Richardson on David Albright: Put Me Down for “C”

Update: Albright has published his views here in slightly more detail, and I’m even less persuaded than I was before. Albright completely mischaracterizes the HEU evidence by ingoring evidence he can’t refute (North Korea’s admissions, Musharraf’s admissions, Libya) and arguing as if all of our evidence consisted of a receipt for aluminum tubes we’d found in A.Q. Khan’s lint filter. The key point about aluminum tubes is that they’re used to make gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. I’ve never seen anyone but Albright mention aluminum tubes in discussing the HEU case against North Korea, and in light of Khan’s admissions that he sent “nuclear hardware” to North Korea — possibly to include complete centrifuges, tubes and all — I don’t know why anyone would need to.

So why does Albright argue against this straw man? Pretty obviously, he’s trying to shoehorn his argument into the Iraq slipper. In the end, Albright almost concedes that North Korea has an eensy little uranium program, though North Korea denies even this. And as Don Kirk notes, Albright really doesn’t have much personal knowledge of North Korea’s nuclear programs, although he probably speaks with some authority on their sitting rooms and teacups. In the end he asks no question that North Korea couldn’t have answered by showing some transparency. That transparency ought to start with a closer look at this location (which, regrettably, is outside Google Earth’s high resolution coverage).

Original Post: In about seven weeks, we’ll know whether North Korean mendacity about its highly enriched uranium (HEU) program will abort the greatest tyrant’s ransom since 1938. Already, some are trying to lay the groundwork for exactly that, regardless of what North Korea chooses to reveal. I’ve been e-mailing my confederate blogger Richardson today to ask when I could expect his complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of David Albright (bio), who plays ventriloquist to Carol Giacomo of Reuters in this one-source reportorial. Richardson does not disappoint. Unlike me, he has the patience to methodically lay out the trail of North Korean, Pakistani, and Libyan admissions about North Korean uranium, and all that has corroborated those admissions, though North Korea now denies making them. To this, I add just a few points of fact, followed by the usual screedy argument that keeps you coming back here by the … dozens.

First, the fact that we recovered North Korean uranium hexafluoride in Libya does seem significant. Albright’s story — sorry, Giacomo’s story — never mentions this. Second, as Richardson notes, pretty much all of the hawks and even most of the doves (Selig Harrison) agree that North Korea has an HEU program. [Correction: Selig Harrison’s view, at least , is that North Korea could have (and most likely?) had a low enriched uranium program for the generation of electricity, not an HEU program. Harrison thinks the evidence of an HEU program was cooked up by the Bush administration to blow up the first Agreed Framework.] I’ll add another name: Jack Pritchard. He should know. He was there to hear the North Koreans admit it:

One of the specialists who visited North Korea last week, former State Department official Charles L. Pritchard, was part of the U.S. delegation that reported hearing the North Korean admission. U.S. officials said they had three translators at the 2002 session and have no doubt the North Koreans confirmed the program.

One official present at the 2002 meeting said Pritchard and Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly began passing notes as Kang Suk Ju, North Korea’s first vice foreign minister, “looking flushed and defiant,” began a 50-minute monologue reacting to the U.S. declaration that it knew North Korea had an enrichment program. As the translation progressed, Pritchard and Kelly each passed notes, asking, “Is he saying what we think he’s saying?” A half minute later, they passed notes again, in effect saying, “Never mind — it’s clear.”

North Korea’s admission was made in the context of other distinct facts discussed during a lengthy and detailed conversation in the presence of three translators. Yet too many press reports, including Giacomo’s, still imply that the evidence for North Korea’s HEU program consists of one (mis?)translated blurt from a cranky apparatchik who might have been hung over or senile. The sum of the HEU evidence is too compelling, and too important to our nation’s security, to distort through the Michael Moore lens Giacomo reveals in her very first sentences:

The United States should reexamine a questionable charge that North Korea has a covert uranium enrichment program, a key American complaint against Pyongyang that could complicate the new nuclear weapons deal, experts said on Wednesday.

The total number of Giacomo’s “experts” questioning this charge turns out to be … one. This one “experts,” Albright, holds a fringe view shared by no one else who has had access to the CIA’s intelligence about North Korea.

Physicist David Albright, who recently visited the isolated communist state, likened the enrichment program charge to the “fiasco” of flawed U.S. intelligence that mistakenly concluded Iraq had a secret nuclear weapons program in the runup to war.

Sensing a dangerous imbalance between Albright’s swollen left brain and his shriveled right, I’m off to the handy online guide to logical fallacies, which tells us that what we have here is an “argument from the negative:” The CIA got a lot of things wrong in Iraq, and therefore everything the CIA says about North Korea must also be wrong. Giacomo’s piece is off to an unbalanced, misleading, illogical, start with this gratuitous reference. In fact, this has been something of a pattern this week.

I’ll freely concede that Iraq proved that intelligence is an inexact science — a revelation to some, I suppose — if you’ll grant that the risk from underestimating threats is potentially much greater than the risk from overestimating them. Maybe in the candyland universe where Kims, Khans, and Khaddafies file timely and accurate responses to Justice Blix’s subpeonas, intelligence consumers can demand conclusive proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In the meantime, we know what we know, and those who create doubts aren’t entitled to their benefit. If every responsible citizen and public servant is now obliged to believe the reclusive tyrant over the alarming conclusions of our own intelligence agencies, why even bother spending the money to have intelligence agencies at all?