From YONHAP, ‘Pakistani premier denies contact with N. Korea on nuclear weapons’:

Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on Thursday dismissed speculation that his country provided North Korea with nuclear materials to help it develop nuclear weapons. “We have had no contact whatsoever, directly or indirectly, with North Korea or any such [nuclear] issues,” Aziz said in a speech to South Korean and Pakistani diplomats. [emphasis added]

Considering that part of the U.S. case against North Korea having a clandestine uranium-based nuclear weapons program, which was in the news just yesterday, the quote above would make U.S. claims perhaps seem less credible. This is especially true for South Koreans not following what Pakistani officials say about the issue, and getting an earful of OhMyNews type propaganda on a daily basis. For them it might bolster NK’s public claims of innocence.

That is because the Pakistani PM is being quoted out of context. Since I do not have the full transcript, I am not sure if Aziz actually said no NK contacts after 2003, or if he was referring to government officials, but here is a bit more of the story:

Pakistan’s prime minister said Thursday his country … has shared what little information it had about North Korea’s nuclear program with South Korea… “As regards any limited information we had in the past it has been shared with the Korean government,” Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz [said]…

Pakistan’s relationship with North Korea was a focus of international attention after revelations that A.Q. Khan…provided nuclear weapons technology to North Korea as well as to Iran and Libya.

Musharraf… has insisted the Pakistani government didn’t authorize or know about the proliferation… Pakistan’s president told The New York Times in an interview earlier this month that he believed North Korea had obtained “probably a dozen” centrifuges machines used to enrich uranium from a network headed by Khan. [emphasis added]

And from the New York Times:

“As regards to any relationship or interaction with North Korea, we have none any more,” Shaukat Aziz told a news briefing in Seoul… “Whatever information we have, we have shared with our friends in South Korea… This is a closed chapter…”

… [On 13 September] Pyongyang called Washington’s charges about the uranium program “false propaganda” and “a very insolent act seeking a sinister political purpose.”

The chief U.S. envoy to the North Korean nuclear talks Christopher Hill said on Wednesday Pyongyang needed to come clean on all of its nuclear programs which officials have said would include its declared plutonium-based program and the suspected HEU program. [emphasis added]

YONHAP is to Korea what Reuters or AP is to the U.S., and information that appears there first ends up in many if not most of South Korea’s newspapers. Something else to consider is that probably most South Koreans tend to take what their press reports as fact. Nowhere is this better demonstrated that with ‘fan death.’ I have had arguments with Ph.D.s from Seoul National on that issue – more that one got on the internet to call up a (SK) news article to ‘prove’ their point.

Why is the YONHAP story a problem? I link this to the larger picture of U.S.-ROK relations and the public opinion of South Koreans about the U.S. In this case, it directly undermines the U.S. position regarding the North Korean uranium program.