EDITORIAL: Liars, liars … part 2

In 2002, the Bush administration led the United States to confront North Korea, cutting off oil supplies. In response, North Korea angrily threw out International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. A full-blown nuclear crisis was provoked.

Why? The U.S. accused North Korea of having a secret uranium enrichment program, parallel to its publicly known plutonium power program.

Now after years of conflict with North Korea, which pushed the North into actually producing nuclear weapons with their plutonium, sources in the Bush administration say the evidence may have been faulty.

This should be no surprise. Bush and company have based most of their foreign policy on lies, the most egregious of which was around Iraq’s fictitious weapons of mass destruction. That lie cost the lives of as many as 600,000 Iraqis and more than 3,100 American troops, with many thousands more wounded and traumatized.

The accusation against North Korea brought the world closer to a nuclear conflict. It jeopardized the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and threatened to destabilize the Korean peninsula and touch off a regional arms race.

Why is the administration choosing to “soften” its accusations now? Could it be because North Korea has agreed to open up its nuclear facilities to the IAEA inspectors? If the IAEA reports no highly enriched uranium program, the administration’s credibility level, already in the gutter, would be further reduced.

On the other hand, the Bush administration is now ratcheting up war threats against Iran, using highly questionable “evidence” that Iran is supplying potent new explosives to Iraq and building nuclear weapons, and therefore poses an imminent danger to the U.S.

It’s now widely acknowledged that the WMDs in Iraq were nonexistent. Now the administration has been forced to begin admitting it exaggerated, twisted or misused intelligence about North Korea. With such a record, the hyped up hysteria that the administration is now attempting to whip up around Iran strikes a familiar, deadly chord.