Posted on 2/13/2003, 4:07:16 PM by conservativecorner
Like Capt. Renault in the movie classic "Casablanca," mainstream journalists are pretending to be "shocked, shocked" this morning to discover that North Korea has intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons to the United States.
And by some accounts, the Bush administration's claim yesterday that this development is old news is just disingenuous White House spin.
But Bush officials are correct, and there's a paper trail that backs them up. In fact, news that North Korea had ICBM's capable of reaching across the Pacific dates back to at least 1999, a full two years before Bill Clinton left the White House.
It's just that at the time, journalists decided not to report on Pyongyang's newfound missile capabilities. Such news, after all, would have torpedoed Clinton administration claims that their diplomacy had succeeded in ending North Korea's nuclear threat.
But a 1999 congressional study warned, "North Korea can now strike the United States with a missile that could deliver high explosive, chemical, biological, or possibly nuclear weapons. Currently, the United States is unable to defend against this threat."
The bombshell news was released in a report by the House North Korea Advisory Group, which was chaired by Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman, R-N.Y. Members of the panel included Rep. Doug Bereuter, R-Neb., then chairman of the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Rep. Porter J. Goss, R-Fla., chairman of Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Christopher Cox, R-Calif., then chairman of the Republican Policy Committee.
As NewsMax.com reported last October, their report warned:
"In the last five years, North Korea's missile capabilities have improved dramatically. North Korea has produced, deployed and exported missiles to Iran and Pakistan, launched a three-stage missile [Taepo Dong 1], and continues to develop a larger and more powerful missile [Taepo Dong 2].
"Unlike five years ago, North Korea can now strike the United States with a missile that could deliver high explosive, chemical, biological, or possibly nuclear weapons. Currently, the United States is unable to defend against this threat."
The report also featured a bar graph that showed a direct correlation between increases in Clinton administration aid and North Korea's enhanced ICBM capacity.
The Advisory Group contended that under the Clinton administration, North Korea had become "the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the Asia-Pacific region."
"In an astonishing reversal of nine previous U.S. administrations, the Clinton-Gore administration, in 1994, committed not only to provide foreign aid for North Korea, but to earmark that aid primarily for the construction of nuclear reactors worth up to $6 billion," the House report noted.
This is exactly correct. In fact, Klinton liked to run around and talk about how sucessful his "Sushine Policy" with the evil DPRK was - when in fact it was all a ruse and built on a house of cards, further built upon lies. Now we also are finding out that the Liberals in South Korea paid the North off to meet them! We all knew about the multi-staged rocket tests here on FR in 1999, but no one in the mainstream media cared to mention it.
All of this damning stuff on Clinton, Albright and Carter about North Korea is out there, but most of it is floating around in Japanese or Korean, and would never have been noticed in the US at the time because of so little interest in Asia. (Some opposition/conservative wing South Korean parliamentarians might be a good place to start: hint).
Next, a state of the union address. We're fighting Al-Quaeda but then seemingly out of nowhere comes the axis of evil - Iraq, Iran, North Korea.
Next, we learn that we know North Korea has been developing Nukes...slight hint as to why it was on Bush's list.
All this, and yet people refuse to think that Bush might know someting about Iraq that we don't...doh! I am sure Susan Sarandon knows better, or the French public peraps...
It is so frsutrating...what I wanna know is when does the shoe drop r.e. Iran? It seems clear to me that the list of countries on the axis-of-evil was carefully formulated.
Ax.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States is vulnerable to an intercontinental missile attack "sooner rather than later" and must develop space-based defense and weapons systems to counter the threat, the head of the U.S. space command said today.
The risk has increased as North Korea, Iran and other nations build missiles with greater ranges and in underground weapons facilities in order to hide activity, said Air Force Gen. Howell M. Estes III.
"The fact of the matter is, it's going to come quicker, in my opinion, than I think many of us would realize," said Estes, head of the U.S. Space Command based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo.
Estes also is commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, the Cold War-era agency responsible for detecting launches and giving the signal for a U.S. counterattack if necessary.
Estes said countries such as North Korea and Iran, which have both successfully tested medium-range missiles and are thought to be developing intercontinental weapons that could hit U.S. cities, are moving forward quickly because they aren't as concerned about quality.
"We're finding that countries who are developing these systems today are not doing it the way we did," Estes said. "They're not going for accuracy. They're going for having the capability, which in fact, is an indication of military might and national power."
The missiles being developed could carry weapons of mass destruction, including biological, chemical and nuclear warheads.
A congressionally appointed panel of experts issued a report last week suggesting the intercontinental ballistic missile threat to the United States was immediate instead of more than a decade away as predicted by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The panel, headed by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, concluded that North Korea and Iran could develop long-range missiles within five years and probably are doing so already without the knowledge of U.S. intelligence thanks to their secretive programs.
Rumsfeld told the House National Security Committee that North Korea, Iran, Russia and China "have made extensive use of the underground construction, which enables them to do things such as development and storage and, indeed, even launching from underground hidden silo areas."
The information came from U.S. intelligence reports.
Geez...1998 to 2003...by golly that sure is 5 years, just as predicted by our very own "Rummy"!
RICHARD GARWIN: Reverse-engineered them. They're a few hundred mile range. Sent them back to other countries. Other countries then have stocks of these missiles. North Korea has evolved it into a longer-range missile, something like eight hundred/nine hundred miles, so called no dawn missile, and that's the kind of missile, for instance, that Pakistan test-fired early in June, a missile very similar to the no dawn. So those are pretty much universal. They're commodities. North Korea has said needs money and a couple of weeks ago it said it's going to go on manufacturing and selling missiles.
Now, what will its engineers do when they've finished wit the no dawn, which they have? They'll move on. They'll find another product either for the commercial markets, or for their own use, and they're working on a longer range missile too. They haven't test fired it, and that's the one that could go perhaps as far as the westernmost islands of Hawaii or some of the Allutions, and if they worked harder on it and made it out of aluminum, then it could reach the United States, itself, the main 48 contiguous states.
The clearest example I've ever seen of the term "useful idiot".
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