Authored by Jason Ditz via TheAntiMedia.org,
In October 1993, during the Battle of Mogadishu (the Black Hawk Down incident), 18 US soldiers were killed and 73 wounded, with a pair of Black Hawk helicopters shot down. The US responded by ceasing military operations, and within a few months had withdrawn all troops from Somalia.
Today, they are headed back.
With the North Korean "problem" front in center for the Trump administration, especially after Sunday's failed ballistic missile launch prompting Trump's top security advisor, Lt. Gen HR McMaster to "work with China on a range of options" to respond to the North Korean provocation, here are several charts and infographics summarizing North Korea's conventional and nuclear potential, as well as its short and long-range military options.
Authored by Robert Parry via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
In Official Washington, words rarely mean what they say. For instance, if a U.S. government official voices “high confidence” in a supposed “intelligence assessment,” that usually means “we don’t have any real evidence, but we figure that if we say ‘high confidence’ enough that no one will dare challenge us.”
Seemingly confirming what we hinted at previously, The Sun newspaper reports that the US may have sabotaged Kim Jong-un’s missile test yesterday through a cyber-attack causing the rocket to spectacularly flop, according to a former British foreign secretary.
In light of the recent NYT report that the US has been able to sabotage and remotely control North Korean launches for years courtesy of cyberattacks, we previosuly wondered if the US did not play at least a minor role in this attempted, but failed, launch.
President Trump's top security advisor, Lt Gen HR McMaster told ABC News that the US and China are "working on a range of options" on North Korea, adding that there is consensus that this was a "situation that just can't continue" as tensions mount over the country's nuclear and missile programs. McMaster also called the regime in North Korea "hostile" and said said that Sunday's failed test fit into a pattern of "provocative and destabilizing and threatening behavior on the part of the North Korean regime."