In the latest distortion of «smoking gun» satellite images, the media continues its attempts to blow up Trump’s nuke negotiations.
Major mews outlets have resumed efforts to pressure President Donald Trump to pull back from trying to negotiate a deal with Pyongyang. In their latest salvo last week, The New York Times and CNN completely misrepresented the findings of a recent study of satellite photos of a North Korean missile base as evidence of bad faith and “deception” in talks with the United States.
A New York Times article bore the sensational headline, “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception.” In a breathless tone, the writers, David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, declared that the satellite images “suggest that North Korea has been engaging in a great deception,” because it had offered to dismantle a major launching site while “continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.”
If such improvements had been made during the U. S.-North Korean exchanges, they have might well merit official and public attention—if they have given North Korea new capabilities for threatening the United States or its allies, as Sanger and Broad suggested. But a review of the study of the satellite images of the base reveals that it does not describe any such improvements as claimed by the Times. On the contrary, the study says the satellite images “show minor infrastructure changes to the base that are consistent with what is often seen at remote KPA {Korean People’s Army] bases of all types.”
Furthermore, according to the study issued by Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), those same minor infrastructure changes had been observed at a number of similar missile bases, along with training and operational readiness improvements that the authors presume have existed ever since the reorganization of the Strategic Rocket Command into the Strategic Force in 2013.
In short, there were no “improvements that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads” that could be cited as evidence of an effort by North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Un to deceive Trump. Sanger and Broad either a) did not actually read the study of the satellite images on which they were supposedly basing their accusation or b) were deliberately deceiving their readers.
Further obfuscating the issue, Sanger and Broad argued that the failure of North Korea to “acknowledge” those missile bases “contradicts Mr. Trump’s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the eliminating of a nuclear and missile program that the North had warned could devastate the United States.
