Excerpts from the 26 October Department of State Daily Press Briefing on North Korea’s nuclear declaration. Spokesman Sean McCormack is responding to questions:

QUESTION: — if North Korea provides a declaration that is seen to be something less than complete and correct on New Year’s Eve. And his response was to the effect that this process is not going to start on New Year’s Eve. So with that in mind, has the United States Government or any members of the six-party talks received any indication so far as to the progress of the declaration and its completeness and/or correctness?

MR. MCCORMACK: … We would expect that when we do receive it, that it is going to be full and complete and that it is acceptable not only to us but the other members of the six-party talks.

[…]

QUESTION: Is the sole — is it true that the sole reason to believe that the declaration will be correct and complete is that North Korea has recently assured you it will be?

MR. MCCORMACK: No. We’re not going to buy a pig in a poke. We have our own ways of certainly looking at the declaration and matching it up against what we as well as others know or suspect about the North Korean nuclear program. Now obviously a lot of that gets into the intelligence field. I’m not going to discuss that.

But nobody is going to sign off on a declaration as acceptable if they believe that it is not — it does not meet the standards that we have set for ourselves and that others have set for them.

[…]

QUESTION: Commercial satellite imagery, the evidentiary foundation of which is unassailable, appears to show that Syria some time between August 6, 2007 and September — and the present day destroyed some buildings located in a remote corner of northeastern Syria. Do you attach any significance to that fact?

MR. MCCORMACK: James, we’ve talked about these news reports for many, many weeks now and we give you the same answer. Of course, we would be very concerned about any activities that attempted to further the development of weapons of mass destruction in countries like Syria, countries like North Korea, other places around the Middle East. So it’s — those are things that we watch very, very closely. And beyond that, I really can’t offer you much of anything else beyond what we’ve said on the topic before.