Bush manipulated NKorea intelligence like he did in Iraq: US expert

“Relying on sketchy data, the Bush Administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did in Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons,” Selig Harrison said in Foreign Affairs Magazine.

Harrison is from the Washington-based Center for International Policy and chairs the Task Force on Korean Policy, a grouping of former senior US military officials, diplomats and Korean specialists.

The Task Force issued a report on Friday calling on the US to immediately back down on its insistence that North Korea come clean on its alleged uranium program.

He blames the US insistence on a uranium program for the stalling of six-party talks while Pyongyang moves closer to producing an atomic bomb.

Harrison said his claims were based on South Korean and Japanese intelligence sources who participated with the Central Intelligence Agency on the issue.

The intelligence was manipulated for “political purposes,” he said in the magazine’s December 17 issue.

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041210002249.86yql5b2.html