Honestly, Baby, It’s Not Mine

Sometimes, I’m tempted to pity some of the more fervent faith-based deniers of North Korean nuclear proliferation:

“I don’t buy everything in the video,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a nuclear expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  Mr Wolfsthal, who has spent time monitoring the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon on which the Al-Kibar facility was allegedly modelled, said the evidence appeared to support the allegations that Syria was constructing a plutonium reactor.

Mr Wolfsthal said the evidence pointing to substantial North Korean involvement was not compelling. He said the photograph of Chon Chibu, the North Korean nuclear scientist, did not prove there was extensive co-operation between the countries. The CIA on Thursday said the Syrian reactor was closely modelled on Yongbyon. But Mr Wolfsthal said Yongbyon was closely modelled on an old British design that has been easily obtainable for years.  [….]

Anthony Cordesman, a defence expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, criticised the CIA presentation, saying it created “far more speculation about the meaning and credibility of US reporting than should have been the case”.

“Once again, the US intelligence community has created an unnecessary mess by rushing out a half-complete product, and failing to but the information in releases in proper context,” he added.  [Financial Times, Demetri Sevastopulo and Daniel Dombey]

Collectively, it adds up to a  scattergun critique by several blind men with their hands on different parts of the elephant.  Of the bunch, David Albright actually comes across as the most restrained and objective, which should tell you something.  The only common theme is that all of them pronounce the publicly disclosed evidence unfit to convict Michael Jackson in before a southern California jury.   The common logic is the assumption that what they have not been told must not be.

This  is always a hazardous position to take.  Here’s what the Washington Post reported today:

According to U.S. officials, European intelligence officials and diplomats, [North Korean businessman Ho Jin] Yun’s firm — Namchongang Trading, known as NCG — provided the critical link between Pyongyang and Damascus, acquiring key materials from vendors in China and probably from Europe, and secretly transferring them to a desert construction site near the Syrian town of Al Kibar.

It was the company’s suspicious buying habits — and the branch office it opened in Damascus — that inadvertently contributed to the alleged reactor’s discovery and later destruction in a Sept. 6 Israeli bombing raid, U.S. officials say. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen declined in an interview to say whether Washington helped with the raid, but he strongly endorsed it.  [WaPo, Robin Wright and  Joby Warrick]

Yun had previously led North Korea’s  U.N. delegation in Vienna.  Among the items on his shopping list, which eventually attracted the suspicion of German customs,  were “gas masks, electric timers, steel pipes, vacuum pumps, transformers and aluminum tubes cut to precise dimensions.”  One European businessman was later sentenced to four years in prison for selling the North Koreans the tubes, although it’s not clear under what authority.  U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718, which is cited in the Post’s article, was not passed until October 2006.  The materials were then transshipped through — guess where? — China, the host of the six-party talks.

Who else is reminded of this scene?