ROBERT HUNZIKER—Interestingly, Phillips’ book ends with “A Letter to The Global Power Elite,” asking them to change the ways of the world socio-economic system: “We absolutely believe that continued capital concentration and neoliberal austerity policies only bring greater human misery…. Wars, covert actions, externally-induced regime changes, propaganda media, and technological surveillance, all in the name of protecting the freedom to do business, is hurting humankind and will be stopped.” (p.320) That’s heavy stuff!
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—Not all 25 million Basiji will be effective “terrorists”, as they are sure to be described in Western media, but a few million will be rather a lot to deal with, right, military analysts? So I hope Washington and Tel Aviv are listening – if a few thousand armed ISIL members can’t be taken care of easily, how can millions of ideologically-politically- militarily-trained citizens be easily defeated?
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GODFREE ROBERTS—The greatest threat, however, was born when the Navy invited a Chinese admiral on a courtesy visit to the USS Nimitz. Upon his return the officer told colleagues, “I’ve just seen the world’s biggest target. If we can’t hit an aircraft carrier we can’t hit anything.” Thrifty engineers attached a new guidance system to an existing land based missile and created a new class of weapon, the million-dollar DF-21D anti-ship ballistic carrier killer. It carries a half-ton warhead one thousand miles then drops it vertically, at 7,500 mph, onto $12 billion aircraft carriers. The USNI says it can destroy a carrier in one strike and that there is currently no defense against it. (Its sibling, the DF-26D, has a range of two thousand miles.) In 2019 Robert Haddick[15] warned, “China’s anti-ship missile capability exceeds that of the United States in terms of range, speed and sensor performance.” Captain James Fanell[16], a senior naval intelligence officer added, “We know that China has the most advanced ballistic missile force in the world. They have the capacity to overwhelm the defensive systems we are pursuing.”
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Lying around the clock to advance or shore up the imperialist goals of the Western plutocracy is the corporate media’s chief task. Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and other nations are fed up with this regime which normally has horrid consequences for the targeted nations. Apparently, although he is normally unfailingly patient and diplomatic, the unrelenting, shameless barrage of lies, distortions, blatant contextual omissions, and sanctimoniousness can even get Vladimir Putin to lose his temper. We are happy to see below this healthy reaction. Way overdue. Imagine how he feels now, a full decade of insults and false acusations later.
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NATYLIE BALDWIN—On the heels of last week’s NYT report that the U.S. Cyber Command had carried out cyber attacks within Russia’s domestic infrastructure, Reuters has reported unnamed representatives of the Russian government as stating that the cyber attacks were recognized and thwarted:
The disclosure was made on Russia’s RIA and TASS news agencies days after the New York Times cited unnamed government sources as saying that the United States had inserted potentially disruptive computer code into Russia’s power grid as part of a more aggressive deployment of its cyber tools….
