October 18, 2002: White House Spokesman Indicates Pakistan Will Not Be Punished for Helping North Korea Acquire WMDs

When a reporter asks White House spokesman Ari Fleischer whether the countries that helped North Korea with its nuclear weapons program risk being punished, Fleischer indicates they will not, provided they have changed their behavior. North Korea’s nuclear program was and is substantially assisted by Pakistan, now a US ally. Fleischer says: “Well, yes, since September 11th, many things that people may have done years before September 11th or some time before September 11th, have changed. September 11th changed the world and it changed many nations’ behaviors along with it. And don’t read that to be any type of acknowledgment of what may or may not be true. But September 11th did change the world.” Fleischer says that this does not mean the US will forgive and forget, but authors Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark will give his remarks as an example of Bush administration officials no longer talking about nuclear proliferation. They will comment: “There was absolutely no mention of [CIA Director] George Tenet’s top-secret working group which had Pakistan’s relationship with North Korea and Libya in its sights (as well as all the other nuclear misdeeds committed by Pakistan). History had begun all over again, according to the administration, much as it had done in [1979] when the Soviets rolled into Kabul.” [White House, 10/18/2002; Levy and Scott-Clark, 2007, pp. 316]