longer hunger in North Korea. Some would have us believe that this, too, is a distraction from bigger things, although at the root of the famine is the regime’s aversion to transparency, its determination to divert its resources to weapons production, and its diversion of food aid to serve the regime’s political interests instead of humanitarian needs. To this end, North Korea severely restricts or excludes aid workers who would distribute and monitor the food aid, and engages in such arbitrary behavior as evicting aid workers, scaling back food assistance for hungry people, forbidding aid monitors who speak Korean, and rejecting any food aid from the United States — historically, the World Food Program’s largest donor.

I raise these topics because of their predictive relevance to our ability to monitor a disarmament agreement, or North Korea’s sincere interest in complying with one. At the root of North Korea’s atrocities toward its own people and its mendacity toward the world is a common pathology of secrecy, hostility, and ruthlessness — the regime’s conditioning that not even the most essential humanitarian, moral, legal, and diplomatic standards apply to it. Too many of us have historically yielded to, and thereby encouraged, this. But transparency is a sine qua non for diplomacy to have any chance of removing North Korea as a global proliferation threat, and it isn’t possible for North Korea to accept fundamental transparency without exposing its crimes against humanity to global scrutiny.

Many in the foreign policy establishment have also long held other discredited views, of course. Many of them predicted that North Korea would disarm at last after Clinton’s Agreed Framework I, and Bush’s Agreed Framework II after it. They supported South Korea’s provision of billions of dollars in unconditional, regime-sustaining aid even as North Korea continued to pursue nuclear weapons, and as U.S. taxpayers funded the presence of 40,000 U.S. military personnel in South Korea to protect it from the North. Many of them also supposed that North Korea was sincerely interested in reforming its economy. North Korea’s behavior has since refuted all of these beliefs. Today, North Korea’s own suppression of a nascent market economy is threatening to plunge the country back into famine. Judging by the regime’s recent attempts to purchase yachts, expensive liquor, and luxury sedans for its generals — all in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1718 and 1874 — its priorities and its fundamental mendacity don’t appear to have changed.

It will be interesting to observe the reactions to King’s comments. The first-term President Bush, of course, drew ferocious criticism from liberals and the liberal-minded South Korean government of the time for denouncing Kim Jong Il’s atrocities. Its then-Foreign Minister, Ban Ki Moon, is now U.N. General Secretary, marking the second occasion that Ban has been wholly ineffective at addressing the greatest humanitarian tragedy to befall the Korean people since the Korean War. After John Bolton said that Kim Jong Il had turned life in North Korea into a “hellish nightmare,” North Korea denounced him as “human scum” and said it would not show up at any negotiation with Bolton. The Bush Administration acceded to North Korea’s demand.

Bolton may have little reason to complain that he was denied the pleasure of such charming company as Han Song Ryol, but America paid a price for giving North Korea a veto over its negotiators. The result was that the pliable breed of American diplomats who dealt with North Korea were the sort who preferred not to confront it with uncomfortable truths, whether about its atrocities, its cheating on its disarmament commitments, its counterfeiting of U.S. currency, or such offenses as its construction of a nuclear reactor in Syria. Christopher Hill, who led the State Department’s East Asia Bureau during most of Bush’s second term — Hill is now our ambassor in the sleepy backwater called Baghdad — led and personified the faction that North Korea found inoffensive and occasionally useful, but which consistently failed to disarm North Korea.  To better appease North Korea, the State Department also muzzled Bush’s own human rights envoy and humiliated him publicly, and even attempted to airbrush criticism of North Korea in the 2008 annual human rights country report (in an e-mail to the author of the 2008 report, State Department official Glyn Davies “hope[ed] given the Secretary’s priority on the Six-Party Talks, we can sacrifice a few adjectives for the cause”).

There are several lessons that the Obama Administration could learn from Bush’s experience. First, it should ignore the predicatable, calculated, and probably amusing North Korean histrionics that are sure to follow very soon. Second, American rhetoric is no substitute for action on practical, concrete proposals — after all, the Bush Administration spent its entire second term flouting the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, doing everything in its power to drag its feet and fail to implement a law that the Bush signed and claimed to support.

Most importantly, the Obama Administration must grasp why the matters within Robert King’s portfolio drive at the heart of every disagreement we have with North Korea, including its nuclear weapons and proliferation. If King doesn’t grasp and can’t articulate that cogently, it’s a sure thing that he’s going to get rolled by the East Asia Bureau, which has long wanted to roll over American presidents’ feigned interest in human rights. If the things that are happening in places like Camp 22 matter to this administration, I’ve seen no sign until now that that’s the case. The Administration’s statements on human rights are on the low end of what could be described as “token,” tongue-clucking acknowledgments that there is an issue at all — only the latest example, frankly, of Obama’s foreign policy being a continuation of second-term Bush, for better or otherwise.

A former JAG officer, Joshua Stanton is an attorney in Washington, DC.