Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2004

North Korea’s nuclear buildup throughout the 1990s, described as “alarming” by one highly placed Capitol Hill staffer, was due to a weak – one could say a sham – treaty engineered by the Clinton administration.

What’s more, the mainstream media, which have nailed the former Vermont governor on previous gaffes, are giving him a pass on this one, perhaps because of their own ignorance.

One would think a Democrat going after President Bush would shamefacedly ignore the issue of North Korea. But Dean, in pursuit of the highest office in the land, on Tuesday rehashed previous falsely grounded attacks by accusing President Bush of pursuing a policy that will “allow North Korea to become a nuclear power” because of his [Bush’s] “petulance” and dislike of that country’s communist dictator Kim Jong-il.

In reality, Bill Clinton and his disastrous secretary of state Madeleine Albright gave the rabidly anti-U.S. dictatorship in Pyongyang its nuclear weapons capability, and they stuck U.S. taxpayers with the bill.

Dean is already in hot water over a revelation by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that, as governor of Vermont, he violated federal law by releasing secret protection plans for a nuclear power plant after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Except for the Boston Herald, the media have largely ignored this shortcoming as well.

Now the Democrat president wannabe is prompting gasps in national security circles in Washington by either ignoring or being unaware of the fact that North Korea’s nuclear buildup can be traced directly to a 1994 unverifiable deal cooked up by the Clinton team.

One key congressional staffer close to international issues points out that North Korea was cheating on the agreement “well before George Bush became president.”

In fact, as NewsMax has reported, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas (then majority whip), as far back as 1998, was calling attention to intelligence reports that North Korea was pursuing a nuclear buildup.

“It was happening in the Clinton administration during a period of time that statements [from Albright and others in the Clinton administration] were [insisting] that the agreed framework was working,” DeLay warned.

Critics of the agreement warned that the “lack of transparency on the part of the North Korean regime” rendered the document worthless.

In fact, it was the Bush administration that blew the whistle on North Korea’s deceit on nuclear weapons.

At first the leaders of the Stalinist regime adamantly denied cheating on the agreement, only to confess after President Bush’s Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly confronted them with hard evidence. The confession did not instill any reduction in arrogance on the part of North Koreans.

Displaying a “stop hitting my fist with your face” gall, they accused the U.S. of using humanitarian aid as a weapon. The U.S. stopped shipments of fuel oil to punish the communist nation for squandering resources on a threatening military buildup while the United States was feeding the starving North Korean people.

Elements of the 1994 agreed framework always “gave pause” to critics of the North Korean regime, a security analyst tells NewsMax, “because of the transfer of nuclear technology that [involved] building two nuclear power plants, paid for by Japan and South Korea, but with construction insurance provided by the United States.”

One analyst noted that even while dictator Kim Jong Il was hosting Albright in October 2000, North Korea was developing nuclear weaponry, an egregious betrayal reminiscent of Japanese negotiations with U.S. officials in Washington on Dec. 6, 1941, just as Japanese bombers were heading toward Pearl Harbor.

As one security specialist noted to NewsMax, “The governor’s remarks display an ignorance that should give every American some pause.”

Clinton caused near heart attacks among his security advisers when he lost the “football” with all the nuclear code buttons. Dean’s missteps on serious life-and-death security matters might cause Americans to “pause” and ask, “Would you trust that man with the 'football'?”

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