GILBERT DOCTOROW—it is entirely logical that in response to the election results we have not heard derogatory personal remarks coming from the occupant of the Oval Office in Washington, who in the not so distant past has called Putin a ‘crazy SOB,’ a ‘murderous dictator’ and a ‘pure thug.’ No, official Washington is speaking of Putin as the ‘leader of Russia,’ meaning that he is the ‘go to’ man if there are to be negotiations to end the Ukraine war, an idea that is very much on the minds of Washington elites now that their bet on Kiev has turned to dross, and calamity on the field of battle is not welcome for an incumbent when America enters the heat of its own electoral cycle.
AMERICAN DUPLICITY
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EDITOR—Garland and Laith discuss the unprecedented paradigm wherein a poor and small country, devastated by many years of colonialism, war, hunger, disease, and long virtually isolated; a country lacking an industrial base, a navy or an air force, is still capable of projecting sufficient military power to largely checkmate the massive strategic advantages of a superpower. Such is the case with Yemen, a defiant nation which, ruled by the Houthis, and through the acquisition and mastery of new rocket, missile and drone technologies, has compelled even the US Navy to admit they are virtually stymied in their effort to reopen free international navigation in the Red Sea.
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EDITOR—Glenn and Matt Taibbi discuss how the top institutions in America —the judicial powers and the Supreme Court, the media, etc.—handle situations wherein the government is interested in suppressing some facts or stories inimical to their policy agendas. This is especially critical when the institutions in play are the Supreme Court, the FBI, CiA, etc. and the effect of their interventions can be entirely unconstitutional, since their behaviour can erase the citizen’s First Amendment guarantees of Free Speech.
In the specific, the central issue is now, in the digital age, whether or not governments around the globe should be allowed to control the flow of information to suit their ideologies and policies, thus exercising narrative control and wide censorship powers -
MIKO PELED—As the world is trying to come to terms with the catastrophic results of the creation of Israel, the actual executioners, those charged with committing the crimes, are hard at work to show themselves as heroic, caring, friendly and humane. The Israeli military public relations campaign on the different social media platforms is sickening. Young men just back from committing heinous crimes are asked by a young military reporter, “What is the first thing you will do when you get home?”
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SCOTT RITTER—The discrediting of Putin’s government with an eye to his removal from power has been a goal of the C.I.A. since 2005, when the C.I.A., together with British intelligence, began actively working to create viable political opposition movements inside Russia.
While these efforts have largely failed (the recent death in a Russian prison of Alexei Navalny, believed to have been a creation of the C.I.A., underscores the scope and scale of this failure), the C.I.A.’s covert political warriors in the Political Action Group of the Special Activities Center continue to try to undermine Putin through various means.