STONE, MEET WALL. Not that this comes as any great surprise, but White House spokesperson Dana Perino is pursuing the buck-passing brush-off strategy when it comes to revealing what the White House knew about the North Korean uranium enrichment program that may or may not have existed. From today’s press gaggle aboard Air Force One en route to the Gulf Coast:

Q: Have you checked into this North Korea story, what — exactly what our intelligence says about the North Korean uranium enrichment program?

MS. PERINO: I did try to check into it. I think what I need to do is refer you to the intelligence community. We’ve said for a long time, North Korea is an opaque regime. I’m sure the intelligence community continually tried to assess and reassess and look at the information that they have. What we do know is that North Korea tested a nuclear weapon. And we have the six-party process that’s underway with the agreement that was announced just last week, or the week before. And now that process is moving forward, based on the September 19th agreement, and there’s working groups, and the IAEA inspectors are going back into North Korea.

So from our standpoint, that’s what we know is happening at the moment. In regards to intel and what they knew and when they knew it, I think I’d have to refer you back to them.

A cop-out, as usual.

–Garance Franke-Ruta

Garance Franke-Ruta is a former senior editor at the Prospect. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was a 2006 recipient of a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.