EDITOR—Iran carried out a strike over the weekend of April 13 and 14 in retaliation for the Israeli bombing on April 1 of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria. Embassies are the sovereign territory of the country represented, effectively making it an Israeli attack on Iran.
In the West, the Iranian response, which was announced in advance and targeted only a military base, has received significantly more attention. Pundits and politicians called it a grave escalation, the opposite of reality.
LARRY JOHNSON—I am always honored to be invited to appear on The Duran with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris. They were the first one I stumbled upon at the start of the SMO who talked intelligently about the political and military dynamics. I was fortunate to come to their attention and have appeared several times since March 2022. We discussed the situation in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. With respect to Ukraine, I explain the significance of the 12 CIA bases that the New York Times claims are scattered throughout Ukraine.
HELEN SANTORO‚March-in rights “will result in disincentivizing private sector partners from licensing advancements made through federally funded research,” a group of educational associations, including the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, wrote in response to the draft march-in rights framework proposed by the National Institute of Standards of Technology last December. “We recommend a complete and timely rescission of this framework by the administration.”
The Bayh-Dole Coalition, a group of research universities and other scientific organizations, also staunchly opposes march-in rights, writing in their comment that the “draft framework is being justified as a weapon to lower drug costs. It is no such thing,” and the “proposed framework violates both the letter and spirit of the Bayh-Dole Act and would cause untold harm to American companies, workers, and consumers if implemented.”
MICHAEL HUDSON—Well, to prevent this kind of embarrassment, and to prevent the embarrassment of journalists who were doing all this, Seymour Hersh described the [Mai Lai] massacre, and that helped inflame the opposition to Johnson. Well, President Biden, who’s approved Netanyahu’s plan, the first people you have to kill are the journalists. If you’re going to permit genocide, you have to realize that you don’t want the domestic U.S. population or the rest of the world to oppose the U.S. and Israel. You kill the journalists. And for the last, ever since the October 2nd Al-Aqsa event, you’ve had one journalist per week killed in Israel. That’s part of it.
The other people you don’t want, if you’re going to bomb them, you have to start by bombing the hospitals and all of the key centers. That also was part of the idea of the Vietnam War. How do you destroy a population? This was all worked out in the 1970s, when people were trying to use systems analysis to think, how do you work back and see what you need?
BILLY BOB—The truth is that the ruling Western establishment is not agile enough. It is not organized well enough to manage, much less save, a crumbling empire. Sure, it can wreak havoc, it can sow destruction, it can reap misery, it can double down on failure, avoiding and projecting responsibility onto others for the humanitarian catastrophes that result from its own policies, but it can’t build anything worthwhile or develop and prosecute a plan that seeks to turn all the current losses into wins. They are too fractured, they are too incompetent, there is too much chaos, there are too many independent interests and centers of power that are too adamant (and selfish) in the violent pursuit of their own narrow interests, for any sensible or rational plan to congeal.