A U.S. congresswoman said Monday she will introduce a bill calling for re-listing North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism in response to the communist nation's alleged cyber-attack on Sony Pictures.
   
"North Korea should have never been taken off the state sponsor of terrorism list and should be reinstated immediately," Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) said in comments emailed to Yonhap News Agency. "I will soon be reintroducing legislation to redesignate North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism and to ratchet up the sanctions pressure on the North Korean regime."
   
The congresswoman welcomed the latest sanctions that the administration of President Barack Obama imposed on North Korea last week in response to the Sony hack, but she stressed that what's more important is to enforce those sanctions.
   
"Simply talking tough on sanctions without enforcing them in order to manipulate public opinion, as this White House has done with regard to North Korea and other rogue regimes, will only diminish whatever credibility and influence the administration has left while putting the security of the United States at risk," she said.
   
North Korea was put on the U.S. terrorism sponsor list for the 1987 midair bombing of a Korean Air flight that killed all 115 people aboard. But the U.S. administration of former President George W. Bush removed Pyongyang from the list in 2008 in exchange for progress in denuclearization talks.
   
Calls have grown for redesignating Pyongyang as a state terrorism sponsor since the FBI determined the North was responsible for the Sony hack. Obama also said the administration would review such a possibility.
   
But U.S. officials have taken a cautious attitude, saying that putting the North back on the list would only be symbolic because the North is already under major sanctions that the designation as a terrorism sponsor would bring about.
  
"Our national security team is always reviewing the actions, particularly of nations like North Korea, to determine the proper policy response and in some cases whether or not that includes including them on the state sponsor of terrorism list," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said.
   
"There is a very specific technical definition for how states or why individual countries should be added to that list," he said.

"And so, we will work very carefully to determine whether or not the actions that have been taken by North Korea meet that very specific technical definition." (Yonhap)