Nuke Korea?

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

13 April 13

Congressman acts warlike toward North Korea and Iran.

ome people say Representative Doug Lamborn, Republican of Colorado, is a reckless, warmongering fool, but others say he's not that reckless.

His loose lips episode in a Congressional hearing had the Obama administration in a spin for the rest of the day trying to tamp down what mainstream media are now calling the "North Korea missile crisis." Exposing previously classified information even got the congressman a page one story in the New York Times on April 12, with what turned out to be a misleading headline:

Pentagon Finds Nuclear Strides by North Korea

By mid-day, right-wing web sites were hyping the story with headlines like these from Red Flag News:

BREAKING: US Raises Nuclear Alert to DEFCON 3

China Mobilizes, Masses Troops on North Korean Border

[The initial report in DEBKAfile was picked up, often verbatim, by other web sites, including Infowars, PrisonPlanet, BeforeItsNews, Daily Paul and YouTube, which has a report that begins: "South Korean officials are telling the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) that B-2 stealth bombers are currently dropping leaflets over the city of Pyongyang warning its citizens of an impending attack." The report quotes a purported eyewitness who describes the leaflet drop and also says, "The girls here are super hot."]

If the U.S. Alert Level Is Raised, U.S. Not Saying

Calls to the Pentagon and NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) to confirm the heightened alert level elicited responses that included "I have no idea," and "Really?" The alert level was neither confirmed nor denied. Emails to the Pentagon and the White House were unanswered.

Giving some immediacy to the situation is North Korea's presumed plan to test another long range ballistic missile in a launch expected in mid-April. Both China and the U.S. have warned North Korea to cancel the test, but it's not clear what either country, or Japan, or South Korea, would do in the event of a launch.

Addressing that question on Fox News on April 10, Rep. Lamborn ducked somewhat, saying that if a North Korean missile were going to land in the ocean, there would be no point in using one of our expensive missiles to take it down. He was not asked what he thought the odds were that we'd have a successful anti-missile missile launch.

He did suggest that North Korean missiles could hit the U.S. mainland or Hawaii or Guam, none of which is true. And he reiterated his longstanding call for spending more billions of dollars on missile defense, including anti-missile missiles deployed on the U.S. East Coast to defend against missiles Iran might get some day.

Rep. Lamborn Has Chronic Pattern of Inaccuracy

Along those lines, he called it "dangerously na•ve" to seek a world free of nuclear weapons. Defending that view, he said falsely that every nuclear-armed country except the U.S. is improving its weapons. He added falsely that the U.S. is the only country to have reduced its number of nuclear weapons.

Even with some reductions in recent years, the U.S. still has about 5,000 nuclear weapons. Only Russia has more, although fewer are operational. The rest of the world combined has fewer than 1,000 nuclear weapons.

Rep. Lamborn grabbed public attention April 11 when he misleadingly claimed that North Korea had developed a nuclear warhead that it could deliver to its target by missile. He based his comments on an unclassified part of a classified Pentagon report that the Pentagon later said should have been wholly classified.

Rep. Lamborn, a member of Congress since 2007, had not read the full report.

The congressman apparently made no effort to discover from the Pentagon, the White House, the intelligence community, or any other presumably knowledgeable source, whether what he was reading was meaningful, or even correct.

Officials Warn Not to Inflate North Korean Threat

Testifying at the same hearing, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, said that he too had not read the report, telling Rep. Lamborn: "Well, I haven't seen it. And you said it's not publicly released, so I choose not to comment on it."

The Director of National Intelligence, General James Clapper, warned that the report by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), even in its very tentative conclusion, did not represent the opinion of other intelligence agencies:

"I would add that the statement read by the Member is not an Intelligence Community assessment. Moreover, North Korea has not yet demonstrated the full range of capabilities necessary for a nuclear armed missile."

As Reuters, Rob Kall, the Times, and others have noted, the DIA was sure that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, an opinion that contributed to a long, expensive, and disastrous war. And the DIA's opinion was completely wrong.

In the report on North Korean missiles, even the DIA didn't believe the threat, saying it reached its conclusion with only "moderate confidence," only one notch above "no confidence." The executive summary reads:

D.I.A. assesses with moderate confidence the North currently has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles; however the reliability will be low.

Rep. Lanborn posted his five and half minutes of questioning during the April 11 meeting of the House Armed Services Committee on his Facebook page, writing, misleadingly, "Here is the full video exchange I had with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey today about the true nature of the North Korean threat."

Not everyone was impressed, as Brian Napolitano commented: "You didn't even read the whole report before you started flapping your jaws. You knew you had a hot report and just couldn't wait to blab. Loose lips sink ships, jerk. That's why you got the reaction you did, and you know it."

China's Oblique Response, Implicit Slapdown for Rep. Lamborn

Rep. Lamborn's other major effort was to lobby for the U.S. to have a second nuclear-strike aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf to "project American power." Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said he didn't think a second carrier was necessary for that purpose.

Rep. Lamborn, 59, is an attorney with no military service who has been a state and federal legislator since 1994. In 2010, the National Journal named him the most conservative member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Secretary of State John Kerry was in the midst of a visit to Japan, South Korea, and China as Rep. Lamborn was making news and making waves in Washington. Secretary Kerry remained calm while answering reporters' questions, making the point that "Our hope is we can get back to talks."

And the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said, perhaps signaling that North Korean bellicosity was getting tiresome: "We do not want to see chaos and conflict on China's doorstep."

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.