Another attempt at a whitewash of North Korea’s actions during the Clinton admin
I blogged last week about Jimmy Carter’s opinion piece in which he flat out lied about North Korea’s activities under the Clinton administration.
Well it would appear that Senator John “F” Kerry was inspired by Carter’s whitewashing because he’s attempting to do it himself:
Kerry criticized the Bush administration for blaming the North Korean nuclear test on former President Clinton.
“That is a lie. North Korea’s nuclear program was frozen under Bill Clinton. When George W. Bush turned his back on diplomacy, Kim Jong Il turned back to making bombs, and the world is less safe because a madman has the Bush bomb,” he said.
*SIGH* To recap what I wrote from my prior post on this topic:
[LINK]Aug. 31, 1998: North Korea fires a multistage over Japan and into the Pacific Ocean, proving it can strike any part of Japan’s territory.
May 25-28, 1999: Former Defense Secretary William Perry visits North Korea and delivers a U.S. disarmament proposal.
Sept. 13: North Korea pledges to freeze long-range missile tests.
Sept. 17: U.S. President Bill Clinton eases economic sanctions against North Korea.
December: A U.S.-led consortium signs a US$4.6 billion contract for two safer, Western-developed light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea.
July 2000: North Korea again threatens to restart its nuclear program if Washington doesn’t compensate for the loss of electricity caused by delays in building nuclear power plants.
June 2001: North Korea warns it will reconsider its moratorium on missile tests if the Bush administration doesn’t resume contacts aimed at normalizing relations.
July: State Department reports North Korea is going ahead with development of its long-range missile. A Bush administration official says North Korea conducts an engine test of the Taepodong-1 missile.
December: President Bush warns Iraq and North Korea that they would be “held accountable” if they developed weapons of mass destruction “that will be used to terrorize nations.”
Although the sanctions against North Korea were largely lifted and oil deliveries began in early 1995, the development of the LWRs became more complex. The U.S., South Korea, Japan and several other countries came together to form the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) to build the reactors. KEDO soon pushed back the deadline for completing the reactors from 2003 to 2007. Bureaucratic wrangling over contracts and the establishment of KEDO slowed the process even more so that the foundations for the two reactors were not poured until August 2002.
North Korea also slowed the process by making new demands on KEDO, including that the consortium cover the costs of modernizing the North’s electricity grid. KEDO rejected the request and the North countered with a demand that the U.S. cover the costs associated with the delayed reactors, which the U.S. has refused to do.
Even as the nations were debating implementation of the Agreed Framework, North Korea, the U.S. argues, was breaking the spirit, if not the letter, of the pact. Within months of signing the framework, North Korea and Pakistan reportedly cut a deal to trade missile technology for Pakistan’s uranium enrichment techniques — the Agreed Framework had banned plutonium enrichment programs.
For more than three years, the North Koreans worked quietly on their uranium project while urging the U.S. to fully implement the Agreed Framework. According to a Chinese government report that was leaked to a Japanese newspaper, the project included a secret uranium processing facility located inside Mount Chonma, near the Chinese border.
The Clinton administration apparently learned of the secret program in late 1998 or early 1999, and by March 2000, President Clinton informed Congress he could no longer certify that “North Korea is not seeking to develop or acquire the capability to enrich uranium.”
Heightened tensions in the peninsula
Over the next two years, the United States continued to compile evidence on North Korea’s uranium project. It was this evidence that prompted President Bush to label the Kim Jong Il government part of the “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address.
The MSM, of course, never examines the statements Kerry or other Democrats who have flat out lied about the activities of Kim Jong-il during the Clinton administration which, to me, makes them complicit in deliberate distortions of the facts.
Anything to win elections, eh?
Hat tip: The Sundries Shack