N. Korea: "Six-Party Talks Are Over"

(CBS/AP)  North Korea says it will not re-enter six-party talks to end its nuclear weapons program, citing the "deep-rooted anti-North Korean policy" of the United States.

"The six-party talks are over," Ri Hung Sik, spokesman for the North Korean delegation at a major Asian security conference, said Thursday.

North Korea's six-party negotiations — with the U.S., Russia, China, Japan and South Korea — ended last year after Pyongyang went back on a promise to halt its nuclear program.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, also attending the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, conference in Thailand, urged Asian nations to vigorously enforce the latest U.N. sanctions against North Korea. She said Washington would pursue "every avenue" to denuclearize the Korean peninsula.

CBS News producer Jeff Goldman reports that a North Korean delegation attempted to take the podium Thursday to speak to reporters gathered for a scheduled news conference by Clinton before she arrived. They were turned away by ASEAN officials.

It was not immediately clear if North Korea's decision to declare it's participation in the six-party talks was made before or after the incident.

In remarks to ASEAN delegates, Clinton lamented the suffering of North Korea's people while stressing her view that the most urgent security issue in Asia is North Korea's illicit nuclear program.

"North Korea must end its pursuit of nuclear weapons and fulfill its pledges" to verifiably dismantle its nuclear arms production complex, she said, according to a text of her prepared remarks. "North Korea's response in turn has been more threatening behavior."

She called on the international community to implement the U.N. sanctions that are intended to deny North Korean ships access to ports for shipping banned cargo and to cooperate in enforcing financial sanctions against designated firms that support North Korea's nuclear program.

North Korea's Foreign Ministry, bristling at an earlier Clinton comment likening the regime to "small children" demanding attention, released a statement Thursday saying: "We cannot but regard Mrs. Clinton as a funny lady as she likes to utter such rhetoric, unaware of the elementary etiquette in the international community. Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping."

Clinton said Wednesday at the ASEAN conference that North Korea's only viable option was "irreversible denuclearization."

She said China, Japan, Russia and South Korea were all in agreement with Washington on this goal and were in a "strong position" in their dealings with the North Koreans.

She spoke at a news conference Wednesday after bilateral talks with foreign ministers of the four countries.

[Michelle48188]

Obama in the British Media

Here is an interesting editorial from someone outside our country as to what is going on!


If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people - not even Jimmy Carter.

Obama's problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.

That is why he opened Pandora's Box by publishing the Justice Department's legal opinions on waterboarding and other hardline interrogation techniques. He cynically subordinated the national interest to his partisan desire to embarrass the Republicans. Then he had to rush to Langley, Virginia to try to reassure a demoralised CIA that had just discovered the President of the United States was an even more formidable foe than al-Qaeda..

"Don't be discouraged by what's happened the last few weeks," he told intelligence officers. Is he kidding? Thanks to him, al-Qaeda knows the private interrogation techniques available to the US intelligence agencies and can train its operatives to withstand them - or would do so, if they had not already been outlawed.

So, next time a senior al-Qaeda hood is captured, all the CIA can do is ask him nicely if he would care to reveal when a major population centre is due to be hit by a terror spectacular, or which American city is about to be irradiated by a dirty bomb. Your view of this situation will be dictated by one simple criterion: whether or not you watched the people jumping from the twin towers...

President Pantywaist's recent world tour, cozying up to all the bad guys, excited the ambitions of America's enemies. Here, they realised, is a sucker they can really take to the cleaners.

His only enemies are fellow Americans.

Which prompts the question: why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?

[rf35]

The North Koreans are like a bunch of angry Munchkins running around making threats and empty "declarations."


Of course since the US, UN, or any other multi-national body won't do anything but make equally empty threats and resolutions, why should N Korea listen? I wouldn't be surprised if some day one of these little freaks miswires something and blows up their own facility.