Air France Flight Diverted Because a Journalist, Who Is Critical of U.S. Foreign Policy, Was On Board

Progreso Weekly

Air France Flight 438, from Paris, was to land at Mexico City at 6 p.m. on Saturday, April 18. Five hours before landing, the captain’s voice announced that U.S. authorities had prohibited the plane from flying over U.S. territory. The explanation: among the passengers aboard was a person who was not welcome in the United States for reasons of national security.

A few minutes later, the same voice told the startled passengers that the plane was heading for Fort-de-France, Martinique, because the detour the plan needed to take to reach its destination was too long and the fuel was insufficient.

The stopover in that French territory in the Caribbean would be only to refuel the plane. Exhaustion was becoming an issue among the passengers. But the central question, spoken in undertones, was the identity of the “terrorist” passenger, because if the “gringos” say it, “it must be because he must be a terrorist.”

Looking at those of us sitting in the back of the plane, two passengers said no terrorist could be there because “nobody there looks like a Muslim.”

Again in the air, and preparing for another four hours of travel, a man who identified himself as the copilot came to me. Trying to look discreet, he asked if I was “Mr. Calvo Ospina.” I told him yes.

“The captain wants to sleep, that’s why I came here,” he said, and he invited me to accompany him to the back of the plane. There, he told me that I was the person “responsible” for the detour. I was astonished.

My first reaction was to ask him: “Do you think I’m a terrorist?” He said no, that’s the reason I’m telling you this. He also assured me that it was strange that this was the first time it happened on an Air France plane.

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Memo: 9/11 Commission Witnesses Were Intimidated By Government “Minders”

More evidence of whitewash emerges

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Somewhat lost within the flu pandemic media hype this week is an important new revelation concerning the cover up of the events of 9/11.

A recently uncovered 9/11 Commission memo dating from October 2003, half way through the panel’s investigation, addresses concerns that government “minders” were intimidating witnesses and shaping their testimonies.

The document was drafted by Kevin Scheid, a senior staffer who led the commission’s Team 2, which was responsible for reviewing the overarching structure of the US intelligence community.

Names also appearing on the memo are those of staffers Lorry Fenner, an air force intelligence officer, and lawyer Gordon Lederman.

The memo, entitled “Executive Branch Minders’ Intimidation of Witnesses,” states the following:

• Minders “answer[ed] questions directed at witnesses;”
• Minders acted as “monitors, reporting to their respective agencies on Commission staffs lines of inquiry and witnesses’ verbatim responses.” The staff thought this “conveys to witnesses that their superiors will review their statements and may engage in retribution;”
• Minders’ notetaking “facilitates agencies in alerting future witnesses to the Commission’s lines of inquiry and permits agencies to prepare future witnesses either explicitly or implicitly.”
• Minders “positioned themselves physically and have conducted themselves in a manner that we believe intimidates witnesses from giving full and candid responses to our questions.”

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Dwyer removal takes place

The removal of Michael Dwyer, the man shot dead by police in Bolivia a fortnight ago, took place tonight in Co Tipperary.

Mr Dwyer’s remains were taken from Keller’s Funeral Home in Nenaght to the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Terryglass. His burial will follow Requiem Mass at 11am tomorrow.

Mr Dwyer is survived by his parents Martin and Caroline, and siblings Aisling, Ciara and Emmet.

A postmortem carried out by State Pathologist Prof Marie Cassidy on Monday morning at the request of Mr Dwyer’s family confirmed that the 24-year-old died from a single gunshot wound to the chest.

An inquest into his killing will be conducted before the Dublin County Coroner’s Court. It is understood there was no examination of the body by the authorities in Bolivia.

The Bolivian authorities have said he was shot dead, along with two others, in a Santa Cruz hotel in the early hours of last Thursday week after a gunfight with Bolivian police. However, pictures of his body in the bedroom of the hotel showed Mr Dwyer was in his underwear, suggesting he may have been in bed at the time.

Authorities in Bolivia have alleged that Mr Dwyer and Eduardo Rózsa Flores, a Bolivian adventurer of Hungarian descent, and Arpad Magyarosi, a Romanian of Hungarian ethnicity, were involved in an international plot to assassinate President Evo Morales.

Mr Dwyer’s family and friends have dismissed suggestions he was involved in terrorism, saying he was not interested in politics.

The Government has called for an international investigation into the circumstances around the fatal shooting.

Wayne Madsen on Russia Today: Suspicions Over Origin of Virus

Russia TV
Infowars
April 30, 2009

Infowars Under Sophisticated Denial of Service Attack

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
April 28, 2009

Earlier this evening, Alex Jones’ flagship website, Infowars.com, came under a concerted denial of service (DoS) attack. The site was down for more than two hours.

The attacks are coming out of Japan. A Whois database search reveals the origin to be the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre in Milton, Australia.

DoS attacks usually consist of concerted efforts to shut down a web server by flooding the computer with requests and consuming its resources so that it is no longer available to users. DoS attacks commonly constitute violations of the laws of individual nations.

Over the last few days, Alex Jones and his websites have covered the so-called swine flu “pandemic” and have built a solid case that the outbreak is part of a larger campaign by the government to frighten the populace and institute martial law as specifically detailed in the Department of Defense’s “Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza” and other government documents. Alex Jones is the primary media source calling the government’s bluff on the bogus “pandemic” elevated earlier today to a level 5 under World Health Organization guidelines.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan declared the phase 5 alert after consulting with flu experts from around the world. “All countries should immediately now activate their pandemic preparedness plans,” Chan told reporters in Geneva. “It really is all of humanity that is under threat in a pandemic.”

“All countries should immediately activate their pandemic preparedness plans,” the WHO declares. “This change to a higher phase of alert is a signal to governments, to ministries of health and other ministries, to the pharmaceutical industry and the business community that certain actions should now be undertaken with increased urgency, and at an accelerated pace.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s National Response Plan follows the same criteria in the case of a flu pandemic or terrorist attack and relies on the military — specifically the Northern Command — to respond to such events.

Alex Jones has featured a number of guests on his nationally syndicated radio show in the last few days that have outlined the government’s plan to use a bogus pandemic as an excuse to impose martial law and engage in forced vaccination. Guests have also noted the eugenics endgame of the ruling elite, determined to reduce world population to 500 million, as stated on the Georgia Guidestones.

A number of U.S. military cyber attacks have originated out of Japan where there is a large military presence.

Over the last few years, the Pentagon has developed an “offensive” cyber capability against “adversaries,” including DoS attacks. In the Pentagon’s “Information Operation Roadmap” document, it is stated that the military “must fight the Net.” The Pentagon believes the internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy “weapons system.”

Finally, here is a list of specific IP addresses and other information related to the attack:

118.11.79.219
122.26.194.245
121.95.152.130
122.29.155.93
58.70.103.234
122.135.86.170
116.80.25.116

p2219-ipbf14wakayama.wakayama.ocn.ne.jp
p3245-ipbf2810marunouchi.tokyo.ocn.ne.jp
ntchba319130.chba.nt.ftth.ppp.infoweb.ne.jp
p4093-ipbf3404marunouchi.tokyo.ocn.ne.jp
58-70-103-234.eonet.ne.jp
FL1-122-135-86-170.tky.mesh.ad.jp
nttkyo711116.tkyo.nt.ftth.ppp.infoweb.ne.jp

Alex Jones Tv: Swine Flu Special Report Videos

This article contains 9 videos of Alex Jones’ special report that he aired on Saturday night April 25, 2009 in regards to the Swine Flu issue. In The Videos he goes in to detail about the current Mexico swine flu situation and explains what is really going on.

Source: Alex Jones YouTube Channel

Expense Allowance Abuse by MEPs (Video)

Hans-Peter Martin and RTL in the fight against abuse of expense allowances:

A Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in Brussels earns approx. 14,700 euros per month, according to this RTL Report (in German with English subtitles). How much the MEPs have to work (or don’t work) for their €14,700 is the subject of this on-site RTL investigation in Brussels. The video is about MEPs who sign in on attendance lists and then disappear immediately for their weekend. RTL investigating journalists were thrown out of the EU building in Brussels during their work.

Some MEPs try to justify themselves, some to invent excuses, again others flee before the camera and dash off to lifts or also in their confusion bump into the wall (German MEP of the Green Party) !

One-man crusader Hans-Peter Martin, MEP from Austria:
“A Member of the European Parliament earns on an average more than the German Chancellor Frau Merkel and one wants to hide this from the electorate. Therefore, one obviously must get rid of reporters investigating this.”

Are Members of Congress (and Maybe Even the President) Being Blackmailed ?

For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.

There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right, and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership, most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National Security Agency (NSA).

I’ll admit that (even though we know J Edgar Hoover did keep a dirt file on members of Congress to help him support his budget allocation each year) I considered the idea of blackmail a bit far out. But now suddenly there is at least some evidence that such seemingly wild speculation may not have been off the mark, with reports that the NSA was indeed monitoring Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), and that the Bush Administration used the evidence it had obtained of her improper conversations with and promises to assist agents of the Israeli government and its lobby here in the US, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to blackmail her into supporting the NSA’s warrantless spying program—the very kind of spying that led to her being caught on tape plotting with an agent of a foreign power.

At the time of the taping of Harman’s incriminating phone conversations, the administration was trying desperately (and ultimately successfully) to get the New York Times to hold off on publishing a shocking investigative report by journalist James Risen about a massive campaign of warrantless tapping of Americans’ phone and internet communications.

According to a report by Jeff Stein, published in the latest issue of Congressional Quarterly, the NSA in 2004 recorded Rep. Harman negotiating with an Israeli Mossad agent about helping Israel win a reduction in the espionage charges filed by the US against two members of the AIPAC lobby accused of providing US intelligence information to the Israeli government (the case against AIPAC’s Stephen Rosen and Keith Weissman is still waiting to go to trial). According to the transcript, a copy of which was obtained by CQ, the Israeli agent offered to have AIPAC lobby, and more specifically to have a it arrange for a wealthy Israeli-American donor in California donate money to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, in order to get her, once she became House Speaker, to name Harman as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. At the end of the phone conversation, Rep. Harman, who offered to help, was heard to say, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

According to reports in CQ and in the New York Times, which ran a story on the scandal as its lead news item on Tuesday, then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales subsequently intervened with the FBI to prevent any prosecution of Harman, a key member of Congress on whom the administration was relying to help it persuade the Times to withhold its NSA wiretapping exposé until after the 2006 election. In the event, Rep. Harman did later make calls to a Times, editor, the paper did hold its story until after the election, and Harman later was a leading backer of the administration’s controversial (and, according to a federal district judge, illegal) NSA spying program. (Harman never did get the chair of the Intel Committee, though she did make a run at it. It is possible that the reason she didn’t get it was that, as Pelosi now admits, she was informed early on by the NSA of the tap it had done on Harman.)

There are several serious issues here. One is the extraordinary glimpse it offers into the extent to which Israel has penetrated the centers of power in Washington. It is illegal for foreign governments to directly lobby and to offer to arrange financial contributions for members of the US government, but here, clearly, Israeli agents were doing just that. The role of AIPAC as a front for the Israeli government in Washington, as exposed here, is simply stomach-turning, and should make it a toxic organization to politicians. Instead, they flock enmasse to its annual meetings, as President Obama did almost immediately upon winning the November election, and a large proportion of both houses from both parties happily accept its campaign largesse.

A second, even bigger, issue is the NSA’s spying activities themselves. According to CQ, the particular wiretap that caught Rep. Harman inflagrante with an Israeli agent was a court-approved tap—part of an investigation into Israeli government spying activities. But even if this is true—and at this point, we’re relying on what the government is telling us about it—it shows how dangerous the broader unwarranted monitoring program of the NSA has been, and remains. Back in 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA) in direct response to the disclosure during the Watergate hearings and subsequent investigations that the Nixon Administration had been using the NSA to conduct illegal monitoring of the communications of anti-war activists, and of members of Congress. To prevent such police-state outrages in the future, Congress passed the FISA legislation, establishing a secret court staffed by a panel of top-security-cleared federal judges, whose sole responsibility was to consider and grant requests from the NSA for warrants to conduct secret electronic surveillance within the US or involving American citizens abroad.

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Free John Walker Lindh, Bush’s and Cheney’s First Torture Victim !

Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s “War on Terror,” and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture.

Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for “carrying a weapon” in Afghanistan and for “providing assistance” to an enemy of the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all, it’s what almost everyone in Texas does everyday). The second is actually a violation of a law intended for use against US companies that trade with proscribed countries on a government “no trade” list like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for the executives involved.

As I wrote in an article in the Nation back in 2005 (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050214/lindorff), Lindh was put away for so long on these minor charges not because he was a traitor or terrorist, but because he was living proof, back at the time of his trial in 2002, that the US had begun, way back in late 2001, a program of brutal torture in the so-called “War on Terror.”

Lindh, in fact, was never really an enemy of the US. Son of middle-class white parents in suburban San Francisco, he had developed an interest in Islam which, following his graduation from high school, he decided to pursue by traveling to Pakistan. In 2001, still just 18, he began studying at a religious madressa. There he learned about the struggle of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan to free that nation of the influence of warlords who had collaborated with a brutal Soviet occupation. Attracted by what he saw as the nobility of that struggle, and with a youthful sense of adventure, Lindh volunteered. In August of 2001, at a time that Bush administration officials were negotiating about a possible oil pipeline deal with Afghanistan’s Taliban government, and talking about providing funds for a program to get farmers to shift away from opium cultivation to more useful cash crops—a time, that is, when the Taliban were not considered America’s enemy—Lindh crossed the border and started training to be a fighter.

A month later, of course, the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington, were struck, and the US launched a war against both Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Lindh, who was still just in training, found himself suddenly in the wilds of the Hindu Kush, with American planes bombing and with US Special Forces troops firing at him and his companions. Whether he wanted to be there or not, he was in no position at that point to change sides. You don’t just walk away from a group like the Taliban—especially if you are an American to begin with, and you’re deep in the bush.

Eventually, a malnourished, dehydrated, and wounded (in the leg) Lindh was taken prisoner along with a group of Taliban fighters by American forces.

At that point, when the Americans discovered they had an American amont their captives, Lindh’s situation worsened dramatically. Stripped naked and duct-taped, blindfolded, to a gurney, he was then placed inside an unheated metal shipping container. Left there for days in the cold and dark, Lindh was removed once daily and interrogated. His interrogators allegedly tortured him, as well as threatening him repeatedly with death. His pleas to see an attorney were mocked, and word that his parents had already arranged for representation was withheld from him (a situation that led a government lawyer involved in his case to protest and ultimately resign).

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Postmortem shows Dwyer was killed by single gunshot

MICHAEL DWYER, the Tipperary man who was shot dead by police in Bolivia, died from a single gunshot wound to the chest, an initial postmortem examination has indicated.

The body of the 24-year-old was so badly decomposed that his identity had to be confirmed using dental records.

The poor state of the body has thrown into doubt the ability of the postmortem to clarify many issues, including if there was any gunshot residue on his hands. The presence or absence of gun residue would have helped to establish whether Mr Dwyer had fired a gun before he died.

Staff at the hotel last week told The Irish Times that the only bullet holes were in the dead men’s bedrooms, suggesting no shots were fired by the men from the rooms.

Mr Dwyer’s body arrived in Ireland from Santa Cruz on Thursday and State Pathologist Prof Marie Cassidy carried out the postmortem yesterday morning.

The postmortem here took place at the request of Mr Dwyer’s family. An inquest into his killing will be conducted before the Dublin County Coroner’s Court. It is understood there was no examination of the body by the authorities in Bolivia.

Sources said only initial results from the postmortem were available last night. The results will be vital in determining the truth about his killing. The Bolivian authorities have said he was shot dead, along with two others, in a Santa Cruz hotel in the early hours of last Thursday week after a gunfight with Bolivian police.

However, pictures of his body in the bedroom of the hotel showed Mr Dwyer was in his underwear, suggesting he may have been in bed at the time. It is hoped a further analysis of the results may determine if Mr Dwyer was lying down, in bed, when shot.

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