Earlier this month, the New York Times revealed that Obama secretly ordered a cyber attack with the Stuxnet computer virus against Iran to sabotage the country’s nuclear energy program.
“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyber weapons,” the daily quoted “participants in the program” as saying.
It also confirmed that the Israeli spy agency was involved in the creation of the Stuxnet virus.
On Friday, US Attorney General Eric Holder assigned two prosecutors – Ronald C. Machen, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, and Rod J. Rosenstein, his counterpart in Maryland – to lead separate criminal investigations into disclosures of ‘national security secrets’ that included the case of the cyber attack on Iran, the New York Times reported.
“The unauthorized disclosure of classified information can compromise the security of this country and all Americans, and it will not be tolerated,” Holder claimed in a statement.
He said that the prosecutors were authorized to “follow all appropriate investigative leads within the executive and legislative branches of government.”
The recent secret disclosures also include reports that President Obama personally approves a “kill list” of terrorism suspects for US assassination drone attacks and the alleged existence of a double agent who penetrated a militant group in Yemen.
In July 2010, media reports claimed that Stuxnet had targeted industrial computers around the globe, with Iran being the main target of the attack. They said the country’s Bushehr nuclear power plant was at the center of the cyber attack.
However, Iranian experts detected the virus in time, averting any damage to the country’s industrial sites and resources.
AR/GHN/HJL
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