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An American cyberattack on North Korea half a decade ago was fruitless overall, sources say. The National Security Agency (NSA) led a mission in 2010 to damage North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Reuters reported on Friday. Operatives tried using a variant of the Stuxnet computer virus deployed against Iran that same year, the news service said, with developers crafting a version that would activate once it reached Korean-language settings on targeted machines. Operatives hoped the virus would disable centrifuges for enriching uranium, much like it had when used against Iran, Reuters said, but the cyberattack stumbled when it encountered North...

A retired four-star Marine Corps general who served as the nation’s second-ranking military officer is a target of a Justice Department investigation into a leak of information about a covert U.S.-Israeli cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear program, a senior Obama administration official said. Retired Gen. James E. “Hoss” Cartwright served as deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was part of President Obama’s inner circle on a range of critical national security issues before he retired in 2011. The administration official said that Cartwright is suspected of revealing information about a highly classified effort to use a computer virus...

President Obama has commuted the 35-year sentence of former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning for leaking classified information in 2010 to WikiLeaks.

Satellite Pics Suggest Iran, North Korea Cooperating on Nuclear Research by TheTower.org Staff | 12.29.16 4:28 pm The discovery of a working North Korean missile site that was previously thought to be inactive may suggest that the country is cooperating with Iran on ballistic missile and nuclear technology, Voice of America reported Wednesday. PRESS RELEASE: Strategic Sentinel Finds Previously Unknown North Korean Site Read more here: https://t.co/NJk9a9LBgd#NorthKorea #VOA @W7VOA pic.twitter.com/f3S24izQOn — Strategic Sentinel (@StratSentinel) December 28, 2016 Satellite images taken and analyzed by the intelligence firm Strategic Sentinel discovered a missile silo in Geumchang-ri, a mountainous area in North Pyongan...

Bombshell yes, surprising no. Excerpted from The Daily Caller: President Barack Obama twice appointed former Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn to key national security jobs in his administration, including as deputy director of national intelligence and later as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, yet he never once met with Flynn face to face. The general, who spent 33 years in the intelligence field, told The Daily Caller News Foundation he was never called in for a face-to-face meeting with Obama to offer his assessment of ISIS as it rampaged through the Middle East, or during the political meltdown of...

Perhaps it was just a little “Pillow Talk” with his Iranian wife!  Who is Dr. Mohamed El Baradei? A quick Google search yields the following general biographical information:Dr. ElBaradei is the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], an inter-governmental organization based in Vienna, and formed under the auspices of the United Nations in 1957. He was appointed to the office effective Dec. 1 1997, and re-appointed to a second term in Sept. 2001. El Baradi was born in Egypt in 1942. He gained a Bachelor’s degree in Law in 1962 at the University of Cairo, and a...

State Department spokesman John Kirby defended his boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, on Monday for accepting an award for his role in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal along with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Kirby and Zarif were given the annual Chatham House Prize for finalizing the agreement in July 2015 and working to implement it in January 2016. Critics of the deal in the United States say that it does not do enough to curb Iran’s nuclear capabilities and gives the Islamic Republic too much sanctions relief without addressing the country’s malign activities in the Middle East.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Monday criticized Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s proposal to allow Japan to obtain nuclear weapons, stressing that Japan’s pacifist Constitution was written by the United States. “Does he not understand we wrote Japan’s constitution to say they could not be a nuclear power?” Biden said in a speech he delivered in Scranton, Pa., for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “Where was he when in school?” Biden asked. “Someone who lacks this judgment cannot be trusted,” he said. “He’s not qualified to know the [nuclear] codes,” the U.S. vice president said. Trump has suggested that...

North Korea: Friendly Proliferation May Beat A Nuclear Umbrella DOUG BANDOW 2:42 PM ET The Obama administration is debating a declaration of no first use of nuclear weapons. Some Asia specialists fear the resulting impact on North Korea. But dealing with Pyongyang is a reason for Washington to encourage its ally South Korea to go nuclear. /snip Washington's chief responsibility should be America's security. Backers of the status quo act like there is no alternative to leaving South Korea (and Japan, which faces a real, though less direct, threat from the DPRK) vulnerable to attack. However, Seoul is well able...

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Friday strongly condemned North Korea's latest nuclear test and said she supported U.S. President Barack Obama's call to increase sanctions on the East Asian country. "I support President Obama’s call to both strengthen the sanctions passed earlier this year with the United Nations and to impose additional sanctions," Clinton said in a statement.

South Korean officials said that they had detected an “artificial” tremor emanating from North Korea on Friday morning, indicating that the country has conducted its fifth nuclear test despite threats of more sanctions from Washington ... A statement from the South Korean military also said that an artificial tremor, registered as magnitude 5.0, had originated from Punggye-ri in northeastern North Korea, where the North has conducted its four previous underground nuclear tests. North Korea last tested a nuclear device on Jan. 6. In April, President Park Guen-hye of South Korea warned that the North might be preparing for another underground...

I can't wait for those Iran sanctions to "snap back" into place, can you? The top leadership in Iran has instructed its atomic research organization to prepare to reopen nuclear sites shuttered by the nuclear agreement. If Iran goes through with this, it would scuttle the agreement and force President Obama to reimpose sanctions. Or not.

Newly released State Department emails help reveal how a major Clinton Foundation donor was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no obvious experience in the field, a decision that appeared to baffle the department’s professional staff. The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later. Copies of dozens of internal emails were provided to ABC News by the conservative political group Citizens United, which obtained...

HIROSHIMA, Japan (AP) - With an unflinching look back at a painful history, President Barack Obama stood on the hallowed ground of Hiroshima on Friday and declared it a fitting place to summon people everywhere to embrace the vision of a world without nuclear weapons. As the first American president to visit the city where the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb, Obama came to acknowledge - but not apologize for - an act many Americans see as a justified end to a brutal war that Japan started with a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor. Some 140,000 people died after...

In case you missed it over the weekend, National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes admitted in a lengthy New York Times Magazine profile that the Obama administration used the media to manipulate and lie to the American people about the nuclear deal with Iran. Here is one of the lies pushed by the administration, which David Reaboi highlighted yesterday at The Federalist. First, the lies and the denials about the negotiations. It took months before a few dogged journalists started to ask questions about the talks Obama officials were engaged in with Ahmadinejad’s regime. In February 2013, then-State Department Spokesperson Victoria Nuland...

President Barack Obama will visit Hiroshima later this month, the White House announced Tuesday. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated by atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on the Japanese cities in 1945 during World War II. Obama will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima. He is scheduled to travel to Vietnam and Japan from May 21 through May 28 on his 10th trip to Asia, where he is expected to highlight America’s commitment to increase diplomatic, economic and security engagement with Asian nations and their people. The White House said Obama will participate in his final G-7 Summit...

Ben Rhodes is perhaps the weirdest foreign policy adviser in the history of the White House. His path to his current position as deputy national security adviser for strategic communications was, as this New York Times profile informs us, "perhaps not strictly believable, even as fiction." Forget his title. Ben Rhodes is "the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself," according to the Times. What makes that so bizarre is that Rhodes has no background in foreign policy at all. He was a failed short story writer who wandered into the orbit of Obama aides...

Wednesday evening, Twitter was filled with angry tweets claiming that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump "blew off" a group of pro-lifers just days after he had issues with his stance on abortion. Inciting the angry tweets were articles in Politico and the Daily Beast announcing the supposed slight. There was only one problem with the stories - they were false and neither news source bothered to correct their error. The falsehood seems to have begun with Politico on Wednesday, as their article was originally posted at 11:49 a.m. and tweeted by Politico, with declaration, "Trump Expected to Address Anti-Abortion Leaders."...

China's mishandling of North Korea's nuclear ambitions may come back to haunt it Emanuele Scimia says Beijing's unwillingness or inability to rein in Pyongyang has brought it the unwelcome consequence of greater US vigilance The US and its allies in East Asia have always been suspicious of China's attitude to North Korea's military adventures. Recent events, such as Pyongyang's launch of a long-range rocket and testing of an alleged hydrogen bomb, have contributed to this climate of mistrust towards Beijing. China is often blamed for not pressuring Pyongyang enough, but now its ability to contain North Korea's nuclear and ballistic...

Last year’s controversial Iran nuclear deal has sparked an atomic arms race, claimed Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon following a meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah. Ya’alon revealed that Israel had indications suggesting that certain Arab countries were now actively pursuing nuclear weapons, reports the Telegraph. The Defense Minister declined to specify which countries or how Israel had ascertained they were working to create their own atomic arsenals. The Sunni Arab world has long feared the specter of a nuclear capable Iran, and now that the Iran deal effectively permits the Islamic Republic to resume its atomic program with no limits...