Marjorie Cohn
Global Research

[Wikileaks: Collateral Murder (VIDEO). This video shows men gathering on a Baghdad street on July 12, 2007, shortly before they were fired upon. View related photos wikileaks.org]

"The charges against Bradley Manning end with the language, “such conduct being prejudicial to good order and discipline in the armed forces and being of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces.” "

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is accused of leaking military secrets to the public. This week, his supporters are holding rallies in 21 cities, seeking Manning’s release from military custody. Manning is in the brig for allegedly disclosing a classified video depicting U.S. troops shooting civilians from an Apache helicopter in Iraq in July 2007. The video, available at www.collateralmurder.com, was published by WikiLeaks on April 5, 2010. Manning faces 52 years in prison. No charges have been filed against the soldiers in the video.

In October 1969, the most famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, smuggled out of his office and made public a 7,000 page top secret study of decision making during the Vietnam War. It became known as the Pentagon Papers. Dan risked his future, knowing that he would likely spend life in prison for his exposé.

The release of the Pentagon Papers ultimately helped end not only the Nixon presidency, but also the Vietnam War, in which 58,000 Americans and three million Indochinese were killed. Dan’s courageous act was essential to holding accountable our leaders who had betrayed American values by starting and perpetuating an illegal and deadly war. Manning’s alleged crimes follow in this tradition.

The 2007 video, called “Collateral Murder,” has been viewed by millions of people on the Internet. On it, U.S. military Apache helicopter soldiers from Bravo Company 2nd Battalion 16th Infantry Regiment can be seen killing 12 civilians and wounding two children in Iraq. The dead included two employees of the Reuters news agency.

The video shows U.S. forces watching as a van pulled up to evacuate the wounded. They again opened fire from the helicopter, killing more people. During the radio chatter between the helicopter crew members and their supervisors, one crew member gloated after the first shooting, saying, “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.”

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M. Shahid Alam
Middle East Monitor

"My God! Is this the end? Is this the goal for which our fathers have striven and for whose sake all generations have suffered? Is this the dream of a return to Zion which our people have dreamt for centuries: that we now come to Zion to stain its soil with innocent blood?" ~ Ahad Ha'am, 1921

This study has employed a dialectical framework for analyzing the destabilizing logic of Zionism. We have examined this logic as it has unfolded through time, driven by the vision of an exclusionary colonialism, drawing into its circuit – aligned with it and against it – nations, peoples, forces, and civilizations whose actions and interactions impinge on the trajectory of Zionism, and, in turn, who are changed by this trajectory.

It would be a bit simplistic to examine the field of interactions among the different actors in this historic drama on the essentialist assumption that these actors and their interests are unchanging. Instead, we need to explore the complex ways in which the Zionists have worked – and, often have succeeded – to alter the behavior of the other political actors in this drama: and, how, in turn, the Zionists respond to these changes. Most importantly, we need to explore all the ways in which the Zionists have succeeded in mobilizing the resources of the United States and other Western powers to serve their specific objectives.

Consider a list of the political actors who have had more than a passing connection to the Zionist project and, who, at one time or another, have affected or have been affected by this project. First, there are the different Zionist factions, the Jewish diaspora and, later, the state of Israel. These entities are overlapping, with the degrees of overlap between any two of them changing over time. The second set of actors consists of Western powers – especially, the United States, Britain, and France – the Christian Zionists especially in the United States, the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe. Finally, there are actors who are the direct and indirect victims of the Zionist project, those who have paid the costs of Zionist success. They form four concentric circles around Israel, including the Palestinians, the Arabs, the Middle East, and the Islamicate. These three sets of actors make up the dramatis personae in the unfolding tragedy of the Zionist project.

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Stephen Lendman

Photo by Danny Wilcox Frazier

The newly released US Census report on "Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009" way understates a growing problem as do most other government data. Unemployment for one, the Labor Department's headlined (U-3) 9.6% masks the true 22% based on 1980 calculations.

With America in economic crisis, the new Census report portends much worse ahead under a president and Congress doing little to address it, the Brookings Institution Isabel Sawhill expecting the problem to "get much worse long before it gets better." More on the new data below. First, some other confirmations of economic trouble.

The Federal Reserve's September-released Flow of Funds report shows household Q 2 2010 net worth plunged $1.5 trillion because of a $0.9 trillion drop in corporate equities and a $0.7 reduction in pension fund holdings. Overall, total household financial assets declined by $1.7 trillion to $43.7 trillion, a trend expected to continue for some time.

On September 15, RealtyTrac reported another disturbing one, saying:

"The number of homes taken back by lenders hit a new record high last month:" 95,364 foreclosures, about 2% higher than the previous May 2010 peak. According to its CEO, James J. Saccacio:

"The trend lines of decreasing default notices and increasing bank repossessions converged in August, with virtually the same number (of both) - a clear indication that the clogged foreclosure pipeline is being carefully managed on both ends by lenders and servicers." However, they can't mask a housing depression, the worst since the 1930s, showing no signs of ebbing. In Q 1, 2010, one of every seven mortgages was either delinquent or in foreclosure, now likely even more.

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Washington's Blog
Washington's Blog

As I noted last year:

Our savings is ... dramatically lower than Japan's when that country entered into its Lost Decade. So the Japanese were much better prepared than we are.

(I also noted that we're in worse shape than America was going into the Great Depression ... but that's another story).

Now, BIS - the central banks' central bank - agrees that Americans are in worse shape than the Japanese.

Specifically, a new BIS paper written by Shinobu Nakagawa (Director, Head of Investment and Market Research, International Department, Bank of Japan) and Yosuke Yasui (International Department, Bank of Japan) concludes that Japan was better able to weather the Lost Decade than the U.S. is able to weather our current economic woes, given three differences between the two cultures:

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Deanna Spingola
Edited by Ken Freeland

David Rockefeller said, “All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.” Rahm Emanuel said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” In the Project for a New American Century document Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century we find the following: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” [1]

False Flag (choreographed catastrophes) operations have been used for generations for various motives: the seizure of additional land and/or natural/mineral resources (domestic or foreign), the acquisition of cheap labor, economic destabilization, the military depopulation of indigenous populations, the destruction of religious or political ideologies, the establishment of political tyranny or a coup d’état (as experienced after 9/11 with the establishment of the PATRIOT Act and the Department of Homeland Security), to assist an allegedly threatened ally or to protect U.S. citizens living in a foreign country. The foundational factor in the majority of all false flag operations is the imposition of greater restrictions on worldwide residential populations in order to implement internationalism or globalism, formerly known as the utopian New World Order under the direction of an elite hierarchy. False flag catastrophes include terrorist attacks, assassinations of political leaders, “natural” disasters, industrial “accidents,” armed assaults against citizens (Waco, Ruby Ridge, Kent State), economic assaults in the form of economic crashes like 1929 or more recently the banker bailouts, both massive redistribution scams. The prevailing feature in all of these circumstances, whether manmade or “natural,” is the transference of culpability followed by the government’s predictable exploitation of any and all circumstances.

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