To make its blame-America-first story interesting, rather than true, Newsweek leaves out a few key facts on the nuclear arms negotiations with North Korea.
Note that reporter Selig Harrison provides Newsweek readers this chronology:
* Sept. 19, 2005: North Korea signs denuclearization agreement, pledging to “abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs” in exchange for a U.S. promise to respect North Korea’s sovereignty and to prepare for normalizing relations with Pyongyang.
* Sept. 23, 2005: The U.S. slaps North Korea with financial sanctions and labels North Korea a “criminal state” for counterfeiting, money laundering and marketing illegal weapons.
It sounds terrible. The deal was done, the North Koreans were giving up atom bombs forever, but those American thugs ruined everything by cutting off North Korea from the world’s banks.
But Harrison leaves out one major event between those two:
* Sept. 20, 2005: North Korea declares it will not abandon its nuclear weapons program unless the U.S. first gives it a free nuclear power plant.
The ink was not yet dry on the Sept. 19 agreement when Kim Jong-il renounced the deal and returned to his foreign policy of nuclear extortion. How was Washington supposed to respond?
Funny how Harrison left out what happened on Sept. 20, 2005. And Harrison is supposed to be an expert on North Korea.
No fact checking? Didn’t anyone at Newsweek challenge him on this key point? Couldn’t anyone at Newsweek make one phone call to the State Department for the other side of the story? There’s certainly more to it.
And by the way, September 2005 wasn’t the first time the North Korean regime reneged on an agreement to ban atomic weapons. In January 1992, North Korea and South Korea agreed to the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, prohibiting the manufacture or possession of nuclear weapons. But within months, North Korea blocked the inspections required under the agreement.
How would Mr. Harrison explain that? Was that America’s fault, too? Did someone in Idaho sneeze and upset the Great Leader in 1992?
It’s time to stop making excuses for tyrannical dictators.
Frank Warner
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