| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"www.infowars.com" |
| Date: |
10 Oct 2006 12:06:45 AM |
| Object: |
Washington Post Propaganda & Rumsfeld's Arming N. Korea With Nukes |
How soon they 'forget' that Rumsfeld sold N. Korea the nukes. And N. Korea
even made it look like they mock-nuked the USA.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2006/190606mocknuked.htm
The propaganda mouthpiece of the net, speweth out this babbling of the
Washington Post;
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100906Z.shtml
Reported Test "Fundamentally Changes the Landscape" for US Officials
By Glenn Kessler
The Washington Post
Monday 09 October 2006
North Korea's apparent nuclear test last night may well be regarded as a
failure of the Bush administration's nuclear nonproliferation policy.
Since George W. Bush became president, North Korea has restarted its
nuclear reactor and increased its stock of weapons-grade plutonium, so it
may now have enough for 10 or 11 weapons, compared with one or two when Bush
took office. North Korea's test could also unleash a nuclear arms race in
Asia, with Japan and South Korea feeling pressure to build nuclear weapons
for defensive reasons.
Yet a number of senior U.S. officials have said privately that they
would welcome a North Korean test, regarding it as a clarifying event that
would forever end the debate within the Bush administration about whether to
solve the problem through diplomacy or through tough actions designed to
destabilize North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's grip on power.
Now U.S. officials will push for tough sanctions at the U.N. Security
Council, and are considering a raft of largely unilateral measures,
including stopping and inspecting every ship that goes in and out of North
Korea.
"This fundamentally changes the landscape now," one U.S. official said
last night.
When Bush became president in 2000, Pyongyang's reactor was frozen under
a 1994 agreement with the United States. Clinton administration officials
thought they were so close to a deal limiting North Korean missiles that in
the days before he left office, Bill Clinton seriously considered making the
first visit to Pyongyang by a U.S. president.
But conservatives had long been deeply skeptical of the deal freezing
North Korea's program - known as the Agreed Framework - in part because it
called for building two light-water nuclear reactors (largely funded by the
Japanese and South Koreans). When then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
publicly said in early 2001 that he favored continuing Clinton's approach,
Bush rebuked him.
Bush then labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil" that included
Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, further riling Pyongyang. U.S. officials say
Bush carried a deep, visceral hatred of Kim and his dictatorial regime, and
often chafed at efforts by his advisers to tone down his language about Kim,
who within North Korea is regarded as a near-deity.
The missile negotiations with North Korea ended and no talks were held
between senior U.S. and North Korean officials for nearly two years. Many
top U.S. officials were determined to kill the Agreed Framework, and when
U.S. intelligence discovered evidence that North Korea had a clandestine
program to enrich uranium, they had their chance.
A U.S. delegation confronted Pyongyang about the secret program - and
U.S. officials said North Korean officials appeared to confirm it.
(Pyongyang later denied that.) The United States pressed to cut off
immediately deliveries of heavy fuel oil promised under the Agreed
Framework. North Korea, in response, evicted international inspectors and
restarted its nuclear reactor.
Pyongyang moved quickly to reprocess 8,000 spent fuel rods - previously
in a cooling pond under 24-hour international surveillance - in order to
obtain the plutonium needed for nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration, hampered by internal disputes,
struggled to fashion a diplomatic effort to confront North Korea. Unlike the
Clinton administration - which suggested to North Korea that it would attack
if Pyongyang moved to reprocess the plutonium - the Bush administration
never set out "red lines" that North Korea must not cross. Bush
administration officials argued that doing so would only tempt North Korea
to cross those lines.
Whereas Clinton had reached the Agreed Framework through lengthy
bilateral negotiations, the Bush administration felt that North Korea would
be less likely to wiggle out of a future deal if it also included its
regional neighbors - China, South Korea, Japan and Russia. But it took
months of internal struggles to arrange the meetings - and North Korea
insisted it wanted to have only bilateral talks with the United States.
It was also difficult to coordinate policies with the other parties. The
talks largely stalled, as North Korea continued to build its stockpile of
plutonium.
After Bush was reelected, new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
launched an effort to revitalize the six-nation talks, which a year ago
yielded a "statement of principles" to guide future negotiations, including
the possibility of major economic help, security assurances and
normalization of relations with the United States if North Korea dismantled
its nuclear programs. To the anger of conservatives within the
administration, the statement also suggested that North Korea might one day
be supplied with light-water reactors as envisioned in the Clinton deal.
But that proved to be the high point of the talks. The administration
issued a statement saying the reactor project was officially terminated -
and North Korea would need to pass many hurdles before it could ever
envision having a civilian nuclear program. The Treasury Department,
meanwhile, focused on North Korea illicit counterfeiting activities,
targeting a bank in Macao that reportedly held the personal accounts of Kim
and his family. Many banks around the world began to refuse to deal with
North Korean companies, further angering Pyongyang.
With the end of the negotiating track marking the likely advent of
sanctions, Pyongyang's action will test the proposition of those Bush
administration officials who argued that a confrontational approach would
finally bring North Korea to heel.
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