North Korean Nukes and the DIA

If the North Korean ballistic missiles don’t have nukes atop them,
then they are not a threat to anyone, especially us. Clinton-Gore must
know that. So, since Clinton-Gore are in such a panic to build an ABM
system in Alaska to counter the NK ballistic missile threat, mustn’t
Clinton-Gore have somehow become convinced that there are nukes atop the
North Korean ICBMs?

What could have convinced them? After all, Clinton-Gore paid North
Korea a $5-billion dollar bribe in 1994 — the so-called “U.S.-North
Korea Agreed Framework to End North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Program” —
to keep North Korea from withdrawing as a signatory of the
Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Keeping North Korea in the Clinton-Gore
sacred NPT regime was supposed to have ended the threat of North Korean
nukes.

Why the bribe? North Korea — a non-nuclear weapons-state, but NPT
sig-natory — had given notice that it intended to withdraw rather than
submit to further inspections of the NPT “enforcers,” the United
Nations International Atomic Energy Agency. After accepting the
Clinton-Gore bribe — two free 1000-Megawatt nuclear power plants and
all the free fuel oil needed to tide North Korea over until the plants
were in operation — North Korea again admitted IAEA inspectors who were
supposed to see to it that all the nuclear activities engaged in by
North Korea were those and only those allowed by the NPT.

What had North Korea been doing? Although destitute — unable to
feed her people or to keep them from freezing in the dark — North Korea
had nevertheless exercised her NPT rights to acquire the nuclear
technology needed to not only produce weapons-useable nuclear materials,
but to convert them into a nuke weapons-useable form.

North Korean had acquired one gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor,
ostensibly to produce 5 megawatts of electricity and were building
similar 20 megawatt and 200 megawatt plants. The significance of the
relatively uncommon reactor type — gas-cooled, graphite-moderated —
is that such a reactor can make weapons-useable plutonium whereas the
much more common power reactor type — water-cooled, water-moderated —
cannot. Furthermore, the North Koreans had already built and were
openly operating a plant to recover the weapons-useable plutonium
produced by those reactors.

But the IAEA inspectors had begun to suspect that the North Koreans
had produced and recovered more weapons-useable plutonium from the
5-megawatt reactor than had been reported. Making the stuff was not a
no-no, but incorrectly filling out the IAEA forms was. When IAEA
Inspector General Blix couldn’t get the North Koreans to allow him to
check their arithmetic, he ordered U.N. sanctions applied to North
Korea. North Korea then announced it was withdrawing from the NPT
regime.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, a number of congressmen had
gotten really upset at what the Defense Intelligence Agency was telling
them and demanded that Clinton-Gore launch pre-emptive strikes against
the North Korean nuke facilities. The Defense Intelligence Agency? Who
the hell are they, and what do they know about activities that are
allowed under the NPT and activities that are not?

The Defense Intelligence Agency is a combat support agency of the
Department of Defense. The DIA mission is to provide timely,
objective, and cogent military intelligence — particularly with respect
to targeting and damage assessment — to U.S. warfighters. Increasingly
what DIA does is to examine satellite photos, identify suspicious
looking activity, and notify the warfighters. This DIA targeting is the
sort of info that Clinton-Gore has used as an excuse to bomb the hell
out of Iraq, every day, for the past 4 to 5 years. DIA is also one of
the 13 members of the U.S.

Intelligence
Community, headed by the director of Central Intelligence.

The director of Central Intelligence has the sole responsibility for integrating the input from all 13 members of the Intelligence Community and providing national intelligence estimates and assessment reports to the president. Frequently there are disagreements within the Intelligence Community as to both the facts and the interpretation to be assigned to the facts. The director of Central Intelligence decides what is to be presented to the president.

Sometimes, when an agency analyst has a strongly held view that is not accepted by the Intelligence Community as a whole, the analyst will subvert the system, will try to find a sympathetic ear, either in Congress or at the National Press Club. That is what happened in 1998, when Department of Energy’s Notra Trulock — unable to get anyone else in the Intelligence Community to accept his view about widespread penetration of DOE labs by Chinese moles — went to the Cox Committee. To this day, even though Trulock’s view has been completely discredited and he is under investigation by the FBI, news accounts still portray Trulock as a whistleblower, as someone who knew the truth but couldn’t get anyone else in the Intelligence Community — all of whom had access to the same “facts” Trulock had — to agree with him.

Now the New York Times

reports that the DIA had frequently sought a congressional ear for getting accepted DIA targeting assessments of North Korean nuke installations, assessments not accepted by the rest of the Intelligence Community. But, nevertheless, assessments that caused some congressmen to insist on immediate bombing of those DIA targets.

Specifically, according to the New York Times, when the secretary of State had finished a topsecret congressional briefing back in 1998, the congressional earmouth asked Madame Secretary about a DIA “top secret” she had not even mentioned. DIA claimed that a warehouse recently constructed in North Korea was for storing nuke components. No one else in the Intelligence Community accepted the DIA assessment, but DIA Director Hughes and the congressional ear-mouth now managed to suggest that, because no one else accepted the DIA targeting assessment, it must be true.

The Clinton-Gore administration, under congressional pressure, didn’t bomb, but did demand to inspect the DIA targets. Egg on DIA’s face. Those members of the Intelligence Community who had doubted most of what the DIA was claiming turned out to be right. And although we don’t know, it appears that the Intelligence Community still doubts that North Korea has nukes atop their ballistic missiles. So why is the Clinton-Gore administration frantic to build an ABM system way up in Alaska? What is DIA now leaking to Congress and/or National Press Club? Maybe the New York Times knows.