Clinton Knew of North Korean Nukes
Ex-President Bill Clinton knew that North Korea had resumed its nuclear weapons program at least two years before he left the White House - long before he now claims - according to former Clinton White House insider Dick Morris.
Responding to Clinton's profession of ignorance on CNN's "Larry King Live" last Thursday, Morris told Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor" last night that he was stunned to hear his old boss make the claim.
"When I hear Bill Clinton saying that he didn't know that North Korea was building bombs in these underground caverns - in 1998, when he was president, the Washington Post published a report that that was the case," Morris said.
"Clinton read the Washington Post," he continued. "If you were the president of the United States and read in the Washington Post that your CIA thought that, would you pick up the phone and call them? Would you ask them?"
In fact, the Post report to which Morris referred went even further, revealing that top administration officials had been briefed on North Korean nuclear weapons activity.
"U.S. intelligence analysts believe about 15,000 North Koreans are at work on a vast, secret underground nuclear facility, a development administration officials say may represent a decision by North Korea to abandon a four-year-old agreement to freeze its nuclear weapons program," the Post reported on Aug. 18, 1998.
"Administration officials who have been briefed on the intelligence data, which includes imagery collected by spy satellites, describe a large-scale tunneling and digging operation in a mountainside about 25 miles northeast of Yongbyon, a former nuclear research center where North Korea is said to have produced enough plutonium for two nuclear weapons."
After citing the Post report, Morris told O'Reilly: "For [Clinton] to take the position he didn't know North Korea was cheating is absolutely disingenuous. Not only did he know, but while he knew, he was pressing Congress to give them food and fuel to honor his '94 agreement [with Pyongyang].
On Thursday the ex-president told Larry King: "We had a tough time with [North Korea], but we got them to end that program and they kept it ended until apparently today they started again. They would have a hundred weapons if we hadn't done that. ... It turns out they had this smaller laboratory program to develop a nuclear bomb with enriched uranium." |
