Robert Parry

The cables and videos allegedly leaked by Pvt. Bradley Manning offer the American people gritty “ground truth” about what the U.S. government has done in their names, such as the slaughter in Iraq, but the information also sheds light on a possible future war with Iran, reports Robert Parry.

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Naomi Spencer

In pre-trial proceedings against Army Private Bradley Manning at Fort Meade, Maryland this week, the Army’s lead prosecutor presented evidence purportedly linking Manning directly to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and alleged that by publishing documents leaked by Manning, WikiLeaks and Assange had aided terrorists, including Al Qaeda.

The proceedings concluded Thursday after less than a week of hearings. Manning is charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents, including evidence of US war crimes, to WikiLeaks.

The closing arguments of Captain Ashden Fein make clear that the United States government is seeking to use its prosecution of Manning, a 24-year-old soldier and former intelligence analyst, to lay the basis for extraditing Assange to the US and either prosecuting him as a terrorist or locking him away indefinitely in a military prison without any recourse to the courts or due process.

The attempt of the prosecution in the Manning case to make an amalgam between Manning, Assange and Al Qaeda is particularly ominous given the passage last week of the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes authorization for the US president to order the indefinite military detention without trial of anyone, citizen or non-citizen, whom the president names as a terrorist.

Assange is currently in Britain, appealing to Britain’s Supreme Court an extradition order to Sweden on the basis of trumped-up sex charges. If extradited to Sweden, Assange will likely face extradition to the US.

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Abdulla Hawez Abdulla

The recent tension in Baghdad between Nouri Al-Maliki’s Shiite Iraqi prime minister with both Iraqi president’s deputy Tariq Al-Hashimi, and his deputy for service affairs, Salih Mutlaq, which both are Sunnis is highly connected with the regional tension between Iran and Turkey on Syria, also the timing is connected. That’s despite Al-Maliki’s desire for power, and his autocratic approaches to wipe out his rivals one another.

As its obvious there are strong ties between Iran and Iraq’s ruling, Shiites, especially with the Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki which remained in power by a secret deal between Iran and United States. However, Al-Maliki is highly connected with the leaders in Iran regarding whatever he could do on Syrian case, as we have seen a delegation from Iraqi government arrived in Damascus to show Iraq’s support to Al-Asad’s Syria, even though Iraqi government announced they are trying to mediate that’s in one hand. On the other hand, Iraqi Sunnis have a strong tie with Turkey; Tariq Al-Hashimi, in particular, has a special relation with the leaders of Turkey’s AKP government, only this year he met with Turkish authorities many times. The recent tension between Iran and Turkey on Syria and NATO missile defense has certainly affected on the Iraqi leaders, especially Iran wants to move the center of attention from Syria to other friendly countries like Iraq.

The declaration of the Sunni cities of Salahadeen, Anbar, and later Dyala to become regions by the Saudi-Turkish support is another reason, as Shiites accuse such a step as a sectarian one that tries to divide the country. That led Muqtada Al-Sadr’s Mahdi militia to intervene in Dyala that around 20% of the province’s population is Shiites. Moreover, according to some sources, another possible scenario is linking part of the Sunni region with Jordan, specifically both cities of Anbar and Dyala. Whereas, Jordan’s King Abdullah arrived in London recently to discuss this possible scenario with the British officials, including British prime minister. According to the source, Britain is the spearhead of the scenario of linking part of the Iraq’s Sunni region with Jordan. While Mosul province which is dominated by the Iraqi parliament speaker’s Sunni leader, Asel Nujifi will become a federal region under Turkish supervision. Furthermore, Arabs will go out from Kirkuk, only Kurds and Turkmen will remain there, and both Kurdistan and Turkey will share the oil revenues with giving Mosul province some of the revenue, as well.

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William Blum

The leaders of imperial powers have traditionally told themselves and their citizens that their country was exceptional and that their subjugation of a particular foreign land should be seen as a "civilizing mission", a "liberation", "God's will", and of course bringing "freedom and democracy" to the benighted and downtrodden. It is difficult to kill large numbers of people without a claim to virtue. I wonder if this sense of exceptionalism has been embedded anywhere more deeply than in the United States, where it is drilled into every cell and ganglion of American consciousness from kindergarten on. If we measure the degree of indoctrination (I'll resist the temptation to use the word "brainwashing") of a population as the gap between what the people believe their government has done in the world and what the actual (very sordid) facts are, the American people are clearly the most indoctrinated people on the planet. The role of the American media is of course indispensable to this process — Try naming a single American daily newspaper or TV network that was unequivocally against the US attacks on Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam. Or even against any two of them. How about one? Which of the mainstream media expressed real skepticism of The War on Terror in its early years?

Overloaded with a sense of America's moral superiority, each year the State Department judges the world, issuing reports evaluating the behavior of all other nations, often accompanied by sanctions of one kind or another. There are different reports rating how each lesser nation has performed in the previous year in the areas of religious freedom, human rights, the war on drugs, trafficking in persons, and counterterrorism, as well as maintaining a list of international "terrorist" groups. The criteria used in these reports are mainly political, wherever applicable; Cuba, for example, is always listed as a supporter of terrorism whereas anti-Castro exile groups in Florida, which have committed literally hundreds of terrorist acts, are not listed as terrorist groups.

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Richard Edmondson

"Christ Driving the Merchants from the Temple"

“…and that no matter how many police state laws our AIPAC-vetted congress may enact, no matter how many of us they may round up and put into FEMA camps or some other detention facility, no matter how many wars they may start, no matter how many innocents they slaughter—no matter all of this, as long as there remain on this earth those who exalt this rebel, who follow his teachings, and who celebrate his birth each year, their control over humanity will never—never—be complete or total. And this they know.”

You could perhaps consider this a primer for Christian Zionists, although others, possibly even atheists, might find it interesting as well. Here is the question: If Jesus was a rebel, then who was he rebelling against? Jackson Browne, although his song is quite nice, doesn’t really give us an answer. Let us then examine the matter ourselves and see if we can reach a conclusion.

Was Jesus in revolt against Rome? This is something Jews often try and argue. Jesus, they tell us, was nothing more than a Jewish nationalist, who, like many other Jewish nationalists of the day, sought an end to the Roman occupation of Palestine (or the “land of Israel” as they now like to claim it). Some of these Jewish intellects have even gone so far as to hypothesize that Jesus practiced Pharisaic Judaism himself! But of course the preponderance of evidence does not support these claims.

And Jesus, answering, said unto them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.

The above quotation, from Mark 12:17, is one of the few statements from Jesus regarding Roman rule over Palestine that can be found in the canonized gospels, and it would suggest he had no strong grievances or objections to it. Of course, that’s only the canonized material. What of other early texts? What, say, of the Gnostic sources? Or the vast body of apocryphal writings? Is there anything in any of this material to support the notion that Jesus’ mission in life was setting up a Jewish state? The answer is little to none.

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