Via Power Line, this quaint little revelation.
North Korea admitted to sending engineers to military- related and other facilities in Syria during its recent talks with the United States over its nuclear program, diplomatic sources in New York said Friday.
Pyongyang, however, denied its involvement in Syrian nuclear development, according to the sources.
The dispatch of engineers and other personnel for bilateral cooperation, including on the military front, started in around 2000, North Korea told the United States in their talks from the end of last year to January.
The North also exported materials to Syria, the sources said.
Pyongyang claimed most of the personnel worked at civilian facilities, according to the sources.
As Power Line remarks:
Sure, that’s plausible. Maybe the Syrians wanted to learn about North Korea’s industry-leading flat-panel television technology. Who wants Japanese engineers when you can get access to North Korea’s? Or perhaps the North Korean engineers were dieticians–human engineers, so to speak–who could teach North Korea’s techniques for making each generation shorter than the preceding one, with a shorter life span, too.
Syria may not be a technological powerhouse, but the idea that it would want North Korean engineering expertise, or North Korean “materials,” relating to anything other than nuclear weapons is laughable.
True. More laughable is the fact that in 2000, Clinton was still in office and was six years removed from the 1994 Agreed Framework that, according to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s statements to Congress in 1998, had “frozen North Korea’s dangerous nuclear-weapons program.”
Turns out that the rogue state secretly started a uranium-enrichment program almost as soon as the Agreed Framework was signed. Despite this information becoming public in 1998, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that …
President Clinton’s administration began thawing relations in the late 1990s, and in October 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright became the first senior-level U.S. government official to visit Kim [Jong Il] in North Korea.
Their talks lasted two days, and before leaving, Albright presented the 5-foot-3 Kim a gift – an authentic NBA basketball autographed by Michael Jordan.
In early 2003 North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it had been actively violating for over half a decade. In 2005 it declared that it possessed nuclear weapons.
Now, North Korea is admitting to collaborating with Syria, although it assures us it is just routine and nothing to be concerned about. Given its continued history of deception, cheating on agreements and violating of treaties, is there any reason to trust that explanation? The answer is obviously no.
Make sure you get this right: In 2000, while Albright and Clinton were giving away sports paraphernalia to a murderous dictator, said dictator was continuing a nuclear program that had been in full swing for many years in violation of a signed agreement, and was also beginning to aid, even militarily, a known terrorist-coddling state in Syria.
Since then, hard evidence, including a test of a nuclear weapon and multiple admissions on behalf of Kim’s regime as to its nuclear program, has come to light that completely ridicules the Clinton Administration’s claims to any form of success in its dealings with North Korea.
Is any of that decade of debacles part of Hillary Clinton’s 35 years of experience? I’d think so, considering this photo.
And where was Obama when his plan to suck up to every enemy of the US was experimented with and proved a failure? Is he so naive that he really thinks he can achieve this, with full compliance from our enemies and the likes of Ahmadinejad?
It’s time for liberals and Democrats obsessed with appeasement to recognize the truth. Tough diplomacy works. Bush II named North Korea a member of the Axis of Evil, after all, and look what happened.
