Today, U.S. intelligence officials will give closed-door briefings to members of Congress about North Korea’s role in building a reactor in Syria. (Israel, it’s been confirmed, destroyed that nuclear facility with their air-strikes last September.)

Why are the briefings taking place now? This morning the New York Times’s David Sanger speculated that Vice President Cheney is trying to scuttle the six-party disarmament talks by highlighting Pyongyang’s proliferant behavior. Others have floated more intriguing theories. For example, Jon Wolfsthal, an analyst from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, thinks the Bush administration is releasing the information at this time to rescue its tentative deal with the North Koreans by letting them off the hook. “If it turns out we have them dead to rights -- that we have enough information on our own -- then we can eliminate this as a point of contention,” he says. “Maybe we don’t need to negotiate transparency with North Korea because we already know enough.” 

The envoy who finally stood up and said the right thing wasn't Chris Hill, who has spent the past year purveying the bizarre calculus that as long as the U.S. keeps its side of the bargain in the Six-Party talks on North Korea, we’re half way to success. It was Jay Lefkowitz, special envoy for human rights in North Korea.

Lefkowitz spelled out that after four years of Six-Party talks, we’ve got pretty much nothing. Meanwhile, North Korea has conducted an intercontinental ballistic missile test, a nuclear test, and continued brutalizing its own people in ways “deeply offensive to us,” which “should also offend free people around the world.” That speech later disappeared from the State Department's website.