ANTIWAR

Journalist Chris Hedges interviews former combat veteran and US Army officer, Spenser Rapone about bravery and morality. The second lieutenant was given an “other than honorable” discharge June 18 after an Army investigation determined that he “went online to promote a socialist revolution and disparage high-ranking officers” and thereby had engaged in “conduct unbecoming an officer.”

Leonov landed at a Japanese airfield near the Korean port of Wonsan with a force of 140 men, led by a higher-ranking officer. The airfield, supposedly lightly defended, was actually manned by 3,500 Japanese defenders. Horribly outnumbered, 10 Spetsnaz officers were forced to surrender. The commander of the Russian force asked to speak with the Japanese garrison commander. As the negotiations started, Leonov angrily interrupted, saying:  “We’ve been fighting in the West throughout the war and we have enough experience to assess our situation. We will not allow ourselves to be taken hostage! You will die like rats when we break out of here!”

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—In a recent interview with US Department of Defense newspaper Stars and Stripes, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said it’s important to keep troops in the Middle East to fight terrorism, and that it’s likely that America’s bloated military budget will not only remain at its current size but may actually increase under his presidency due to the need to focus on “near peer” threats like China and Russia. This is not a deviation in messaging from Biden and his crack team of beltway string-pullers, but a continuation of already established patterns.

DAVE LINDORFF—Instead of sharing the bomb with the USSR, which, remember, was America’s ally in World War II, and then working for its being banned, the US began producing dozens and eventually hundreds of Nagasaki-sized atom bombs, moving quickly from hand-made devices to mass produced ones. The US also quickly started pursuing the development of a vastly more powerful bomb — the thermonuclear Hydrogen bomb — a weapon that theoretically has no limits to how great its destructive power could be.

RUSSELL BENTLEY—The photographs of the fuselage of MH17’s cockpit are all you really need to see. The perfectly round  30 mm holes can be seen in photos on Google Images. Or listen to what Canadian citizen and OSCE monitor Michael Bociurkiw said, just a few days after the event. Russian military radar detected at least one SU-25 in close proximity to MH17 just before the crash, consistent with eyewitness accounts from people on the ground at the time, including DNP Prime Minister Alexander Zaharshenko (6:14) Interestingly, the Wikipedia and other information sources about SU-25 flight capabilities were edited and changed before July 17th, to reduce the flight ceiling from 10,000 meters to 7,000 meters. The SU-25 CAN fly at 10,000 meters, (10:50) the height that MH17 was at when it was attacked.