I think I may have found a spin for the political statements: With the USA government so focused on blaming "axis of evil" countries for all its woes, perhaps the statement was really meant to say that should <evil country> setup some botnet attack against our systems, the USA would retaliate by setting up a botnet attack against the <evil country> own systems. Basically, if Canada were to send 6 billion mosquitoes to the USA to annoy the hell out of americans, the USA wouldn't bother attacking the mosquitoes, but would attack something valuable to canadians (like DDOS attack against the Tim Horton's web site). In other words, once they have concucted evidence that <evil country> is behind a botnet attack against www.house.gov, then the USA would "attack" www.government.<evil country> instead of attacking the individual computers that attack the USA.