Author Archives: kerr

Pyongyang/Tehran Missile Testing: Yeeeaahhhh….Maybe Not

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Before North Korea, on 4 March, said it was no longer bound to its 1999 missile launch moratorium, _Time Magazine_ “published a 20 February article”:http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1029824,00.html making an old charge: “Administration officials think it may be cheating [on the moratorium] by using Iran as its proxy.”

Reports that North Korea has been circumventing the testing moratorium through outsourcing to other countries have been circulating for a while now. A “Bush administration official” made the claim to a _Los Angeles Times_ reporter on 5 August, six days before Iran “tested its Shahab-3 missile.”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_09/Arrow.asp

So why did _Time_ say that Iran and N Korea “may be cooperating more closely than previously known”?

If the author could go ahead and tell us, that would be great. But the article only says:

bq. After Iran test-fired the Shahab-3 last summer, there have been indications, a top U.S. official says, that Tehran is giving North Korea telemetry and other data from its missile tests and that North Korea is using the data to make improvements in its own missile systems. In exchange, the official says, Pyongyang may be supplying Iran with engineering suggestions for further testing.

Strictly speaking, I suppose it could be true that there are “indications” of post-August-test cooperation. But that doesn’t mean these “indications” are different from previous “indications.” What is new here ?

_Time_ certainly implies that there is new evidence, but it’s hard to know because the article doesn’t say a damn thing about previous data-sharing reports. Methinks someone likely got spun.

I don’t know any authoritative sources discussing exactly how much flight test data-sharing could substitute for actual flight-testing. Moreover, a State Department official commented on the available evidence for such cooperation “18 August”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_09/NK_Missile.asp

bq. Asked about press leaks from U.S. officials that Iran is conducting flight tests for North Korea, the State Department official said that it is “always a possibility” but added that the United States does not have solid information that such cooperation is happening. It is not clear that North Korea “would depend on Iran for anything,” the official added.

The _Time_ article also contains this misleading section:

bq. [Under Secretary of State John Bolton] warned, Iran could soon have missiles capable of delivering payloads to Western Europe and the U.S. And if that isn’t scary enough, CIA director Porter Goss said in congressional testimony last week that North Korea’s new, untested Taepo Dong-2 missile “is capable of reaching the United States with a nuclear-weapon-sized payload.”
The implications of a North Korea-Iran deal to share and test these missiles are grim. Equally ominous, Goss said, intelligence shows that North Korea is seeking to raise hard currency by peddling its missile technology to new clients beyond Iran.

To me, this implies that Goss testified that Iran and North Korea are sharing flight testing data. But he didn’t mention it in either his prepared statement or the hearing Q&A.

It is, at the very least, poorly written.

Yeeeaahhhh, great.

Bolton’s Mouth: Writing Checks His Ass Can’t Cash

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Bulletin to “Anne Applebaum”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18706-2005Mar8.html?referrer=email and others who argue that John Bolton’s “blunt” manner makes him “an ideal candidate to be America’s U.N. ambassador”: your boy has a history of doing stupid things. Competence matters, kids.

Case in point: “Bolton’s fave strategy”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2002_03/boltonmarch02.asp of naming countries who
(the US thinks) are violating international arms control agreements. Additionally, he simultaneously derides such agreements as ineffective, apparently appointing the US as judge of who’s behaving correctly and who isn’t.

The Iraq debacle obviously proves why this is asinine, but there is another example: Libya.

Before Libya decided to get rid of its WMD programs in December 2003, Bolton said several times that Tripoli was pursuing a biological weapons program. For example, he “told the BWC Review Conference”:http://www.acronym.org.uk/bwc/revconus.htm in November 2001 that:

bq. The United States believes that Libya has an offensive BW program in the research and development stage, and it may be capable of producing small quantities of agent.

He made a similar statement to the HIRC in June 2003. And in several other places.

Bolton even went so far as to issue a veiled threat against Libya in April 2003:

bq. we are hoping that the elimination of the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein and the elimination of all of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction would be important lessons to other countries in the region particularly Syria, Libya and Iran, that the cost of their
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is potentially quite high.

The problem is that Libya had no BW program, just chemical and nuclear wepaons programs. A senior administration official “said at the time”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_01-02/Libya.asp that Libya “admitted to past intentions to acquire equipment and develop capabilities related to biological weapons” and had dual-use facilities.

As with Iraq, the administration might say “Well, seemed like a good idea at the time,” but the publicly available evidence suggests that the intel didn’t quite jibe with Bolton’s spiel. The public “CIA 721 reports”:http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/721_reports/jan_jun2002.html#6 from that time said that “Evidence suggested that Libya also sought dual-use capabilities that could be used to develop and produce BW agents”

Yes, we should be concerned about proliferation if/when the intel warrants such a concern. And sometimes intellligence is ambiguous/inaccurate. Fair play. But it’s just moronic to shoot your mouth off in public when you’re wrong AND simultaneously decrying everyone else’s inability to see the truth.

In case you were wondering, Bolton’s blunt BW talk accomplished exactly nothing when it came to Tripoli’s disarmament. Even the US doesn’t make that argument. [“more here”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_06/NewsAnalysis.asp].

P.S. There are 3 ACT interviews “here”:http://www.armscontrol.org/ for all you Bolton junkies.

Down is Up, Black is White

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Michelle Goldberg “reports from CPAC”:http://salon.com/news/feature/2005/02/19/cpac/index.html on Rep. Chris Cox’s wisdom:

bq. America’s Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd,” he crowed. Then he said, “We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq.” Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation.

She then offers an unparalled description of conference attendees’ evident willingness to believe this nonsense:

bq. Like comrades celebrating the success of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, attendees at CPAC, the oldest and largest right-wing conference in the country, invest their leaders with the power to defy mere reality through force of insistent rhetoric. The triumphant recent election is all the proof they need that everything George W. Bush says is true….For much of the rank and file, though, the thousands of blue-blazered students and local activists who come to CPAC each year to celebrate the völkisch virtues of nationalism, capitalism and heterosexuality, Bush is truth.

Solid.

Scrounging for Iraq Excuses

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It’s late, so I thought I’d take aim at this barrel of fish.

Someone asked a question at the ACA meeting about how, given the Iraq intel debacle, the US can build a credible case regarding Iran and North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs. As part of his answer, Assistant SecState Stephen Rademaker stated that:

MR. RADEMAKER: … I guess it’s the received wisdom now that the Bush administration was all wrong in its assessment of Iraq. I think it’s important to just recall that – I mean, errors may have been made but they were not simply made by the Bush administration. The judgments of the Bush administration with respect to weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq were the same judgments that the Clinton administration reached prior to the Bush administration. They were the same judgments that the Congress and its intelligence committees reached based on their review of the evidence. It’s the same conclusion that the intelligence agencies of virtually every other government that was paying attention reached. And today, now that we’ve been to Iraq and seen the situation on the ground, the question arises, how could all of these intelligence agencies have been so wrong?

[snip]

Perhaps that’s what was going on, but I do think it’s quite unfair to single out the Bush administration and say those guys were all wrong; they’re a bunch of liars. I mean, the historical record here is quite clear that the Bush administration was hardly alone in the judgments it reached.

I’m sorry if it strikes Rademaker as unfair, but those guys were all wrong; they _are_ a “bunch of liars.”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/index.php?id=401

Not that this is news to anyone, but it doesn’t hurt to remind people that the UN inspections were a nifty way of finding out how good our intel was, but “those guys” refused to listen. In that respect, the Bush administration was nearly “alone.”

While we’re on the subject, Cheney lied about this same issue during a 6 February appearance on Fox News:

Chris Wallace: You said, in the run-up to the war, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. You said we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons, and then clarified that to be “nuclear weapons capability.” You said U.S. forces will be greeted as liberators.

I’m less interested, because I think it’s somewhat plowed ground, what you said and what you knew and all of that. I’m more interested in what you took away from the experience. Has it changed the way that you rely on intelligence? Are you more skeptical, perhaps, than you were before, having seen that it isn’t always right? And has it changed your attitude, your approach toward making pronouncements to the American people?

CHENEY: Well, what I said there, Chris, was, in fact, based on the status of the intelligence at the time. That’s what we had been told. It’s what the National Intelligence Estimate on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had shown and so forth.

Umm…no.

Cheney made the reconstitution claim just a few days before we invaded Iraq. By that time, all of the relevant intel about the nuclear weapons program had been “shown to be inaccurate.”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2003_09/Nuclearclaims.asp

More on North Korea, Pakistan, Uranium

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Jon Wolfstahl has an “analysis”:http://www.carnegieendowment.org/npp/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=16509 of recent reports indicating that North Korea shipped UF6 to Libya. He covers a lot of the same issues that I did “here”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/index.php?id=418, but includes a sentence which speaks to an important question: how can the Bush administration be so confident that it has all the relevant information about Pakistan’s uranium deposits, mines, etc.?

Jon writes:

bq. In addition, technical experts have confirmed that U-234 content can vary greatly even within the same mine or even within the same sample of ore, raising the possibility that the uranium sample does come from a known source.

I was uncertain as to whether and to what degree U-234 content varies within a country. Jon’s assessment suggests that the uranium in question could well have come from an unknown Pakistani mine. Another possibility is that we know about the mine, but lack the necessary uranium samples.

It’s worth noting that Pakistan does not have a comprehensive IAEA safeguards agreement. “According to the agency,”:http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Reports/Anrep2003/table_A24.pdf Pakistan has three facilities under safeguards. None are mines.

Kerry Intel Zinger

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Jeffrey can write the substance today. I’ve been busy.

I just noticed this exchange between the SecState and Kerry during Rice’s 18 January confirmation hearing:

Context: Rice and Kerry were discussing the role of “interfaith efforts” in U.S. public diplomacy. Rice expressed doubts about the need for a government role. The rest speaks for itself. I don’t know if Rice was being deliberately obtuse, or just missed the joke entirely.

RICE: … a lot of it is going on in the private sector and I actually am not sure that this is something the U.S. government would do better than letting the private sector…

KERRY: Well, isn’t it really a part of public diplomacy and there’s no way to…[ellipses in original]

RICE: It is certainly part of public diplomacy, Senator, but I often think that we are too narrow in our definition of public diplomacy if we only think it is something the U.S. government is going to do.

*KERRY: Well, this will be the first time this administration left a faith-based analysis lying by the wayside.*

RICE: Well, the faith-based analysis here I would agree with but I think the need for interfaith dialogue is important….

More on North Korea and Libya

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The NYT and WP stories are obviously describing two different intelligence methods, but the two don’t seem to exclude one another. Put together, they are perhaps compelling.

Perhaps. Some relevant questions/comments:

1.When was the UF6 produced and shipped to Libya? Where did it come from? Who shipped it?

“I wrote in ACT”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_07-08/IAEAandLibya.asp:

[According to the IAEA,] Libya used Khan’s network to acquire two …shipments of uranium hexafluoride in September 2000 and February 2001.

[snip]

A report earlier this year from Malaysia’s inspector general of police stated that, according to U.S. and British intelligence officials, uranium hexafluoride was shipped from Pakistan to Libya in 2001. Additionally, [an IAEA official told ACT that] the IAEA has “uncorroborated information,” but no “proof,” that North Korea may have supplied Libya with nuclear material.

The _Post_ says that the UF6 containers had traces of North Korean plutonium. That may prove the containers were in North Korea, but it doesn’t prove that the UF6 came from there. The UF6 may have been produced in another country, even if the natural uranium came from North Korea.

The IAEA’s Iran investigation illustrates the difficulty of unraveling networks like A.Q. Khan’s. We now know that centrifuge components Tehran obtained through the Khan network changed hands more than once before arriving in Iran. This is relevant because the IAEA initially had a hard time determining the source of enriched uranium particles found on those components. (The investigation is still incomplete- details “here”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_12/IAEA_Iran.asp).

Now, the _Times_ story _does_ trace the UF6 back to North Korea, but how reliable is the intelligence method the article describes (e.g. process of elimination, tracking U-234, etc.)? What kind of samples do you need from a country in order to make an identification? Is natural uranium enough, or do the samples need to come from uranium compounds (e.g. UF6?).

[_Note_: Tonight’s Nelson Report has some devastating quotes concerning this accuracy of this method.]

2. It is true that a North Korean UF6 production capability would tell us something about Pyongyang’s ability to produce feedstock for a uranium enrichment program. But we knew that North Korea’s fuel fabrication facility could produce UF4 and former Clinton administration official Gary Samore was confident enough to tell Nuclear Fuel in September 2003 that “”North Korea could probably start making hex [UF6] fairly quickly.”

And remember that the intelligence about the centrifuge program “remains sketchy”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_01-02/Deconstructed.asp.

3.The DoD official who told the _Times_ that this intelligence finding “changes the whole equation with the North” and “we don’t have time to sit around and wait for the outcome of negotiations” is wrong. These findings point to _past_ North Korean behavior, not present. And Libyan receipt of this material is hardly a crisis, since Tripoli’s nuclear weapons program has been shut down. We already knew to be wary of North Korean nuclear exports

4. *Big Picture:* Details aside, this episode points to the danger of letting the North Korean nuclear crisis persist. Negotiations remain Washington’s best option.

Lying About Iraq. Again.

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Dave Ruppe at _Global Security Newswire_ has a “great article on how Bush and Rice are spinning”:http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2005_1_25.html#FC33CA97 the “Duelfer Report”:http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/. At least one media outlet decided the fact that the Bush Administration keeps blatantly lying is news.

As an aside, I hope that some with influence in the journalism profession are reconsidering just how they cover events in an age where an administration engages in straight-up propaganda – “staying on message” regardless of the facts. The administration has played the press and something needs to be done about it. Actually, the _press_ needs to do something.

Anyway, things I would add to Dave’s article:

1. The Bush administration line that “Iraq had no weapons, but they had programs” implies that Saddam was on the verge of churning out weapons. Dan Bartlett “told Wolf Blitzer”:http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0501/16/le.01.html that Saddam “had the capabilities to produce weapons of mass destruction on a moment’s notice.”

Bull-shit.

Read Dave’s summary of “the Duelfer Report”:http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/ (or my modest contribution “in ACT a few months back”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_11/Duelfer.asp ). Suffice to say, the report states that, in the case of nuclear and biological weapons, Iraq had neither weapons nor programs.

2. Little has been written about the ongoing monitoring and verification mechanisms that would have remained on Iraq even if sanctions were lifted. The idea that lifting sanctions would force us to trust Saddam is another lie. (We asked super-dove David Kay about this in an “interview”:http://www.armscontrol.org/aca/midmonth/2004/March/Kay.asp.)

3. Bush et al do not get to say that the war was justified for any reason other than WMD without also admitting that they initially lied to the public about the justification for war. Why? Because the decision to go the UN meant that Saddam would stay in power if he complied with the resolution, tyranny and all. Therefore, regime change and disarmament through the UN were *mutually exclusive.* Simple, but I have yet to see anyone make this argument.

4. This is a bit off-topic, but I think Bartlett should be forced to repeat this gem to every wounded U.S. soldier:

CNN, 16 January 2005

BLITZER: But Europeans, other critics have suggested that he [Saddam Hussein] was contained, he was in a box. The U.S. had a no-fly zone in the north, a no-fly zone in the south. Sanctions were being imposed. He represented very marginally, at that moment in time, a threat to anyone other than his own people.

BARTLETT: Well, that might be easy to say for people who are not actually putting young lives at risk every day flying those no-fly zones. They’re being shot at almost on a daily basis, U.S. pilots.

Bartlett obviously meant they _were_ being shot at. I think the rest speaks for itself.

More Egypt Nonsense

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Well now that Michael Roston’s called me out, I feel the need to say something about “this”:http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20050123-100613-7697r.htm _Washington Times_ editorial about Egypt.

In short, it’s bad for many of the same reasons as “this other right-wing article”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/index.php?id=365 about Egypt’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

The _Washington Times_ does acknowledge that the “IAEA is investigating the matter”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005_01-02/Egypt_Taiwan.asp. But rather than, you know, waiting for the results, the _Times_ carries on with a bunch of alarmist silliness. For example, it talks about a bunch of Egyptian weapons activities that don’t exactly point to a bomb-in-a-basement program (e.g. their ballistic missile programs).

Additionally, the piece mentions that:

bq. Egypt has been quite open in defending the right of Arab nations to develop weapons of mass destruction in order to counteract Israel’s presumed nuclear deterrent (an odd formulation indeed, given the fact that the Arabs have been the ones starting the wars). At a 1989 Chemical Weapons Conference in Paris, for example, Egypt said these weapons were necessary to counterbalance Israeli nukes. In October 1998, President Hosni Mubarak said that Egypt reserved the right to acquire nuclear weapons.

This, of course, ignores several pesky facts:

1. Chemical weapons are not nuclear weapons.

2. Israel “likely has a chemical weapons program”:http://www.puaf.umd.edu/CISSM/Scholars/Cohen.pdf, in addition to its nuclear weapons.

3. The Mubarak quote, though not sourced, is likely taken out of context from an interview the president did with Al-Hayat. I don’t have the full interview, but a 5 October 1998 AFP article quotes Mubarak saying:

bq. Currently we are not thinking of entering the nuclear club because we don’t want war … When the time comes and we need nuclear weapons, we will not hesitate. But I say if we need it because it is the last thing on our mind.

[_Late Update_: Here is the “full text of the interview”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/Mubarak.pdf, becuase I do have such sweet skills. _ACW_]

The _Times_ also ignores the fact that Mubarak made several “anti-nuclear weapons statements”:http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/egypt/index98.html just in that very same year.

Obviously, Egypt’s nuclear activities should be investigated. But right wing opinion writers need to get sweeter skills.

Wanted: Sweet Iran Skills

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I was initially unimpressed a few days ago when “Cheney said”:http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6847999/:

Well, one of the concerns people have is that Israel might do it without being asked, that if, in fact, the Israelis became convinced the Iranians had significant nuclear capability.

Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards. [Mess edited for clarity. _ACW_]

I figured this was yet more buck passing by the administration (“Hey, don’t look at us….it’s the Israelis you gotta worry about”) but then realized that he was really threatening Iran. The reason is very simple- the US, it would seem, pretty much has veto power over an Israeli strike. Which means an Israeli attack is pretty damn close to a US/Israeli attack.

Now, I realize that lots of people complain that our influence on the Sharon government is limited. But in this case, there seem to be some pretty obvious barriers to Israel attacking without U.S. permission. If I’m reading “this map”:http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/reference_maps/middle_east.html correctly, Israeli aircraft would have to pass though Iraq, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia to bomb Iran. For obvious reasons, I think the US and our allies would have a bit of influence in all of those places.

And yes, I’m aware that Israel has “submarines with missiles”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2003_11/Israel.asp, but I really doubt there’s more than a slight possibility that Israel could up and attack Iran in such a manner without the US knowing about it.

In any case, this administration has to get serious about Iran. In one sense, it’s saying the right things. Cheney said “everybody would be best suited…if we could deal with it diplomatically” and Powell “said 10 December”:http://www.usembassy.ro/WF/100/04-12-13/eur111.htm that “U.S. policy is not to advocate regime change in Iran.”

But the problem is that remarks like Cheney’s Israel comments indicate that the administration is talking out of both sides of its mouth on this issue. Since Bush acted in bad faith in the case of Iraq, it’d be hard to blame anyone for thinking that he isn’t serious about diplomacy this time either.

If U.S. policy really is “diplomacy without regime change” (as the administration says it is), then US officials need to express that over and over again and tell people like Cheney to STFU about military action.