Kim Jong Un Cartoons

Spying on North Korea: US Air Force keeps eye on Kim Jong Un

OSAN AIR BASE, SOUTH KOREA –  The U.S. Air Force is busy in the skies over the Korean Peninsula, a range of aircraft including F-16’s running around the clock missions and exercises. The increase in provocations from North Korea focusing minds more.
“It keeps us on a heightened sense,” says US Air Force Col. James Brotree, “ There’s always something going on so we always have to make sure we do the right things.”
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Many of these flights come from the Osan air base south of Seoul. And all those operations are run from an air operations center manned by U.S. and South Korean Air Force personel.
Osan is the base for updated U-2 spy planes that prowl the skies over the Korean peninsula. Most days ‎two planes will go on missions lasting some 10 hours, as high as 14 miles up.
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All weight has been stripped away to get the plane down to its basics so it can always be “locked in” via signals and image intelligence on the conventional and unconventional doings of the Pyongyang regime.
“It can be a very tense time but that’s kind of what we do here,” U-2 squadron commander Lt. Col. Todd Larsen, “We do our daily mission but we’re always maintain our readiness.”
If trouble is spotted, other planes at the base, including F-16 jet fighters, could be called into action, as well as the A-10 “Warthog” or “Tank-killer” aircraft which has seen a lot of combat action in other hot spots.
It provides close air support for ground forces with missiles strapped to its wings and a very nasty nose cone machine gun.
“We go to the same air space that we’d be going to in a wartime situation just 30 miles to the north of us,” Major Jordan Hrupeck told me about his combat exercises. “We’re going there in defense of South Korea.”
None of the U.S. Air Force officers who spoke with us said they expected to be called upon to execute a “preemptive strike,” the so-called “military option.” But they did tell us, if provoked by the North, which is happening more these days, they are ready.

O'Reilly: 'A Damn Shame' No Countries Will Help US Fight Global Threats

In his Talking Points Memo on Monday, Bill O'Reilly said it was a "damn shame" that western nations won't help the United States combat threats like Syria, Iran or North Korea.
O'Reilly said the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Australia offer only limited assistance in "policing the world."
He said President Trump's strike against a Syrian airfield after a civilian gas attack is proof America will make sure world order is kept.
"It is a damn shame we are the only country to take that stance," he said.
O'Reilly questioned why Russia insists on being friendly with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and why China seems to allow North Korea to operate as it wishes.
He pointed to a CBS News poll that showed Trump's approval rating rising slightly, and added that the upward trend is likely to continue.

Tillerson faces biggest challenge yet in upcoming meeting with Russian counterpart

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Russian President Vladimir Putin will not meet with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson when the former Exxon Mobil CEO visits Moscow on Wednesday, a move that could signal tensions between Washington and the Kremlin.
The Kremlin’s decision to avoid the meeting is notable. In 2013, Putin personally awarded Tillerson  the Order of Friendship- which is a top state award in the country, Reuters reported.
A Russian spokesman did not indicate why the two will not meet.
Tillerson is emerging from the shadows with a leading public role in shaping and explaining the Trump administration’s missile strikes in Syria. And, he’s set for an even higher-profile mission, heading to Moscow under the twin clouds of Russia’s U.S. election meddling and its possible support for a Syrian chemical weapons attack.
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Tillerson was visible during last week’s announcement of the response to the gruesome chemical attack, fielding questions from reporters on and off camera, and then captured in an official White House photo seated next to President Trump as they heard the result of the 59 cruise missiles that struck a Syrian military base.
Tillerson was a prominent fixture during the most important foreign policy period in Trump’s young presidency: a two-day summit with Chinese President Xi that coincided with the strikes against Syria. He was by Trump’s side during his meetings with Xi and spoke publicly multiple times to address both issues.
It was Tillerson who delivered the Trump administration’s first blistering condemnation of Russia in the hours after the strikes. Standing in a cramped conference room alongside national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Tillerson said Moscow had “failed” to live up to its obligations under a 2013 agreement to strip Syria of its chemical weapons stockpiles. “Either Russia has been complicit or Russia has simply been incompetent in its ability to deliver on its end of that agreement,” he said.
On Sunday, he made his first network television interview appearances. In one interview, Tillerson said he sees no reason for retaliation from Russia for the U.S. missile strikes. Russia maintains a close political and military alliance with President Bashar Assad’s government and has been accused of supporting its attacks against Syrians opposed to Assad’s rule — something Moscow adamantly denies.
Tillerson said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that Russians were not targeted by the strikes. He also said the top U.S. priority in the region hadn’t changed and remained the defeat of Islamic State militants.
Then he headed to Europe to gather with the foreign ministers of the other major industrialized nations before venturing on eastward to become the first Trump Cabinet member to visit Moscow — and possibly meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The criticism from the foreign policy establishment’s left and right that has dogged Tillerson’s tenure is dying down.
Tillerson had faced questions about whether he understood that his new position meant he was now the face of the United States to the world, that he had to answer no longer to a small group of top shareholders but to more than 320 million Americans.
The secretary of state must be “the spokesman for American foreign policy,” said Eliot Cohen, a senior State Department official during George W. Bush’s presidency. “This is the administration’s first crisis but it won’t be their last by a long shot, so he’s going to have to get used to this.”
Joining Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, Tillerson was supposed to focus on the informal summit with Xi. Instead, he was thrust to the forefront after photos of the bodies piled in heaps in Idlib, Syria, dramatically altered the agenda.
Only a week earlier, Tillerson had alarmed U.S. allies by indicating the U.S. was no longer interested in pushing for Assad’s removal from power.
In the hours leading up to Trump’s decision to order the strikes, Tillerson was among the most forward-leaning of Trump’s top aides in suggesting the U.S. would deliver an “appropriate response.” He challenged Russia publicly in a way Trump appeared scrupulously to avoid and said of Assad early Thursday: “It would seem that there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people.”
After the cruise missiles crashed down in Syria, Tillerson was calm and commanding in a question-and-answer session with journalists.
Cohen, a conservative critic of Trump’s foreign policy who has chided Tillerson for his reticence, said he saw Tillerson growing into the job. “I suspect you’ll see more of him as he grows more comfortable in dealing with the press and in his relationship with the president and the administration’s national security team,” Cohen said.
Beyond Syria are disputes over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
At the same time, Tillerson carries to Moscow the weight of FBI and congressional investigations into Russia’s interference in last year’s presidential election. The Trump campaign’s possible ties to the presumed Russian meddlers are also under scrutiny.
“This is going to be Tillerson’s biggest test to date,” said Julianne Smith, a National Security Council and Defense Department official under President Obama.

North Korea vows 'catastrophic consequences' for US aircraft carrier dispatch

North Korea is vowing tough counteraction to any military moves that might follow the U.S. move to send the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier and its battle group to waters off the Korean Peninsula.
The statement from Pyongyang comes as tensions on the divided peninsula are high because of U.S.-South Korea wargames now underway and recent ballistic missile launches by the North. Pyongyang sees the annual maneuvers as a dress rehearsal for invasion, while the North's missile launches violate U.N. resolutions.
"We will hold the U.S. wholly accountable for the catastrophic consequences to be entailed by its outrageous actions," a spokesman for its Foreign Ministry was quoted as saying by the state-run Korean Central News Agency late Monday.
The statement comes just after U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said U.S. missile strikes against a Syrian air base in retaliation for a chemical weapon attack carry a message for any nation operating outside of international norms.
He didn't specify North Korea, but the context was clear enough.
"If you violate international agreements, if you fail to live up to commitments, if you become a threat to others, at some point a response is likely to be undertaken," Tillerson told ABC's "This Week."
Gordon Chang, a Daily Beast columnist and author of “Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On The World,” said in an emailed statement to Fox News Friday that the U.S. strike on the Syrian airfield “tells North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un that he must now heed American military power, something that he probably dismissed before.”
“Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, disappeared from public view for about six weeks in 2003 at the time of the Iraq war. Kim Jong-Un loves the public spotlight, and it will be telling if he similarly goes into hiding,” the author said.
The airstrikes are “a warning to China’s People’s Liberation Army, which had grown dismissive of the U.S. Navy and Air Force.  Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader visiting Mar-a-Lago, almost certainly interpreted the strike as a sign of disrespect to him,” Chang said.
The North has long claimed the U.S. is preparing some kind of assault against it and justifies its nuclear weapons as defensive in nature.
"This goes to prove that the U.S. reckless moves for invading the DPRK have reached a serious phase of its scenario," the North's statement said. "If the U.S. dares opt for a military action, crying out for 'preemptive attack' and 'removal of the headquarters,' the DPRK is ready to react to any mode of war desired by the U.S."
North Korea's formal name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
U.S. Navy ships are a common presence in the Korean region and are in part a show of force. On Saturday night, the Pentagon said a Navy carrier strike group was moving toward the western Pacific Ocean to provide more of a physical presence in the region.
President Donald Trump's national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, described the decision to send the carrier group as "prudent."