Powell: North Korea "has not tested a nuclear weapon..."

[expatriot]

"...to the best of our knowledge."

This smells of something Powell could be seriously busted on if it comes out that we knew.

[Rose Siding]

1. "to the best of our knowledge"?

Why say that? Wouldn't the US be definitively CERTAIN about whether or not a nuke had been tested?

[nostamj]

4. well gee.... is there ANY reason to doubt

bushco when it comes to the presence of WMDs?

the "best of our knowledge" wouldn't help this gang win at tic-tac-toe

[Deja Q]

8. I second that!

Today's technology makes it damn easy to register radioactive fallout.

If a satellite system was taking photographs, it'd be easy to figure out if it was a bomb or "forest fire" or "Godzilla sneezing" or whatever.

Still, Powell's misled before.

[Rose Siding]

11. And then the journalist would ask

"Mr Secretary, can you explain to us the circumstances that might require you to qualify your denial?"

...in a perfect world.

[Spazito]

2. Those are weasel words, big time!

There is no bloody way they wouldn't know with absolute certainty whether it was nuclear or not, this stinks, imo. If he is using weasel words they are covering up something!

[Jacobin]

3. If Colin Powell said "the sky is blue" I would run outside to check it

This dude has about as much credibility as a ouija board.

[mistertrickster]

5. Yeah, the "mushroom cloud" was only 2.5 miles in diameter, so

if it were a nuclear device it was just a little one. <heavy sarcasm>

[Eric J in MN]

7. Yes, I'd say a 2.5 mile mushroom cloud is extremely good evidence

of a nuclear explosion.

[cliss]

6. What is wrong with these guys?

Here we've got Doctor Doom right in our own backyard, openly stating that he considers the US a major threat, and he'll "do what it takes" to defend himself. And now he's blown something which "to the best of our knowledge" isn't nuclear? Shit, this makes me sweat.

In the meantime, due west, we're busy on our horses aiming at windmills in Iraq, just like Don Quixote. The tab for our little adventure is now $200 billion, and we're no closer to our goal than we were when we first started.

We could have bought the country for that amount. And we would have been friends, to boot.

[LizW]

9. Okay, they're beginning to scare me now

Powell and Russert wouldn't even say the word "explosion", they just made a sort of veiled reference to "the reports in the papers today". If I hadn't know what they were talking about I would have missed it entirely.

Rice, on Blitzer's show, just said, "We're looking at it, but it wasn't a nuclear test. We don't know what it was."

The blast made a mushroom cloud 2.5 miles wide and left a crater visible from space! And we don't know what it was, but it wasn't nuclear?

If it wasn't nuclear, then what? Huge industrial accident? Accidental weapons discharge? Fuel storage explosion?

I don't like the evasion we're seeing on this. :scared:

[shraby]

10. Don't they realize that

some of us watched Condi and some watched Powell and then can compare notes on the internet?