U.S. claims face new scrutiny

? The Bush administration, which used some false and exaggerated intelligence to make its case for invading Iraq, also may have inflated some of its allegations against North Korea to justify a hard-line policy toward the Stalinist regime.

President Bush claimed in 2002 that North Korea was making highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons when there was no intelligence that it was doing so.

Now there are new questions about the administration’s assertions that a bank in Macau knowingly laundered proceedings from North Korean narcotics trafficking, cigarette smuggling and counterfeit American currency.

An audit of the Banco Delta Asia’s finances by accounting firm Ernst & Young found no evidence that the bank had facilitated North Korean money-laundering, either by circulating counterfeit U.S. bank notes or by knowingly sheltering illicit earnings of the North Korean government.

In a filing submitted to the Treasury Department in October, Heller Ehrman LLP, the bank’s New York law firm, reported that an audit by the government of Macau also had found no evidence of money-laundering.

Taken together, the pronouncements raised questions about whether the administration has been overstating its case against North Korea, a heavily armed communist dictatorship that Bush included in his “axis of evil” with Iran and Iraq under the late dictator Saddam Hussein.

The Bush administration used its charges against Pyongyang to justify a hard-line policy that led the regime of Kim Jong Il to end an eight-year freeze on plutonium production.