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No Confidence? No Kidding!The North Korea intel botch is worse than you think.

By Fred KaplanUpdated Thursday, March 1, 2007, at 6:49 PM ET

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In October 2002, U.S. diplomats confronted North Korean officials with CIA evidence that North Korea had secretly obtained centrifuges from Pakistan and, with them, had started a program to enrich uranium. (If enough centrifuges are assembled in a certain way, they can enrich uranium into bomb-grade material.) The North Koreans confessed—though they later backpedaled and said they were misunderstood. (Even now, there are contradictory accounts of what happened.)

It is indisputable that North Koreans had centrifuges. It is not known—and has never been known—whether they've assembled these centrifuges into a cascade that could enrich uranium or, if they have, whether they've enriched any.

However, in October 2002, when Bush was looking for any excuse to back out of the Agreed Framework, senior officials said the evidence of enriched uranium was strong.

Now, four and a half years later, when Bush is looking for reasons to justify a deal that's remarkably similar to the Agreed Framework (except it's not quite as tight, and the North Koreans have since become a nuclear-armed nation), senior officials are saying the evidence of enriched uranium is weak.

The evidence has always been ambiguous. Before, they hyped it to justify what they wanted to do. Now, they're downplaying it to justify what they've done.

A footnote to this tale reveals the way these people work. It was on Oct. 4, 2002, that then-Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly confronted the North Koreans with the evidence of an enriched-uranium program and allegedly received confirmation. Not until Oct. 17 did Bush reveal this to Congress or the American people.

The reason for the delay was that on Oct. 11, Congress voted on the resolution to authorize President Bush to use force in Iraq. The rationale for the resolution was that Saddam Hussein was believed to be building weapons of mass destruction. Had lawmakers known that North Korea (another spoke on the "axis of evil") was also believed to be building WMD—and was, in fact, much closer to a nuclear bomb than Saddam—they might have hesitated to pass the resolution; they might have viewed the intelligence more skeptically or asked if Bush was about to go to war against the right country.

Does North Korea have a secret enriched-uranium program? Is Iran supplying deadly explosives to Iraqi insurgents? How close is Iran to building its own nuclear weapon? These questions may play a huge role in decisions of war and peace. Not even reasonably well-read citizens have much basis for answering them independently. We have no choice but to rely on what our leaders tell us about intelligence reports. In that sense, it doesn't much matter what the real answers are, because we have no reason to believe anything the current leaders tell us.

A few congressional committees can step into this breach to some degree, but they often have a hard time asserting their authority when an administration is determined to resist their prying. They should pry harder. Otherwise, for the rest of this presidency (which still has 690 days to go!), we'll be stomping and stumbling around the world in the dark.