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February 7, 2008

U-Tubed, Part 4

Commenter ChosunHapa was kind enough to  drop  some links to Chris Hill’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on  Wednesday (transcript / video).  Hill says that the “disablement” of (some of) North Korea’s nuclear facilities is proceeding well, contrary to what other reports tell us.   He also assures us of his grave concern about Japanese abductees and human rights … which we’ll pursue on a separate track of course, after  Kim Jong Il has what he wants from us....
Categories Diplomacy/Media Criticism/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
February 5, 2008

Senators Urge Bush Not to De-List N. Korea as Terror Sponsor

Six senators, all Republicans, have signed a letter to President Bush asking him not to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism yet.  The senators are Sam Brownback of Kansas, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, John Kyl of Arizona (the minority whip), Charles Grassley of Iowa, … and Larry Craig. You can see a pdf of the letter — full text, signatures, and all, here: senate-letter.pdf Many thanks to the person who sent me...
Categories Six-Party Talks/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics
January 31, 2008

N. Korea: We Won’t Budge

As State Department official Sung Kim heads for Pyongyang  to try to  save  Chris Hill’s  failing deal, North Korea is trying to be unambiguous about just how much it’s willing to give. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il told a Chinese Communist Party official Wednesday that there is no change in Pyongyang’s stance of implementing a six-party agreement on the North’s denuclearization, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported.  Kim made the remarks when he met with Wang Jiarui, head of...
Categories China & Korea/Six-Party Talks
January 26, 2008

Fox: White House May Accept Incomplete N. Korean Declaration

“Foreign diplomatic sources” have told Fox News that Chris Hill has floated the idea of accepting a declaration that omits information about North Korea’s proliferation — to Syria, for  instance —  or its suspected uranium enrichment programs. With North Korea almost a month overdue on its obligation to provide a complete and correct declaration of all its nuclear programs and materiel, the Bush administration — under increasing pressure from American conservatives to take a harder line with Pyongyang, or abandon the...
Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
January 22, 2008

Plan B: How to Disarm Kim Jong Il Without Bombing Him

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.    — Albert Einstein Plan A, gentle diplomacy,  has  again  failed to disarm Kim Jong Il.  Whenever this happens (every time it’s tried) advocates of doing the same thing over and over again fall back on The False Choice, whether expressly or by implication:  it’s  their way or war.  They know better, of course, which technically makes this a lie.   And usually, this lie  stands uncorrected: “People...
Categories Diplomacy/Money Laundering/NK Economics/Six-Party Talks
January 13, 2008

State Dep’t Denies Groundhog Sighting

The only thing worse than shifting deadlines is no deadlines:  The United States on Friday again denied setting a new target date for North Korea to give a full accounting of its nuclear programs that would replace a missed year-end deadline.   ”We are continuing to work towards the end of getting a declaration in, but there has been no new deadline set by the United States, by the North Koreans or by any other party in the six-party talks,” State...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
January 11, 2008

Did Chris Hill lie about North Korea’s declaration?

In the last episode of  our drama, Chris thought he had convinced Kim to out himself in time for  the New Year’s ball, only to have Kim say that he’d said enough when Chris visited his place last November.   At moments like this one, when this blog begins to sound like the screenplay for a gay soap opera, I  understand  why The Lost  Nomad  went fishing. Several days ago, I believe I  caught  U.S. nucyular  negotiator Christopher Hill in a...
Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
January 10, 2008

Groundhog Day in Pyongyang

Now that we’ve asked North Korea to tell us about its nuclear programs, and now that North Korea has answered by telling us to perform prostate exams on ourselves, I suppose it’s best if we at least pretend to do otherwise. Not that the pretense is a convincing one. When Chris Hill tells us to react “with patience and perseverance,”  understand that translating this into the North Korean dialect yields something that also means, “How about never? Is never good...
Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
January 7, 2008

North Korea’s Moment of Untruth, and Chris Hill’s

Secretary Rice, embrace your legacy.  Agreed Framework 2.0  has  stalled, and probably for good.    Last month,  we  thought we were approaching North Korea’s moment of truth.  Last week, with the  matter of that overdue  declaration,  it was still possible (though gullible)  to  believe they’d still  offer it in due course.  Certainly that was the impression the White House was feeding us when it said on January 3rd that it was “going to keep hammering away” at getting the declaration...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
January 2, 2008

U-Tubed! (Part. 3)

Washington has long suspected North Korea of having a program to make highly enriched uranium (HEU) since shortly after it agreed to denuclearize in the first Agreed Framework.  North Korea  denied this at first, admitted it to two U.S. diplomats and three translators in 2002, and  then went  back to denying it.    Those denials  just got even less likely. As I previously noted here,  the U.S. asked for, and North Korea recently provided, samples of aluminum tubes we know it...
Categories Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
January 1, 2008

2007: A Lost Year

[Update 2 Jan 08:   “North Korea failed to fulfill its October promise to declare all its nuclear programs by the end of 2007 — and the United States did not make a big deal out of it.” — WaPo, Blaine Harden] SO ENDS THE YEAR 2007, with this terse statement from the State Department spokesman: In September 2005, the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea agreed on a Joint Statement with North Korea that charted the way...
Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
December 26, 2007

N. Korea will miss year-end deadline to declare nukes

No surprise there.  At this point, it would really only be news if North Korea actually met the deadline, or made a full disclosure at all during Kim Jong Il’s life span. A South Korean government official on Tuesday said, “There is no sign yet that North Korea has decided to make an accurate declaration. It’s improbable that the North will declare its nuclear programs by the end of the year, with only a week remaining before the New Year.”...
Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
December 21, 2007

U-Tubed! Enriched uranium found on N. Korean sample

Say it aint so. U.S. scientists have discovered traces of enriched uranium on smelted aluminum tubing provided by North Korea, apparently contradicting Pyongyang’s denial that it had a clandestine nuclear program, according to U.S. and diplomatic sources. [Washington Post, Glenn Kessler] But where and when did we find this incriminating sample? The United States has long pointed to North Korea’s acquisition of thousands of aluminum tubes as evidence of such a program, saying the tubes could be used as the...
Categories Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
December 21, 2007

U-Tubed, Part 2

[Part 1] An honest appraisal of this new discovery means that those of us who are skeptical of AF 2.0 should grudgingly admit that it has produced at least one significant intelligence windfall, even if it was due to a North Korean oversight. Since that oversight will probably land a few people in front of firing squads, AF 2.0 proponents should at least draw the obvious conclusions to which this new intelligence leads. It seems difficult to deny that AF...
Categories Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
December 20, 2007

Behind the scenes, a deepening crisis for Agreed Framework 2.0

Maybe the Dear Leader will save us all yet. From ourselves, that is. If he does, it will be because he’s overplayed his hand again. A reader forwards a scan of a letter sent by three Republican U.S. Senators — Brownback, Grassley, and Kyl, the new minority whip, to Chris Hill, the architect of Agreed Framework 2.0. The letter requests that State specifically respond to this Congressional Research Service report’s allegations that North Korea continued to materially support Hezbollah and...
Categories Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
December 13, 2007

North Korea still refusing to admit HEU program

The chief nuclear negotiators of South Korea and China Thursday met in Beijing to hammer out a joint message to North Korea, urging Pyongyang to come clean on all its nuclear programs and activities. North Korea is reportedly refusing to acknowledge its long-suspected uranium enrichment program, creating what Foreign Minister Song Min-soon has called a new “bump” in six-way nuclear disarmament talks that involve the two Koreas, the U.S., Japan, China and Russia.  [Yonhap] Just watch us fold like lawn...
Categories Six-Party Talks
December 13, 2007

Congressional Research Service issues report on the implications of removing North Korea from the terror sponsor list

Yesterday, a reader and friend was kind enough to forward the entire report to me (thanks!), which I’ve uploaded onto this blog, and which you can access here: crs-north-korea-terrorism-list-removal.pdf   Since then,  this has  generated some press attention in South Korea.  The report’s authors are the highly regarded Larry  Niksch and Raphael Perl.  There’s too much valuable information in there for me to graf and do it justice; this one is a must-read.  I’ll limit my comments to a few...
Categories Six-Party Talks/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
December 6, 2007

Chris Hill Returns from Pyongyang; Bush Writes to Kim Jong Il

After returning from a weekend in bucolic North Korea, Chris Hill stopped to talk to reporters in the lobby of his hotel in Beijing. As before, I’ll post the full State Department transcript of the Q&A, but here are some highlights: Hill visited Yongbyon and pronounced himself satisfied with the progress of “disablement” activities there. Although Yongbyon was already at the end of its useful life, the work there now involves removing the fuel, cutting valves, and using heavy equipment...
Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks