Leave it to McClatchy to claim that documents given to the US by North Korea are more credible then CIA intelligence assessments:
Thousands of pages of nuclear documents submitted by North Korea earlier this month cast doubt on a U.S. intelligence estimate of how much weapons-grade plutonium the secretive communist country has been able to amass, U.S. officials and a leading private analyst said Wednesday.
An initial review of the documents, they said, provides no evidence that communist North Korea covertly extracted plutonium, which can be used to make nuclear weapons, from its reactor complex at Yongbyon before 1992.
Some CIA officials have alleged that North Korea had done so, meaning that it could have more plutonium, and thus the capacity to make more nuclear weapons, than it’s admitted. In an unclassified document provided to Congress in 2002, the CIA estimated North Korea had one or possibly two nuclear weapons using plutonium produced prior to 1992. [McClatchy]
And guess who is legitimizing this claim? None other then OFK’s and DPRK Studies favorite scientist David Albright:
David Albright , a former United Nations nuclear inspector who consults frequently with the U.S. government, said the reactor records turned over by North Korea are "consistent with what they’ve said."
The CIA’s contention that Pyongyang extracted plutonium prior to 1992 "is not supported in the record," said Albright, the president of the Washington -based Institute for Science and International Security . The trove of documents "is internally consistent, and to forge it would be tremendously difficult," he added.
Leave it to David Albright to claim that a country that is the greatest forger of American dollars would find it difficult to forge some documents.
Popularity: 2%
1:26 am on May 30th, 2008 1
I tell my students, if God were to do a redo, he should code human genetics/DNA so that the head simply pops when you say stuff like this.
Think about the low budget 80s movie Scanners (you tube link http://www.youtube.com/v/mAIerRTDKHE&hl=en)
Wouldn’t the world be a much better place?
See. If Albright’s head had popped when he said that stuff about the Syrian-Korean nuke connection, in the face of video footage and photographs, we wouldn’t have gotten this gem….
Of coures, Mad Cow Hysteria would have wiped out half the South Korean population this month….
But just think about how low property values would be in the US today if we just had such a mechanism encoded in our DNA…
I also wouldn’t have students using little care to disguise their text messaging effort in class only to tell me they aren’t doing it when I walk over to them…
(I also probably wouldn’t have made it past age 5)…
7:08 am on May 30th, 2008 2
Granted NK can’t be trusted. But neither can we trust the CIA who is also known to lie. Remember the sad affairs concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that never existed? What about the false CIA claims that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attack? CIA themselves lack any credibility. Frankly, I don’t believe neither the NK or the CIA.
7:21 am on May 30th, 2008 3
The WMD intel from the CIA was in agreement with every other respected intelligence agency in the world at the time. The CIA was as accurate as everyone else.
Also the CIA never said Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks.
8:26 am on May 30th, 2008 4
the cia lost much of its respect and credibility after the 9/11 attack. if it wasnt for the false information, many american gi would be getting their salad tossed by juicy girls in korea instead of risking and losing their life in iraq.
9:10 am on May 30th, 2008 5
My guess is that David Albright does not have access to those records. He’s a laughingstock as far as I’m concerned.
6:23 am on May 31st, 2008 6
11:35 am on May 31st, 2008 7
With more assets and money spent on intelligence than any other country in the world, one would have expected better from the CIA. With 500 million dollar satillites and huge aircraft to monitor signal intelligence, the results were as bad as a third world country. One begins to wonder if all that money is spent so staff generals and high ranking politicians can have wide screen TV on developements on the ground vs a few bits of info getting to the troops.
11:48 am on May 31st, 2008 8
You also have to remember that according to Saddam’s own admission to his FBI interrogator he intentionally was leading on intelligence agencies on the Iraq’s WMD capability because he wanted to keep potential threats like Iran at bay by having them think he has WMD. He just never expected that Bush was actually serious about invading Iraq until it was too late.
2:53 pm on May 31st, 2008 9
North Korea had better watch out!
Condoleezza Rice is not going to take any crap off them. In fact, believe it or not, Condoleezza Rice has just enlisted in the Army!
I kid you not.
I guess she is looking for employment after the next election.
The enemies of America are warmed!
msnbc.msn.com/id/24890031/