The Bush administration’s former ambassador to the United Nations says “a lot of people in the State Department and the Washington commentariat” are rewriting history on North Korea’s nuclear ambition and he thinks he knows why.
The “rewriting” involves whether North Korea has an illicit uranium enrichment program, as well as its declared plutonium production. The Bush administration in 2002 scrapped the Clinton administration’s 1994 Agreed Framework, under which the North was supposed to end pursuit of all nuclear weapons, after presenting evidence the communist regime moved to enrich uranium.
Five years later, the Democrats and the news media question the scuttling of the framework because intelligence official Joseph DeTrani testified last month the evidence in 2002 was “mid-confidence level.”
John Bolton, who resigned in December as U.N. ambassador after failing to win Senate confirmation, on Thursday told The Examiner there was no doubt then and there should be none today.
“The fact is it is rewriting history to say that somehow there was something wrong with that intelligence and it’s certainly flat out wrong to say the administration was hyping it,” Bolton said.
He has emerged as one of the fieriest critics of a new Feb. 13 denuclearization deal with North Korea worked out by his former boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
“The only hook any of these people have is that statement by De Trani at the hearing about a somewhat lower level of confidence,” Bolton said. “But it wasn’t because the information had come into question. It’s because they haven’t received as much [intelligence] information in recent years, which could be because the North Korea denial and deception effort is better than it was before.”
Bolton, who in 2002 served as Under Secretary of State for arms control, said the intelligence was conclusive. North Korea procured foreign components whose only purpose could be to turn uranium into bomb-grade material. In fact, the North admitted to the secret program to a U.S. delegation, he said.
Bolton, interviewed in his American Enterprise Institute office in downtown Washington, believes he knows why some in the administration want to downplay the uranium program. If the program’s existence is in doubt, the administration cannot be held accountable if it does not force North Korea to end it.
