Slate: The North Korea intel botch is worse than you think

[dajoki]

No Confidence? No Kidding!
The North Korea intel botch is worse than you think.
By Fred Kaplan
Updated Thursday, March 1, 2007, at 6:49 PM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2160958/fr/flyout

It's too bad that the U.S. political system offers no way to take a vote of "no confidence," because that describes the state we're living in now. We have come to the point where nothing that the Bush administration says can—or should—be trusted. That is, the government deserves no confidence.

This judgment (which many might view as laughably late) is sparked by stories in Thursday's New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/washington/01korea.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1172947888-QEoKQA4tOAD3T81shngEcA) and Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/28/AR2007022801977.html) quoting senior U.S. intelligence officials saying that North Korea might not have an enriched-uranium program after all.

The revelation is stunning on two levels.

First, it suggests that the Bush administration could have struck a deal to halt the North Koreans' nuclear-weapons program five years ago—before they reprocessed 8,000 nuclear fuel rods into plutonium, before they tested a nuclear bomb for the first time, before they officially became a "nuclear-weapons state."

Second (and this is the reason for the "no-confidence" stamp), it shows that Bush and his people will say anything, no matter whether it's true, in order to shore up a political point. It means that U.S. intelligence has become completely corrupted.

<<snip>>

Why are senior officials suddenly saying that North Korea might not have an enriched-uranium program? No new information has come to light on the issue. They are saying this for one reason: President Bush recently agreed to a nuclear deal with the North Koreans; the deal says nothing about enriched uranium (it requires them only to freeze their plutonium-bomb program); so, in order to stave off the flood of criticism from Bush's conservative base, senior officials are saying that the enriched uranium was never a big deal to begin with.

It's unclear whether it was, or is, a big deal or not. But President Bush and his aides consistently claimed it was a big deal from October 2002 until just this week. It was such a big deal to them that they cited it as justification for pulling out of President Clinton's 1994 "Agreed Framework" accord, which had kept North Korea's nuclear reactor under constant monitoring by international inspectors and its nuclear fuel rods kept under lock and key.

[BayCityProgressive]

1. because they

are going to fuck Korea over. They are already blocking aid until the Koreans dismantle their nuclear program in full. How much you wanna bet when they dismantle it, they don't see the promised peace treaty or aid?

[dajoki]

2. I doubt that it will be dismantled...

They spent years saying how bad Clinton's deal was, now it turns out it was all lies, as usual with this bunch.