Pyongyang specifically threatened the White House and the Pentagon in a long statement from the powerful National Defense Commission late on Sunday.
Such North Korean rhetoric during times of high tension with Washington is routine. But it also underscores the country's sensitivity over a movie whose plot focuses on the assassination of leader Kim Jong-un.
The US blames North Korea for the cyberattack that escalated to threats of terror attacks against US movie theaters and caused Sony to cancel "The Interview's" release.
The United States is now considering whether to put North Korea back on its list of state sponsors of terror, Obama said on Sunday.
"We're going to review those through a process that's already in place," the president said in an interview aired on Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union".
"And we don't make those judgments just based on the news of the day. We look systematically at what's been done and based on those facts, we'll make those determinations in the future."
'A dangerous precedent'
North Korea had earlier denied responsibility for the hack attack and proposed a joint investigation with the US to to find the culprits.
Obama's remarks, in the interview which was taped on Friday, followed a call from a leading US senator to re-consider North Korea's terror designation.
- Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday, saying the Pyongyang regime had set a "dangerous precedent" through cyber attacks that were "able to inflict significant economic damage on a major international company".
- The State Department rescinded its designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism in October 2008. Currently, the list includes just four countries: Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria.
Obama has asked the State Department to consider removing Cuba, following the historic thawing of relations between the two Cold War rivals announced earlier this week.
[aljazeera.com]
22/12/14
GR
FR
DE
ES
IT
RU
EU
North Korea threatens strikes on US amid hacking claims...
ReplyDelete......The National Defense Commission, led by Kim, warned that its 1.2 million-member army is ready to use all types of warfare against the US.
"Our toughest counteraction will be boldly taken against the White House, the Pentagon and the whole US mainland, the cesspool of terrorism, by far surpassing the 'symmetric counteraction' declared by Obama," said the commission's Policy Department in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
North Korea has said it knows how to prove it had nothing to do with the hacking and proposed a joint investigation with the US
North Korea and the US, which fought each other in the 1950-53 Korean War, remain technically in a state of war because the conflict ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. The US stations about 28,500 troops in South Korea to deter aggression from North Korea................http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/North-Korea-threatens-strikes-on-US-amid-hacking-claims/articleshow/45598628.cms
22/12/14