PAUL WOLFOWITZ UPDATE….Back in 2002 the Bush administration accused North Korea of starting up a uranium enrichment program, which it then used as an excuse to withdraw from the Agreed Framework and halt bilateral negotiations. Today the administration says there was no uranium program after all. It was just an intelligence screwup.
Well, stuff like that happens to the best of us, doesn’t it? Still, with this administration, when there’s an “intelligence screwup,” that usually means that some actual person took ambiguous intelligence and decided to go to town with it. So who was it in this case?
Commenting privately…a concerned observer, then and now, said “the [HEU] evidence was very ambiguous. Wolfowitz took it and ran with it as hard as he could, and the upshot was that we shut down everything we planned to do with the DPRK. It was after that [Jan., 2003] they threw out the IAEA and began [what became] the run-up to the bomb test [last fall].”
Paul Wolfowitz! What a surprise. If we ever find evidence that he also trumped up intelligence against Iran, he’ll have an Axis of Evil trifecta.
