ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

By Pepe Escobar The South China Sea is and will continue to be the ultimate geopolitical flashpoint of the young 21st century – way ahead of the Middle East or Russia’s western borderlands. No less than the future of Asia – as well as the East-West balance of power – is at stake. To understand the Big Picture, we need to go back to 1890 when Alfred Mahan, then president of the US Naval College, wrote the seminal The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. Mahan’s central thesis is that the US should go global in search of new markets, and protect these new trade routes through a network of naval bases. That is the embryo of the US Empire of Bases – which de facto started after the Spanish-American war, over a century ago, w hen the US graduated to Pacific power status by annexing the Philippines, Hawaii and Guam. Western – American and European — colonialism is strictly responsible for the current, incendiary sovereignty battle in the South China Sea. It’s the West that ca

By Peter Van Buren Short answer: nobody knows, but the media is treating it as a fact based primarily on a single technical source employed by the Democratic National Committee. I read the source’s publicly available explanation. Here’s what I found. A Quick Taste of Media Conclusions Despite a line in paragraph five saying “Proving the source of a cyberattack is notoriously difficult,” the New York Times offers the following statements. “researchers have concluded that the national committee was breached by two Russian intelligence agencies;” “Though a hacker claimed responsibility for giving the emails to WikiLeaks, the same agencies are the prime suspects;” “Whether the thefts were ordered by Mr. Putin, or just carried out by apparatchiks who thought they might please him, is anyone’s guess.” “It is unclear how WikiLeaks obtained the email trove. But the presumption is that the intelligence agencies turned it over, either directly or through an intermediary. Moreover, the timing of

By Dmitry Orlov The way things are supposed to work on this planet is like this: in the United States, the power structures (public and private) decide what they want the rest of the world to do. They communicate their wishes through official and unofficial channels, expecting automatic cooperation. If cooperation is not immediately forthcoming, they apply political, financial and economic pressure. If that still doesn’t produce the intended effect, they attempt regime change through a color revolution or a military coup, or organize and finance an insurgency leading to terrorist attacks and civil war in the recalcitrant nation. If that still doesn’t work, they bomb the country back to the stone age. This is the way it worked in the 1990s and the 2000s, but as of late a new dynamic has emerged. In the beginning it was centered on Russia, but the phenomenon has since spread around the world and is about to engulf the United States itself. It works like this: the United States decides wh

Police officers and rescue workers are seen in a facility for the disabled, where at least 19 people were killed and as many as 20 wounded by a knife-wielding man, in Sagamihara, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan, in this photo taken by Kyodo July 26, 2016. © Kyodo / Reuters A suspect detained after a stabbing attack in Japan was carrying a bag full of knives and other sharp tools, according to the latest reports. He was allegedly able to kill and injure a third of the patients at a facility for the disabled near Tokyo. The stabbing attack took place at the Tsukui Yamayuri En (Tsukui Lily Garden) facility in the city of Sagamihara in Japan’s Kanagawa Prefecture on Tuesday at around 2:30 am local time, leaving at least 19 people dead and 26 injured, 20 critically, local media quoted police and firefighters as saying. The dead victims, who ranged from 18 to 70 years of age, included nine men and ten women, according to reports citing the local fire department. Police arrested Satoshi Uematsu, 2

Psychological Operations or PSYOP are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals. War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery   Written and produced by SF Team: J.Hawk, Daniel Deiss, Edwin Watson The beginning of interest in post-Cold War information operations can be traced to the UN intervention in Somalia and the Rwanda Genocide. Relatively honest and direct reporting from these war zones meant that the public opinion of Western countries was a factor that had to be considered by the political classes. Hence the complaining at the time about the so-called “CNN Effect” which forced the politicians to send and/or withdraw troops irrespective of what the elites actually wanted to happen at the time. The early methods of influencing the public opinion by manipulating the

The anti-Russian propaganda across the U.S. political/media system is so pervasive that even members of Congress know little about the events that launched a new Cold War, as Elizabeth Murray learned and David Swanson reported. By David Swanson Elizabeth Murray served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council before retiring after a 27-year career in the U.S. government. She is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) and an occasional writer at Consortiumnews.com which has covered recent U.S. propaganda re Russia as well as any media outlet out there. Murray has recently returned from a trip to Russia organized by the Center for Citizen Initiatives which has resumed the sort of U.S.-Russia cultural exchanges that it organized during a previous peak in the Cold War. Murray was invited by Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (WPSR) to attend and speak at a small meeting in Everett, Washington,