No 'pinprick strikes' – 1,200 targets ID'd for massive attack on nuke sites
The Pentagon has formulated a "three-day blitz" plan to annihilate Iran's military that targets 1,200 sites, including Tehran's nuclear facilities, in order to render its military incapable of conducting offensive, defensive or retaliatory missions.
According to the London Sunday Times, citing Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, the Pentagon has rejected a strategy of "pinprick strikes" against Iran's nuclear facilities.
"They're about taking out the entire Iranian military," Debat said.
Despite a report last week by the International Atomic Energy Agency of "significant" cooperation by Iran over its nuclear program, Washington sees only continued stalling by the Islamic regime, reports the Times.
President Bush increased his rhetoric against Iran's nuclear program last week, saying Tehran had put the Mideast "under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust" and indicated action would be taken against the program "before it is too late."
According to a Times source close to the Bush administration, the president's recent statements were meant as "a message to a number of audiences" – Iran and the U.N. Security Council.
"A number of nuclear sites have not even been visited ...   more »

Hillary Clinton and Norman Hsu
A shady Chinese megadonor to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has close ties to an aerospace mogul accused of placing his business interests before national security by sharing missile secrets with Beijing during the Clinton administration.
Before his forced resignation last week, Norman Yuan Yuen Hsu sat on the board of trustees of the liberal New School university in New York with former Loral Corp. head Bernard L. Schwartz, who was allowed to transfer restricted satellite and missile technology to a People's Liberation Army front after contributing a record amount of cash to President Clinton's 1996 campaign.
The New School has removed Hsu's name from its list of trustees. But the old list showing both Hsu and Schwartz is still captured on Google's cache files. Here is the screen shot.
Schwartz, vice chairman of the New School board, was among officials who introduced Hsu to the school's administration, WND has learned.
Hillary Clinton and Bernard Schwartz
Last November, Schwartz and Hsu chaired a New School banquet at the Mandarin Oriental in New York which featured Sen. Clinton as keynote speaker. Clinton steered a $1 million federal grant to the college.
More recently, Schwartz and Hsu (pronounced ...   more »

Twelve Russian strategic bombers will take part in an Arctic exercise on Monday and Tuesday including tactical launches of cruise missiles, an air force spokesman said.
He did not specify where the exercise was taking place but said TU-95MC bombers would take off from five air bases stretching from the Volga River city of Engels to Anadyr on the Chukotka Peninsula overlooking the United States.
"The planes will also practice mid-air refuelling from Il-78 transport planes," the spokesman said.
Last month, President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia's air force to resume long-range patrols by the strategic bombers, abandoned since the end of the Cold War.
In line with his assertive foreign policy and efforts to build up the Russian armed forces, Putin has said the resumption of patrols is needed to guarantee national security.
The air force exercise also follows a widely advertised scientific expedition to the North Pole last month with the task of finding justification for Russia's claims for a bigger slice of the Arctic zone, believed to have rich mineral resources.
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China's military successfully hacked into the Pentagon's computer network, raising fears it could disrupt the US defence department's systems, the Financial Times reported Tuesday.
The Chinese military's cyber attack was carried out in June following months of efforts, the London-based newspaper said, citing unnamed current and former US officials.
While the Pentagon declined to say who was behind the hacking, which led to the shutdown of a computer system serving the office of Defence Secretary Robert Gates, officials told the paper it was China's People's Liberation Army.
"The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system," the paper quoted a former US official as saying.
One senior US official reportedly said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origin of the attack.
The paper quoted another person familiar with the event as saying there was a "very high level of confidence... trending towards total certainty" that the PLA was responsible.
The paper said both the US and Chinese militaries were widely assumed to conduct computer espionage on each other.
"But US officials said the penetration in June raised concerns to a new level because of fears that China had shown it could disrupt systems at critical times," ...   more »