It looks like the Bush administration is determined to appease North Korea no matter what before they leave office:

U.S. media say the Bush administration may remove North Korea from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism as early as Friday.

The Washington Post, Fox News and other media quote U.S. government sources as saying that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to announce the administration’s plans to take North Korea off of the list as early as Friday.

Rice is to brief President George W. Bush about Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill’s recent visit to Pyongyang last week, and then will discuss the issue of delisting North Korea with other top officials of the administration.

However, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack and his deputy Robert Wood have denied the reports, saying no decisions have been made yet.  [KBS Global]

After reading this I had to go over and read what One Free Korea had to say about this.  Like me, he is unhappy with this news if true because there is no real verification mechanism to confirm they actually disarmed their entire nuclear program.

One Free Korea does have a question that maybe someone much smarter then me can answer:

All I want to know is this: what “gains” is Condi so desperate to salvage?  More succinctly:  in what way is North Korea even arguably disarming?  North Korea isn’t giving up its existing nukes, its fissile material, its uranium program, or even its most threatening plutonium reactor, the big new 50-MW model recently reported to be near completion.  Recent information from credible sources tells us that the North is still developing long range missiles and still working hard on nuclear warheads to put on them, both in flagrant violation of U.N. resolutions 1695 and 1718.  As far as we know, they’re still proliferating nuclear technology, since we opted to overlook that back in April.  North Korea just evicted the monitors from Yongbyon yesterday, and to the extent it matters, it’s begun putting its older, smaller 5-MW reactor and fuel fabrication plant back together.  It tells anyone who bothers to ask — including Condi Rice herself – that it’s keeping its nuclear weapons, period.

Will someone please explain what on earth we actually gain in exchange for throwing away what’s left of our leverage here?  [One Free Korea]

The only gain I can think of is that Secretary Rice and President Bush really think they will get some kind of foreign policy legacy with this appeasement deal.  The US people sure do not gain any security benefits by paying the North Koreans extortion money and pretending they are disarming.

My biggest question is why wasn’t there in any of the Presidential or even the Vice-Presidential debate one question about North Korea?

I would love to hear what each candidate thinks of de-listing North Korea from the terrorism list and pretending they will actually disarm.  So far I haven’t heard anything from either of them that will break the pattern that has seen with relatively minor interruptions of sanity, since 1994 of the US making tough-sounding threats, North Korea cheating, provoking, & lying, then the US expresses disappointment and then offers second-chances accompanied by generous concessions.

When will the US government turn to Plan B?