Louis Gossett Jr
Well-known member
- Joined
- Sep 4, 2012
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I mean we are having a fucking military parade if anyone’s forgotten, cost was never an issue.
I mean we are having a fucking military parade if anyone’s forgotten, cost was never an issue.
“There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea”—DJT.
Bolton is known to be a master of bureaucratic political tactics to advance his policy agenda, and waged a highly successful campaign to kill the Agreed Framework negotiated with North Korea by the Clinton administration in 1994. And a key to Bolton’s success in such maneuvering was his cultivation of elements of the intelligence community. Bolton established personal relations with not only the senior officials of the various intelligence agencies, but also with some individual analysts. In mid-2002, he got hold of an assessment on North Korea’s shopping for large-scale centrifuge-related materials, which he used to pursue his attack on the Agreed Framework. Bolton later called it “the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework.”
In mid-2004, his office leaked satellite images of sites at Iran’s Parchin military testing facility to ABC News with the suggestion that they showed that Iran had sites for nuclear weapons-related tests, generating a story about suspicious Iranian testing sites.
Bolton appears to be repeating that modus operandi since he entered the White House in April. Within weeks, someone leaked to Albright the latest intelligence assessment on the alleged secret enrichment facility, which in turn generated The Washington Post story in May. Just over a month later came the leak of the DIA assessment alleging a North Korean plan to deceive the United States.
The strategy of demanding that North Korea admit to secret nuclear sites, and when it refuses, demanding that negotiations be terminated, may appear to those with short memories as offering a good chance of political success. But this is not the first time US intelligence has become convinced that North Korea was maintaining a covert nuclear site, nor the first time that the US made a major issue of such a claim. It backfired on the Clinton administration when North Korea agreed to US inspections of one site in 1999 and 2000, for instance.
In mid-1998, satellite photographs and other intelligence led the Clinton administration to tell congressional leaders and the South Korean government privately that they were convinced that a site with tunnels carved into a mountain at Kumchang-ri was intended to house a new reactor and plutonium reprocessing center. But Pyongyang agreed to an inspection of the site — not once, but twice. The US inspections in June 1999 and again in May 2000 concluded that the purpose of the tunnel complex was to vent fumes from an underground uranium milling plant.