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#14831937
skinster wrote::D

Did you see this?

Unfortunately it's been withdrawn and not available a few days ago.


Trump is mouthing off again, more hot air.

President Donald Trump on Thursday ramped up his rhetoric on North Korea again, saying his warning of bringing "fire and fury" on the isolated nation may not have gone far enough.

"If anything, maybe that statement wasn't tough enough," he told reporters at his New Jersey golf club.

When asked what could be tougher than "fire and fury," the president responded: "we'll see." He also did not comment on whether the U.S. is considering a pre-emptive strike on North Korea.

"The people of this country should be very comfortable, and I will tell you this: If North Korea does anything in terms of even thinking about attack, of anybody that we love or we represent or our allies or us, they can be very, very nervous," Trump said. "I'll tell you why, and they should be very nervous. Because things will happen to them like they never thought possible."

On Tuesday, Trump strongly warned Pyongyang against threatening the United States in a reportedly improvised line.

"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States," Trump told reporters, speaking slowly and deliberately with his arms crossed in front of him. "They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening ... and as I said they will be met with fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before."

North Korea's state media responded by saying the country was considering a plan to attack the U.S. territory of Guam.

Trump's comment followed reports that Pyongyang had successfully miniaturized a nuclear weapon. It marks a major step in the country's nuclear ambitions.

North Korea has continued its aggression and missile tests in the face of economic sanctions. The most recent round was unanimously approved by the U.N. Security Council on Saturday.


https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/10/trump-m ... nough.html
#14831957
anarchist23 wrote:Unfortunately it's been withdrawn and not available a few days ago.


Maybe this link works.


Pundits Slam Trump’s Biblical Language on North Korea, But Praise His Defense Secretary’s Genocidal Threats - Secretary of Defense James Mattis has threatened North Korea with “the destruction of its people.”

President Donald Trump’s pledge to punish North Korea “with fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before” triggered outrage from pundits and lawmakers across the political spectrum. The outrage over his apparent threat to annihilate an entire country, possibly with nuclear arms, prompted his advisors to insist that Trump’s comments were improvised.

When Defense Secretary Mattis followed up with another belligerent statement, this one warning of "the end of [North Korea’s] regime and the destruction of its people” -- an apparent threat of genocide -- the reaction from Washington’s political class was entirely different.

Though Mattis was nicknamed “Mad Dog” for his role in razing the city of Fallujah during the US occupation of Iraq in 2004, pundits have rebranded him as one of “the adults” in the White House -- part of a class of sober-minded ex-generals appointed to reign in Trump’s divisive “America First” agenda.

Dan Merica, an aptly named CNN correspondent, cast Mattis’ warning to oversee the mass slaughter of North Korea’s civilian population as a “tough statement.”

Merica’s charitable framing was echoed by Barbara Starr, the CNN Pentagon correspondent who serves as an enthusiastic stenographer for the Defense Department. Starr called Mattis’ rhetoric “very tough talk” and “a dire warning” to North Korea.

Self-described “GOP media guy” Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican consultant popular among liberals for his vehement criticisms of Trump, applauded Mattis’ eliminationist language, tweeting, “This is how you phrase it, not biblical-level chest beating.”

Perhaps the most bizarre description of Mattis’ statement came Washington Post national security reporter Dan Lamothe, who described it as a “call for de-escalation.”

The leak that triggered the threats

Both genocidal threats from Trump and Mattis were triggered by a confidential Defense Intelligence Agency assessment leaked to the Washington Post claiming that North Korea has “cross[ed] a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power. The unverified analysis claimed that “60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.”

As Tim Shorrock, a veteran investigative journalist who has focused on Korean issues for several decades, was skeptical about the DIA leak. “I’m a little surprised by this report because for one thing it’s clearly not the collective conclusion of the intelligence community. It’s someone in the DIA and there’s no real analysis of what it is… They just say it has this miniature warhead and they can now put on an ICBM,” he commented to Aaron Mate of The Real News Network.

Shorrock also questioned the timing of the leak: “Well, they’ve said that before in years past, it hasn’t been proven to be true, and I’m wondering why this is coming out right now. That seems very dangerous on the face of it. Someone within the intelligence community is pushing for a military response by leaking this report.”

Turning the aggressor into the victim
The terrifying threats from the Trump administration were most immediately prompted by the DIA’s leak, but they were also an undeniable response to a months-long campaign by corporate media to drum up fears of a North Korean attack on the American homeland.

This August 2, CNN’s Jake Tapper hyped up unfounded fears that North Korean missile tests threatened passenger planes from the West. “Every day we’re getting starting details about North Korea’s military ambitions which seem to be proceeding at an increasingly rapid clip. It’s unclear with the Trump administration’s strategy is to stop the Kim Jong Un regime,” Tapper declared as he introduced a segment on the supposed threat to civilian airliners.

The segment featured special graphics created by CNN that showed an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched from North Korea striking California.

While CNN correspondent Barbara Starr acknowledged that no North Korean missile test came anywhere close to downing a passenger plane, CNN’s chyron read: “NORTH KOREA MISSILE TESTS COULD ENDANGER PASSENGER PLANES.”

Since Trump threatened “fire and fury” on North Korea, mainstream media has portrayed the government of DPRK as the sole aggressor. The front page of The Wall Street Journal on August 9 framed the president’s warning with the headline, "Trump Warns North Korea: Stop Threats."

Though Trump’s choice of language might have been alarming, his threats were part of a grand bipartisan tradition. Former President Barack Obama, for instance, casually threatened the DPRK with destruction in 2016. “We could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals,” Obama said, even while conceding that the DPRK posed “relatively low level threats.”

What is rarely acknowledged is that the DPRK’s weapons production is strictly defensive, not offensive. North Korean spokespeople have expressly pointed to countries that have been destroyed in U.S. military attacks, noting, “Nothing will be more foolish if the United States thinks it can deal with us the way it treated Iraq and Libya, miserable victims of its aggression, and Syria, which did not respond immediately even after it was attacked.”

Even Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, has acknowledged that Kim is a rational actor. Coat even conceded that the experience of watching Qaddafi be butchered by US-led forces after willingly ending his nuclear ambitions has influenced Kim’s decision making process. “The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes … is, unfortunately: If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them,” Coats said at the Aspen Security Forum this year.

Coats concluded that for Kim, “there is some rationale backing his actions which are survival, survival for his regime, survival for his country, and he has watched I think what has happened around the world relative to nations that possess nuclear capabilities and the leverage they have and seen that having the nuclear card in your pocket results in a lot of deterrence capability.”

The U.S. is the only country in the world that has ever dropped a nuclear bomb on a civilian population (and not once, but twice). The U.S. War Department’s own Strategic Bombing Survey acknowledged that the atomic bombing of Japan was not necessary to win the war.

Many historians today note that the U.S. nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which incinerated hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, was not necessary to end the war. Rather, it was a warning sign to the Soviet Union, and could be seen as the first act of the Cold War.

Fake news on North Korea
The Western media is notorious for spreading blatantly false and patently ridiculous myths about North Korea, many of which are explicitly racist, in reports that are only quietly corrected after they go viral.

Among the flagrant lies spread by corporate media outlets have been that the DPRK discovered evidence of unicorns, that all North Koreans are forced to get the same haircut, and that leader Kim Jong-Un killed his uncle by feeding him to a pack of dogs.

The former Washington Post pundit Max Fisher falsely reported that the DPRK distributed copies of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf to leaders. And Spencer Ackerman, a national security reporter now at The Daily Beast and formerly working for The Guardian, wrongly portrayed an obvious spoof video made by a Westerner as official North Korean propaganda.

Accompanying much of the distortion-laden discussion of the DPRK is an extreme dehumanization of the more than 25 millions people who live there, who are either erased or who are portrayed as brainless sycophants who mindlessly follow the orders of their cartoon villain leaders.

U.S. crimes against humanity

What is also conspicuously absent from media reports is any context or history for North Korea’s actions. Just over 60 years ago, the U.S. waged what was essentially a genocidal war against Korea, in which it murdered millions of civilians.

As the Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan astutely noted, “The madman with nuclear weapons is Donald Trump, not Kim Jong-un.”

While some Western media reports and even intelligence officials may acknowledge that the DPRK does indeed act rationally — and that Donald Trump is personally erratic to a dangerous degree — they still gloss over the impact of obscene US atrocities committed during the Korean War.

“Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” admitted Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who led the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War. Journalist Blaine Harden reported this in an unusually blunt Washington Post op-ed entitled, “The U.S. war crime North Korea won’t forget.”

Harden explained, “Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later Secretary of State, said the United States bombed ‘everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.’ After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.”

In its three-year war on Korea, the U.S. is estimated to have killed 3 million people, approximately half of whom were civilians.

It is hard to imagine that North Korea’s leadership has forgotten this calamity, or that it would allow it to happen again without a response.
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-projec ... rc.twitter
#14831968
anarchist23 wrote:I can't see what the West can do, any attack on North Korea conventional or nuclear would be an absolute disaster. Seoul would no doubt be attacked, can you imagine how the stock market would react, how China would react and North Korea knows this. Militarily the West can do very little.


The stock market is already falling, well done Trump. Those with portfolio of stocks and shares are freaking. Pensions will be hit.

Wall Street stocks saw their largest losses since May on Thursday, turning negative after weeks of record highs as tension escalated between North Korea and the US.
President Donald Trump warned his "fire and fury" comment might not be "tough enough."
Meanwhile North Korea discussed plans to fire missiles toward the US Pacific island territory of Guam.
The Dow Jones fell 0.9% to 21,844.01 and S&P 500 fell 1.5% to 2,438.21.
The Nasdaq lost 2.1% to 6,216.87.
Mr Trump earlier this week said North Korean would be met with "fire and fury" if it continued to threaten the US.
"Maybe that statement wasn't tough enough," Trump told reporters as he prepared to meet with top national security advisers. "If anything, that statement may not be tough enough."
Markets had been bracing for a correction after weeks of highs. The sell-off was widespread, with shares in financial and consumer companies leading the declines.
Two big retailers saw their shares fall rapidly after they announced results this morning.
Macy's has been cutting costs and closing stores. It saw a surprising rise in its profits, but its shares fell 10%.
Its big rival Kohl's said sales in its stores that had been open more than a year had fallen, and its shares were down 5.8%.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40887040
#14831969
Trump seems to have found how to stop the MSM anti Trump campaign. They can not continue to be totally negative to a President on the verge of war. It appears to already have been toned down.
User avatar
By Philby
#14831988




Analysis: Trump mirrored North Korea's own rhetoric with threat of 'fire and fury.' Can it be effective?


WASHINGTON — President Trump's use of apocalyptic imagery in threatening "fire and fury" against North Korea represented some of the most bellicose language uttered by any president since World War II.

Speaking at his New Jersey golf club on Tuesday, Trump warned: "North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen."

Trump's statement, in response to reports that the communist regime had developed a warhead that could be mounted on a ballistic missile, mirrored a North Korean propaganda machine that once threatened to turn the South Korean capital into a "sea of fire."

U.S. officials say that's exactly the plan. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Wednesday that the president's words were designed to send a clear message to North Korea's enigmatic leader "in language that Kim Jong Un can understand."

But the message seemed to only escalate the tension. North Korean Gen. Kim Raj Gyom on Thursday repeated a threat to target the U.S. territory of Guam with what he called “historic enveloping fire” from four ballistic missiles.

He called Trump’s threat “a load of nonsense" and said "sound dialogue is not possible with a such a guy bereft of reason and only absolute force can work on him."

The escalating war of words raises the risk of a high-stakes miscalculation. "What we have is two schoolyard bullies out-threatening each other," said Stephen Miles, director of Win Without War, a coalition of liberal advocacy groups.

"The problem with that is that it has the tendency to turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy. You end up with conflict coming out of a misunderstanding, and one side feeling they have to attack first," he said.

"I think the president just wanted to be clear to the North Korean regime on the U.S. unquestionable ability to defend itself, will defend itself and its allies, and I think it was important that he deliver that message to avoid any miscalculation on their part," Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Wednesday. And Defense Secretary Jim Mattis appeared to embrace this approach, telling Pyongyang to "cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people."

But veteran Korea watchers say that Trump's statements are likely to be counterproductive. "Yes, this is language that Kim Jong Un and his generals might understand very clearly," said Tim Shorrock, a journalist with the Korea Center for Investigative Reporting. "But this language isn't just heard by Kim Jong Un, but it’s heard by millions of people who live in the region."

It's a region where cultural memories of World War II, atomic bombs and the Korean War war are still raw.

And Trump's original threat was followed up with a Wednesday tweet boasting that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is "far stronger and more powerful than ever before."

Trump's bombast isn't entirely unprecedented. Historians were quick to point out the similarities to President Harry Truman's threat to Japan after the dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima: "If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth," Truman said.

And such statements can even be effective, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis. "We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth — but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced," President John F. Kennedy said then, promising "a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union" in the event of a missile launch from Cuba.

But experts said Trump's threats might backfire, in part because he doesn't have any plausible military options for backing it up. With vast artillery pointed at Seoul, South Korea, even a conventional war on the peninsula could claim millions of lives.

"Interpreting the statement literally makes it almost ridiculous," said Roseanne McManus of the City University of New York, author of Statements of Resolve: Achieving Coercive Credibility in International Conflict.

That's because Trump's threat was so vague, leaving open to possibility of a nuclear attack in response to non-specific North Korean "threats." She's found that presidential saber-rattling can is most effective when it's credible, specific – and understood.

Trump has already earned an international reputation for blustering, and his comments aren't backed up by public opinion or bipartisan support in Congress, McManus said.

Indeed, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the threat was "reckless."

"No matter how much the Kim regime deserves international condemnation and action — which it does — it is not a strategic or responsible response to issue wild threats of destruction. Such is behavior we'd expect to see from Mr. Kim himself, not the president of the United States," he said Wednesday.

It's also unclear how much Trump's statement reflects the thinking of his own administration. The White House pushed back Wednesday on suggestions that the remarks took national security officials off guard.

"The words were his own," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. "The tone and strength of the message were discussed beforehand."

Trump's comments came in response to a question about North Korea's nuclear capabilities as Trump sat down for a briefing on the opioid crisis.

Tillerson, who spoke to reporters on his way to Guam for a pre-scheduled stop, said Americans should "have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days."

"I think what the president was just reaffirming is the United States has the capability to fully defend itself with any attack, will defend our allies, and we will do so," he said. "So the American people should sleep well at night."
#14831996
What exactly do they expect Trump to negotiate?
The world says North Korea should not have nuclear weapons.
North Korea does not care what the world wants.
We have sanctioned everything we possibly can.
Why does it matter if Trump tones down his rhetoric?
#14832140
I was just reading about China saying they would remain neutral if North Korea attacked first but would retaliate if the US did. This could be interpreted as a go ahead. All the US needs is for North Korea to launch any missile.
Why else would China bother making the announcement?

Edit: After reading other versions of this story, it appears this was based on a Chinese opinion column.
#14832144
The NK/US problem has to be sorted out with diplomacy or not at all.
Armed conflict is not really a realistic option.

US Defence Secretary James Mattis has said America still hopes to solve the North Korea crisis using diplomacy.
After days of fiery rhetoric from both the US and North Korea, Mr Mattis said war would be "catastrophic" and that diplomacy was gaining results.
Pyongyang on Thursday announced it was finalising a plan to fire four missiles near the US territory of Guam.
Earlier, President Donald Trump said North Korea should be "very, very nervous" if it acted against the US.
He said the regime would be in trouble "like few nations have ever been" if they do not "get their act together".
Tensions have escalated rapidly in recent weeks after North Korea tested two intercontinental ballistic missiles in July.
It was further angered by a subsequent UN decision to increase economic sanctions against it.
North Korea has said it will finalise a plan in days to fire medium-to-long-range rockets towards Guam, the small Pacific island where US strategic bombers are based, along with more than 160,000 US citizens.
There has been no indication that any attack on the Pacific island is imminent.
Mr Mattis, speaking in California late on Thursday, said it was his job as defence secretary to be ready for conflict.
But he said the diplomatic effort, under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, "has diplomatic traction, it is gaining diplomatic results".
He did not provide any further details on what diplomatic efforts were under way. However, the UN Security Council agreed fresh sanctions against North Korea on Saturday.
Mr Mattis said: "The tragedy of war is well enough known. It doesn't need another characterisation beyond the fact that it would be catastrophic."
When asked about US military plans for a potential conflict, Mr Mattis said the country was ready, but "I don't tell the enemy in advance what I'm going to do".
Speaking on Thursday at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Mr Trump suggested his own statements on North Korea - where he threatened them with "fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen" - had not been tough enough.
He also railed against previous US administrations for being too weak on North Korea and again chided the North's closest ally, China, saying it could do "a lot more".
He said: "I will tell you this, if North Korea does anything in terms of even thinking about attack of anybody that we love or we represent or our allies or us they can be very, very nervous.
"I'll tell you why… because things will happen to them like they never thought possible.
"I will tell you this, North Korea better get their act together or they're gonna be in trouble like few nations have ever been."
However, he added that the US would always consider negotiations.
China's state-run Global Times newspaper - often dubbed a Communist Party mouthpiece - wrote that China should stay neutral if North Korea launches an attack that threatens the US.
But it also said that if the US and South Korea attack North Korea with the intention of forcing regime change, then China must intervene to prevent it.
Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said his nation would be prepared to join a conflict against North Korea if the United States came under attack.
Australia would honour its commitment under the 1951 Anzus Treaty, he said, "as America would come to our aid if we were attacked".


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-40896236


edit

Today there are warnings to the residents of Guam.

Image





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Last edited by anarchist23 on 11 Aug 2017 19:55, edited 3 times in total.
#14832146
Korea will not be unified until the North collapses of its own accord. Antagonising them is utterly pointless. A war would completely ruin all that the Koreans built over the last 70 years. Instead of worrying about their nuclear weapons why not just wait? Eventually they are going to either reform or collapse. Hassling them, putting sanctions on them and making threats will only embolden the government in Pyongyang. Just wait and see. There are certain factions in the NK government which want reform. If we continue on the path we are going the result will be nuclear war. It is simply not worth it.
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