TRUMP AND KIM MAKE WORLD GREAT AGAIN

Yep.....Kim Jong-un has played the simpleton Donald J. Trump like a fiddle and made a monkey out of him.

President Dumb showed he was so gullible, that he believed all the bullshit told to him by Kim.

Faaaaaaarking hillarious, eh?

from The Washington Post…

North Korea working to conceal key aspects of its nuclear program,
U.S. officials say

Assessment comes weeks after Trump declared that nation was no longer a nuclear threat.

By ELLEN NAKASHIMA and JOBY WARRICK | 7:32PM EDT — Saturday, June 30, 2018

President Donald J. Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12. After the summit, Trump said “there is no longer a nuclear threat”
from North Korea. New U.S. intelligence reports are saying otherwise. — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.

U.S. INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS, citing newly obtained evidence, have concluded that North Korea does not intend to fully surrender its nuclear stockpile, and instead is considering ways to conceal the number of weapons it has and secret production facilities, according to U.S. officials.

The evidence, collected in the wake of the June 12 summit in Singapore, points to preparations to deceive the United States about the number of nuclear warheads in North Korea's arsenal as well as the existence of undisclosed facilities used to make fissile material for nuclear bombs, the officials said.

The findings support a new, previously undisclosed Defense Intelligence Agency estimate that North Korea is unlikely to denuclearize.

The assessment stands in stark contrast to President Trump's exuberant comments following the summit, when he declared on Twitter that “there is no longer a nuclear threat” from North Korea. At a recent rally, he also said he had “great success’’ with Pyongyang.

Intelligence officials and many North Korea experts have generally taken a more cautious view, noting that leader Kim Jong Un's vague commitment to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula is a near-echo of earlier pledges from North Korean leaders over the past two decades, even as they accelerated efforts to build nuclear weapons in secret.

The new intelligence, described by four officials who have seen it or received briefings, is based on material gathered in the weeks since the summit. The officials insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive assessments about a country that has long been one of the most difficult targets for spy agencies to penetrate. Some aspects of the U.S. intelligence were reported Friday by NBC News.

Specifically, the DIA has concluded that North Korean officials are exploring ways to deceive Washington about the number of nuclear warheads, and missiles and the types and numbers of facilities they have, believing that the United States is not aware of the full range of their activities.

Some U.S. intelligence officials have for at least a year believed that the number of warheads is about 65, as reported last year by The Washington Post. But North Korean officials are suggesting that they declare far fewer.

The lone uranium-enrichment facility that has been acknowledged by North Korea is in Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang. That site is estimated to have produced fissile material for as many as a couple of dozen warheads.

Meanwhile, the North Koreans also have operated a secret underground uranium enrichment site known as Kangson, which was first reported in May by The Washington Post. That site is believed by most officials to have twice the enrichment capacity of Yongbyon. U.S. intelligence agencies became aware of the nuclear facility in 2010.

In recent years, the United States, through imagery and computer hacking, has improved its intelligence collection in North Korea. Officials in Pyongyang are seeking to obfuscate the true number of their weapons facilities, and U.S. intelligence officials believe that more than just one hidden site exists. The Washington Post is withholding details at the request of intelligence officials.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined requests for comment.

North Korea expert David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said the assessments come at a time when “there's a worry that the Trump administration may go soft, and accept a deal that focuses on Yongbyon and forgets about these other sites.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has acknowledged that it could take years to implement any agreement on eliminating North Korea's nuclear stockpile, a hard-won asset that North Korean leaders regard as a guarantor of their survival. Asked by senators on Wednesday about the status of private talks with North Korean officials, he declined to offer specifics.

“I'm not prepared to talk about the details of the discussions that are taking place,” he said in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I think it would be inappropriate and, frankly, counterproductive to achieving the end state that we're hoping to achieve.”

Asked about Trump's claim that the North Korea threat had been eliminated, Pompeo said Trump had meant to say only that the threat had been reduced. “I don't think there’s any doubt about that,” he said.

While North Korea made a public show in June of demolishing the country's main nuclear weapons test site, there has been little public evidence of efforts to dismantle scores of other sites linked to production of nuclear and chemical weapons and delivery systems.

Even if North Korea's promises were sincere, it could take years of work, accompanied by an unprecedented agreement to grant access to outside inspectors, before U.S. officials could confidently say that the weapons threat has been neutralized.

As of now, there is little proof that North Korea intends to go down that road, long-time North Korea observers say.

“North Korea has made no new commitments to denuclearization, and in fact has backed away from its previous commitments,” Abraham M. Denmark, Asia Program director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told a House committee in late June.

“North Korea remains free to manufacture more nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and other weapons of mass destruction — even though it has unilaterally frozen testing of its nuclear weapons and certain ballistic missiles,” he said. “There is no deadline for them to eliminate their illegal capabilities, or even freeze their continued production.”

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• Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She covers issues relating to cybersecurity, surveillance, counterterrorism and intelligence. She has probed Russia's efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election and contacts between aides to President Trump and Russian officials. In 2014, she and her colleagues were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting on the hidden scope of government surveillance and its policy implications. Nakashima has also served as a Southeast Asia correspondent and covered the White House and Virginia state politics. She joined The Post in 1995.

• Joby Warrick joined The Washington Post's National staff in 1996. He has covered national security, the environment and the Middle East and writes about terrorism. He is the author of two books, including 2015's “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS”, which was awarded a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. His first book, “The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole who Infiltrated the CIA” recounts the 2009 suicide attack by an al-Qaeda informant on a CIA base at Khost, Afghanistan, that killed seven U.S. intelligence operatives. Before joining The Post, Warrick covered the fall of communism in Eastern Europe as a UPI correspondent and worked as a reporter at the Delaware County (Pennsylvania) Daily Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina. While in Raleigh, he co-authored “Boss Hog”, a series of investigative stories that documented the political and environmental fallout caused by factory farming in the Southeast. The series won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for public service.

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