US: Clinton briefs top US official on North Korea trip
Fri Aug 7 05:16:01 EST 2009
WASHINGTON, Aug 6 AFP - Ex-president Bill Clinton has given a top US official an initial briefing on his North Korea trip and plans to conduct a more formal and in-depth debriefing for the White House, officials say.
Clinton spoke to a member of President Barack Obama's national security council on Wednesday night, hours after flying home from negotiating the release of two jailed US journalists, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
"We are going to get a fuller briefing," Gibbs said, adding that Obama was also seeking to sit down with the former president to get a rare view of the inner workings of Kim Jong-Il's hermetic political system.
The White House has so far declined to detail the nature of Clinton's conversations, other than to style the visit as a purely humanitarian mission that included no message from Obama to the leadership in Pyongyang.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Clinton discussed a broad range of issues in a three-hour encounter with Kim, and told him Pyongyang could benefit if it released kidnapped South Korean and Japanese nationals.
The paper quoted a South Korean official as saying Kim was hoping to secure the kind of direct summit with Obama that he failed to lock in with the former president as his administration drew to a close in 2000 and 2001.
A day after Obama told North Korea it must halt provocative acts and its nuclear program, Gibbs argued that the next step in any easing of tensions must come from Pyongyang.
"If they would like to see a greater international breakthrough, then they just have to come back to live up to the responsibilities that they entered into," he said.
"We are going to continue to ensure that we take actions to enforce recently passed Security Council resolutions to ensure there is not the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."
