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http://www.spacewar.com/…

WASHINGTON, June 25 (AFP) Jun 25, 2008
The United States said Wednesday that it could move to take North Korea off its list of state sponsors of terrorism “quite soon” after the North makes a full accounting of its nuclear programs.

“We’ll have to wait and see. It could be quite soon if that were to happen,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said, as Washington hoped the Stalinist nation would provide its long overdue “declaration” as early as Thursday.

“We just don’t know if they’re actually going to do it,” she said.
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rawstory.com
By Nick Juliano
Tuesday, 24 June 2008

Word emerged late Tuesday night that the Bush administration would ask Congress to remove North Korea from a terrorist watch list this week, according to a prominent Washington foreign policy expert.
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http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/…

SYRIA: More questions about alleged nuclear site

Professor William Beeman at the University of Minnesota passed along a note today from “a colleague with a U.S. security clearance” about the mysterious Syrian site targeted in a Sept. 6 Israeli airstrike.

The note raises more questions about the evidence shown last week by U.S. intelligence officials to lawmakers in the House and Senate.

The author of the note pinpoints irregularities about the photographs. Beeman’s source alleges that the CIA “enhanced” some of the images. For example he cites this image:
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http://www.motherjones.com/…
Late last week, two senior US intelligence and a senior administration official provided background briefings to Congressional committees and the media on what they said was the evidence of North Korean involvement in a covert Syrian nuclear reactor. The facility was destroyed by Israeli air strikes last September, in an operation dubbed “Operation Orchard” that was subject to an Israeli news blackout.
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http://www.juancole.com/…
from Informed Comment by Juan Cole

An informed reader writes:

What little information provided in the CIA videotape concerning the destruction of the purported Syrian reactor only provokes more questions.

The alleged reactor is described, because of its dimensions and shape, as a duplicate of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon. The reactor at Yongbyon is a rough copy of an old British design. It is graphite-moderated and cooled with gaseous carbon dioxide. Its core is composed of a large number of highly-purified graphite blocks. For example, each of the first two Magnox reactors at Windscale in the UK used 2,000 tons of graphite. Even if this purported Syrian reactor vessel were half the size of one of the original UK reactors, it would require roughly 1,000 tons of graphite. That’s 14,400 cubic feet of highly-purified graphite. Would all official entities fail to notice the production and transfer of that amount of highly-refined graphite to Syria?
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