Wachovia Backs Off of North Korea Funds Transfer

State must  really regret having let the Banco Delta issue  enter the mainstream of our nuclear diplomacy with the North Koreans.  What a terrifically mangled excuse it has become for North Korea’s nonperformance.

The United States believes a banking dispute blocking a nuclear disarmament accord will drag on and has pressed North Korea to start shutting its reactor in return for a firm US promise of a solution, a report said Monday.  [AFP]

This is just odd.  You’d think that we could just write a check for $25 million if it was just about that sum.  The fact that it isn’t suggests that North Korea really just wants an account for laundering future sums, free and clear.  In which case, I can’t imagine any bank wanting to expose its shareholders that way. 

The United States said it had lifted the restrictions on the accounts in March. But the North has had problems arranging a transfer via a foreign bank since banks are unwilling to touch apparently tainted money.

The US-based Wachovia bank said earlier this month it was considering a US State Department request to help process the transfer.

But South Korea’s DongA Ilbo newspaper said Monday that efforts to use US banks such as Wachovia had come unstuck because of the US Patriot Act, under which the funds were originally frozen.

It quoted a diplomatic source as saying that Washington, at a US-China forum last Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, asked Beijing to help liquidate BDA or let other banks take it over.

Good for Wachovia.  North Korea certainly does seem determined to wreck this deal.  For once, I wish them success.

See also (Anju Links for today):  

*   Gordon Cucullu and I have a very long piece in Front Page, here.

*   Cindy Sheehan has posted a long “resignation letter as the ‘face’ of the American anti-war movement,” filled with bitterness at the left and the media for only covering her when she was useful as a partisan tool (but not when she was traipsing around Camp Humphreys with North Korean agents  or Hugo Chavez).  She ends with these words:

Good-bye America …you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.  [Daily Kos]

I wonder where Ms. Sheehan’s cycles of grief will end, because it ought to be evident and understandable to any compassionate observer that the loss of her son unhinged her.  I’m not sure losing a child would affect me less, so I won’t judge.  What I do know is that her son died a hero, and I’d rather take this time to remember Casey Sheehan, not to deconstruct — or exploit — his grieving mother.  I hope these last two years have been a catharsis for her, and that she’ll find inner peace.