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Our real enemies are not those living in a distant land whose names or policies we don't understand; The real enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable, the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it's profitable, the Insurance Companies who deny us Health care when it's profitable, the Banks who take away our homes when it's profitable. Our enemies are not several hundred thousands away. They are right here in front of us.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26047.htm



American Soldiers Brainwashed with "Positive Thinking"

By Bruce E. Levine

"As far as I can tell this is the largest, deliberate, psychological intervention in human history. . . . We don't know when the global war on terrorism is going to end so we're preparing to have to be engaged for a long period of time."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26044.htm



From Freedom Fighter to Terrorist

By Jacob G. Hornberger

The same Gul who was viewed by U.S. officials as a "pro-Western and moderate" freedom fighter is now viewed by the U.S. government as a "murderous terrorist agent."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26056.htm

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Banks, drugs and US-sponsored terrorism
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/906.html

What war on drugs?
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/910.html



http://sharenews.twoday.net/search?q=Big+Banks
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Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G. Hornberger

07/28/10

They don’t call Afghanistan the graveyard of empires for nothing. Just ask Great Britain and Russia. It seems that the U.S. Empire, however, is bound and determined to prove that it’s the exception to that adage. No matter how bad things get for the Empire, U.S. officials become more and more determined to stay the course and let the chips fall where they may, including the possibility of economic and financial bankruptcy for the United States...

http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2010-07-28.asp



The anti-American American empire

Strike the Root
by Tony Pivetta

07/29/10

It may well be that nothing’s more powerful than an idea whose time has come, but a carefully cultivated Big Lie will invariably give that timely idea a run for the money. People know what they know. They know war brings prosperity. They know because ‘World War II got the U.S. out of the Depression.’ They know because the government schools told them ‘World War II got the U.S. out of the Depression.’ Beyond that, they know because of what they see. They see the manufacturing might of the military-industrial complex (MIC). They see it employing land, labor and capital. They see its technological sophistication. They see the high-paying jobs. They don’t know what they don’t see...

http://www.strike-the-root.com/anti-american-american-empire



The myths that made an empire

The American Conservative
by Bruce Fein

08/01/10

Two unassailable orthodoxies drove [Cold War US] hyper-interventionism. First was the belief that the national security of the United States was dependent upon the vitality of democracy in foreign lands. Second was the notion that a global military presence, with its ability to ensure international stability and access to resources, was indispensable to economic growth. Both orthodoxies are patent nonsense, yet both continue to dominate American thinking...

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/the-myths-that-made-an-empire/



How to dismantle the American empire before this country goes under

AlterNet
by Andrew J. Bacevich

07/29/10

No doubt the case can, and probably will, be made that the obligations of global leadership demand that the United States take on the problems besetting Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, much as it has addressed those besetting Afghanistan and Iraq. Little evidence exists to suggest that such efforts are likely to have a positive effect, however. No evidence exists — none — to suggest that U.S. efforts will advance the cause of global peace...

http://tinyurl.com/342sbga


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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The U.S.-Made Mess in Somalia

By Gwynne Dyer

The U.S. decision in 2006 to send Ethiopian troops into Somalia was one of the stupidest moves in a very stupid decade. This week, some of the chickens spawned by that decision came home to roost.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26247.htm



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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/28-1

The Suffering of Fallujah
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/29

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Rewriting history: Biden: US troops halted 'chaos' and 'destruction' in Iraq

US Vice President Joe Biden declared Wednesday that anti-US forces who wanted to consign Iraq to "chaos and destruction" had failed, as he welcomed home a much decorated military unit.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100728/pl_afp/usiraqmilitarypoliticsbiden


From Information Clearing House



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U.S. taxpayers may be on the hook for as much as $23.7 trillion to bolster the economy and bail out financial companies, said Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aY0tX8UysIaM



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The cache of classified U.S. military reports on the Iraq War as yet unreleased by WikiLeaks may be more than three times as large as the set of roughly 76,000 similar reports on the war in Afghanistan made public by the whistle-blower Web site earlier this week, Declassified has learned.

http://bit.ly/9oqhco



Leaks reveal 'friendly fire' deaths

Wikileaks documents suggest that four Canadian soldiers who died in 2006 were actually killed when a US jet dropped a bomb on a building they were occupying.

http://english.aljazeera.net/video/americas/2010/07/201072943015175382.html


From Information Clearing House

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National insecurity complex

CounterPunch
by Dave Lindorff

07/29/10

The White House’s initial response to the release of 92,000 pages of raw reports from the field by US forces in Afghanistan for a period from 2004-2009 — that it was a threat to national security and to the lives of American troops — was as predictable as it was farcical. These documents didn’t reveal anything new to America’s enemies in Afghanistan or Pakistan. … No, what the release of these documents threaten is the huge almost decade-long lie that both the last administration of President George W. Bush, and the current administration of Barack Obama have been putting out, that the US is engaged in a ‘good war,’ trying to defeat ‘terrorists’ and establish a democratic government in Afghanistan...

http://counterpunch.org/lindorff07292010.html



This week in Change

Salon
by Glenn Greenwald

07/29/10

[A]s was painfully predictable and predicted, the bulk of political discussion in the wake of the WikiLeaks disclosures focuses not on our failing, sagging, pointless, civilian-massacring, soon-to-be-decade-old war, but rather on the Treasonous Evil of WikiLeaks for informing the American people about what their war entails. While it’s true that WikiLeaks should have been much more careful in redacting the names of Afghan sources, watching Endless War Supporters prance around with righteous concern for Afghan lives being endangered by the leak is really too absurd to bear. You know what endangers innocent Afghan lives? Ten years of bombings, checkpoint shootings, due-process-free hit squads, air attacks, drones, night raids on homes, etc. etc. ...

http://tinyurl.com/33tqmdz



Why we need WikiLeaks

AntiWar.Com
by Justin Raimondo

07/31/10

The reaction to the Wikileaks exposure of US war crimes — and Afghan corruption — has been quite interesting: the President responded by averring that there’s nothing new here, that ‘the fact is these documents do not reveal any issues that have not already informed our public debate on Afghanistan,’ but the facts are quite different, as anyone who peruses even a small sampling of the documents – such as is offered by the Guardian via a convenient interactive map — can readily ascertain. After all, the public debate was certainly not informed of the existence of ‘Task Force 373,’ an American assassination squad that roams the Afghan countryside wreaking murder and mayhem at Washington’s direction — and that killed seven children, as revealed by the Wikileaks document dump, in a strike at a supposed terrorist compound. And the public was definitely not informed that US intelligence had picked up evidence of Osama bin Laden’s personal participation in a series of meetings on the Afghan-Pakistan border as late as 2006, as revealed in the documents. Certainly the public debate could have been better informed if Leon Panetta’s interlocutor could have asked him about that when the CIA director, in a recent televised interview, denied having received any new information as to bin Laden’s whereabouts ‘in years’...

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/07/30/why-we-need-wikileaks/


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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Top Democrats Pressure White House Over WikiLeaks Revelations

Mike Ludwig, Truthout: "The Afghan war is coming under renewed scrutiny as web surfers across the world browse through the bloody battle scenes and military follies described in the thousands of classified military reports released by WikiLeaks, and now top Democrats are finally expressing concerns over the longevity of a war that has dragged on for nearly a decade."

http://www.truth-out.org/top-democrats-pressure-white-house-afghan-war-wikileaks-reveals-bloody-realities61867



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By Mike Whitney

The bottom line? When Wall Street is hurting, money's never a problem. But when the states are on the brink of default and 14 million workers are scrimping to feed their families, there's not a dime to spare. Explain that to your kids.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26040.htm



U.S. Congress Passes $59 Bn Afghan War Funding Bill

The new funding is on top of the $130 billion Congress already approved for Afghanistan and Iraq this year.

http://www.rttnews.com/Content/Policy.aspx?Id=1372920&SM=1



Funding the Afghan Occupation

How They Voted
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2010/roll474.xml



Democrats abandon Obama on Afghanistan war

The House's vote yesterday on emergency funding for the Afghanistan war shows a significant eroding of support for President Obama's war policy -- from members of his own Democratic Party.

http://bit.ly/ay8btb


From Information Clearing House



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By John Cook

Buried among the 92,000 classified documents released Sunday by WikiLeaks is some intriguing evidence that the U.S. military in Afghanistan has adopted a PR strategy that got it into trouble in Iraq: paying local media outlets to run friendly stories.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26036.htm



A Civilian Casualty, Up Close

By Kevin Sites

I try to imagine the incongruity of it all. You are riding in your car with your family and in one instant, by being in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, your wife is now dead.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26062.htm

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US Hunts Afghan War Files Leaker
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/28-1

'Leaked Afghan Files Hid a Losing War, Not Military Secrets'
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/07/28-0

WikiLeaks’ Afghan War Diary
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/28-4

How US Ignorance Helped Doom the Afghan War
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/29-12

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The main effect of the Wikileaks documents is political

Independent Institute
by Ivan Eland

07/28/10

[T]he only thing the WikiLeaks documents reveal is how persistent the post-9/11 war and nation-building fever continues to be among the foreign policy elite — even in the face of the dismal results on the ground for almost a decade and a majority opinion in America that the war is not worth fighting...

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2834



Afghanistan’s census of the dead

Slate
by Chris Wilson and Jeremy Singer-Vine

Nearly 77,000 of the 92,000 military documents unveiled by WikiLeaks this week are individual incident reports from the war in Afghanistan. Each report tallies the number of soldiers, civilians, and enemy targets both wounded and killed. While no one was hurt in the majority of the incidents, these reports, read in aggregate, offer a sterile but hyper-detailed picture of the dead and wounded on all sides of the nearly decadelong war. The following visualization focuses on enemy and civilian casualties over the past five years...

http://www.slate.com/id/2261911/



Are we in Afghanistan because we’re in Afghanistan?

AntiWar.Com
by Charles V. Pena

07/30/10

[I]sn’t this war? Yes. And it’s not like we’re intentionally targeting or trying to kill innocent civilians, right? Right (it’s not the moral equivalent of terrorists attacking a civilian target like the World Trade Center or insurgents using villagers as human shields). Plus aren’t civilian casualties an inevitable tragic consequence of war? Yes. If the survival of the United States was at stake, we might not like but nonetheless have to accept those answers. But the conflict in Afghanistan is not a war of U.S. national survival...

http://tinyurl.com/392eugw


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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Rights Groups File Lawsuit To Allow Challenge To Targeted Killing Without Due Process

http://www.aclu.org/national-security/rights-groups-file-lawsuit-allow-challenge-targeted-killing-without-due-process



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By Philip Giraldi

House of Representatives resolution 1553, introduced by Congressional Republicans, and currently working its way through the system will endorse an Israeli attack on Iran, which would be going to war by proxy as the US would almost immediately be drawn into the conflict when Tehran retaliates.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26034.htm



House Republicans Giving Green Light for Israeli Strike on Iran

Nearly one third of the Republican congressmen in the U.S. House of Representatives have introduced a resolution that would support Israel's right to use "all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by Iran", including military force.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/138835



Iran cmdr. guarantees US shame in ME

"Americans can be certain that in the event of a ground, naval or aerial attack against our country, they will be faced with a crushing and decisive response which will be much more fatal and crushing than their initial act [of aggression]," Mehr News Agency quoted the commander as saying.

http://presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=136548&sectionid=351020101



U.S. Has Plan in Case Attack On Iran Needed, Says Army Chief

By The Associated Press

Both Israel and U.S. keeping military option on table; Iran envoy to UN: We'll set Tel Aviv ablaze if Israel strikes us.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26055.htm



Two Resolutions, One World War

By Ruqayyah Shamseddine

We are now witnessing the legalization and industrialization of another war, one which will set the entire region ablaze.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26057.htm


From Information Clearing House

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The unpresidential president

The Weekly Standard
by James W. Ceaser

Barack Obama has managed a rare feat: The longer he holds office, the more he diminishes in stature... (for publication 08/02/10)

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/unpresidential-president



Obama’s double-down gamble

The American Spectator
by James Srodes

07/28/10

In Las Vegas casinos, gamblers at the blackjack tables are allowed to ‘double down.’ After drawing their two cards they are allowed to double the size of their bet if they will take only one more card in their quest to get closer to 21 than the dealer. It is a high-risk bet that should be made only if the player holds a very strong hand. Faced with an easily panicked Wall Street, a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, persistent unemployment, and increasing political backlash looming in the autumn congressional elections, President Barack Obama has made a double-down bet on the U.S. economy...

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/28/obamas-double-down-gamble



Mullen rattles saber at Iran

Daily Mail [UK]

08/01/10

America’s top military chief has warned that the country has a plan to attack Iran. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a military strike is an option if Tehran presses ahead with plans to build a nuclear weapon. While admitting that going to war could destabilise the Middle East, Admiral Mullen said the risk of allowing the Iranian regime’s atomic ambitions to continue unchecked was unacceptable...

http://tinyurl.com/22rf9ul



A cakewalk against Iran

AntiWar.Com
by Philip Giraldi

08/05/10

A resolution (HR 1553) is making its way through Congress that that would endorse an Israeli attack on Iran, which would be going to war by proxy as the US would almost immediately be drawn into the conflict when Tehran retaliates. The resolution provides explicit US backing for Israel to bomb Iran, stating that Congress supports Israel’s use of ‘all means necessary … including the use of military force.’ The resolution is non-binding, but it is dazzling in its disregard for the possible negative consequences that would ensue for the hundreds of thousands of US military and diplomatic personnel currently serving in the Near East region...

http://tinyurl.com/2b4nvy2


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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That Reckless Protection Racket of Military Socialism and Fascism
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/lazarowitz10.1.html



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