Newark Airport Security Breach Video Released, but Amsterdam Video Remains Under Wraps

January 08, 2010

Info Wars

By Kurt Nimmo

The corporate media is making a big deal out of the wrong-way guy and his female companion caught on a Continental Airlines surveillance video at Newark Liberty International Airport during the holiday.

“The video, released by the office of Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., shows an unidentified man standing for several minutes near Checkpoint 1 in the Newark airport’s Terminal C, apparently waiting for a woman at around 5:20 p.m. The Transportation Security Administration officer assigned to the post appeared to be aware of the man’s presence, and at one point the officer instructed the man to move back,” reports ABC News.

In a statement, Lautenberg said the release of the video will help authorities find the guy and punish him for his wrong-way criminal activity.

Regardless of Lautenberg’s statement, the real purpose behind the release of the video is to juice up the propaganda effort now underway by the government in cooperation with the corporate media to manufacture a hysterical pretext to increase Gestapo tactics in airports (and eventually everywhere else).

Obama’s top White House aide on defense and foreign policy issues, James Jones, said Americans will feel “a certain shock” when they read an account being released later today “of the missed clues that could have prevented the alleged Christmas Day bomber from ever boarding the plane.”

Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., added that a “very comprehensive no-fly list” would be “the greatest protection our country has.” In an interview, she said the definition of who can be included should be expanded to include anyone about whom there is “a reasonable suspicion.”

As of July, 2008, over a million people were considered suspicious. “The nation’s terrorist watch list has hit one million names, according to a tally maintained by the American Civil Liberties Union based upon the government’s own reported numbers for the size of the list,” the ACLU noted. “Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ’suspicious characters,’ with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon.”

Instead, in the wake of the Christmas day false flag event, Congress will expand it.

Neocon bloggers and pundits — most notably the concentration camp apologist Michelle Malkin — are calling for profiling Muslims in response to the obviously staged Christmas non-bombing. Israel is cited as the example to follow, according to The Financial Times. “Countries such as Israel that use profiling say it is not used on a racial basis but anecdotal evidence suggests south Asian and Middle Eastern people are far more likely to be stopped.”

In addition, government officials and “experts” are demanding full body scanners be installed in every airport and all air travelers be subjected to the dangerous machines that violate child pornography laws.

Finally, it is interesting that the Newark video was released in short order and yet the video that would put to rest the “sharp-dressed man” controversy surrounding the Christmas day event has not been released by officials in Amsterdam.

Kurt Haskell, an eye witness to the boarding of patsy Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab in Amsterdam, has demanded that video of the event be made public. On January 6, Dutch authorities announced that Mutallab acted alone with no accomplices at the Amsterdam airport.“I’m not surprised, we expected this,” Haskell told Big Government.

Mr. Haskell appeared on the Alex Jones Show and voiced his concerns over government behavior in the case. Haskell told Alex Jones the FBI has changed its story about the event on numerous occasions.

Click here for full report

Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage

November 23, 2009

Spiegel Online

By Gabor Steingart

There were only a few hours left before Air Force One was scheduled to depart for the flight home. US President Barack Obama trip through Asia had already seen him travel 24,000 kilometers, sit through a dozen state banquets, climb the Great Wall of China and shake hands with Korean children. It was high time to take stock of the trip.
Barack Obama looked tired on Thursday, as he stood in the Blue House in Seoul, the official residence of the South Korean president. He also seemed irritable and even slightly forlorn. The CNN cameras had already been set up. But then Obama decided not to play along, and not to answer the question he had already been asked several times on his trip: what did he plan to take home with him? Instead, he simply said “thank you, guys,” and disappeared. David Axelrod, senior advisor to the president, fielded the journalists’ questions in the hallway of the Blue House instead, telling them that the public’s expectations had been “too high.”

The mood in Obama’s foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The “first Pacific president,” as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.

Lost Some Stature

Upon taking office, Obama said that he wanted to listen to the world, promising respect instead of arrogance. But Obama’s currency isn’t as strong as he had believed. Everyone wants respect, but hardly anyone is willing to pay for it. Interests, not emotions, dominate the world of realpolitik. The Asia trip revealed the limits of Washington’s new foreign policy: Although Obama did not lose face in China and Japan, he did appear to have lost some of his initial stature.

In Tokyo, the new center-left government even pulled out of its participation in a mission which saw the Japanese navy refueling US warships in the Indian Ocean as part of the Afghanistan campaign. In Beijing, Obama failed to achieve any important concessions whatsoever. There will be no binding commitments from China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A revaluation of the Chinese currency, which is kept artificially weak, has been postponed. Sanctions against Iran? Not a chance. Nuclear disarmament? Not an issue for the Chinese.

The White House did not even stand up for itself when it came to the question of human rights in China. The president, who had said only a few days earlier that freedom of expression is a universal right, was coerced into attending a joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, at which questions were forbidden. Former US President George W. Bush had always managed to avoid such press conferences.

Relatively Unsuccessful

A look back in time reveals the differences. When former President Bill Clinton went to China in June 1998, Beijing wanted to impress the Americans. A press conference in the Great Hall of the People, broadcast on television as a 70-minute live discussion, became a sensation the world over. Clinton mentioned the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when the government used tanks against protestors. But then President Jiang Zemin defended the tough approach taken by the Chinese Communists. At the end of the exchange, the Chinese president praised the debate and said: “I believe this is democracy!”

Obama visited a new China, an economic power that is now making its own demands. America should clean up its government finances, and the weak dollar is unacceptable, the head of the Chinese banking authority said, just as Obama’s plane was about to land.

Obama’s new foreign policy has also been relatively unsuccessful elsewhere, with even friends like Israel leaving him high and dry. For the government of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, peace is only conceivable under its terms. Netanyahu has rejected Obama’s call for a complete moratorium on the construction of settlements. As a result, Obama has nothing to offer the Palestinians and the Syrians. “We thought we had some leverage,” says Martin Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel under the Clinton administration and now an advisor to Obama. “But that proved to be an illusion.”

Even the president seems to have lost his faith in a genial foreign policy. The approach that was being used in Afghanistan this spring, with its strong emphasis on civilian reconstruction, is already being changed. “We’re searching for an exit strategy,” said a staff member with the National Security Council on the sidelines of the Asia trip.

‘A Lot Like Jimmy Carter’

An end to diplomacy is also taking shape in Washington’s policy toward Tehran. It is now up to Iran, Obama said, to convince the world that its nuclear power is peaceful. While in Asia, Obama mentioned “consequences” unless it followed his advice. This puts the president, in his tenth month in office, where Bush began — with threats. “Time is running out,” Obama said in Korea. It was the same phrase Bush used against former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, shortly before he sent in the bombers.

There are many indications that the man in charge at the White House will take a tougher stance in the future. Obama’s advisors fear a comparison with former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, even more than with Bush. Prominent Republicans have already tried to liken Obama to the humanitarian from Georgia, who lost in his bid to win a second term, because voters felt that he was too soft. “Carter tried weakness and the world got tougher and tougher because the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators, when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead,” Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker in the House of Representatives, recently said. And then he added: “This does look a lot like Jimmy Carter.”

Click here for the full report

Neocon Trying to Oust Ron Paul

October 28, 2009

InfoWars

By Kurt Nimmo

Tim Graney of Katy, Texas, has announced a bid to unseat Ron Paul in the 14th congressional district of Texas. According to FortBendNow, a news website in Houston, Graney is a small business owner and this is his first political campaign. Graney told FortBendNow the district needs a new voice in Congress, particularly in the area of foreign policy.
 
Ron Paul adamantly opposes the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. “I believe our founding fathers had it right when they argued for peace and commerce between nations, and against entangling political and military alliances. In other words, noninterventionism,” Paul wrote in 2007. He believes Congress needs to reassert its authority over foreign policy. The Constitution makes no distinction between domestic and foreign matters, Paul insists. “Policy is policy, and it must be made by the legislature and not the executive.”

“I am a fiscal conservative, but I do not support Ron Paul’s weak foreign policy views, nor do I support his do whatever you want ultra-Libertarian views that conflict with our American values,” Graney said.

In other words, Graney subscribes to the unitary executive doctrine of an imperial presidency. The Constitution makes a distinction between the power of the Congress and that of the president by stating that Congress shall “make all laws” and the president shall “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Graney apparently believes invading small countries and killing large numbers of people — more than a million so far in Iraq — represents “American values.”

Ron Paul is not an “ultra-Libertarian” (ultra-libertarianism would be defined as anarchism). Paul is a mainstream Libertarian. Mainstream Libertarians support free market capitalism by advocating a right to private property, minimal government regulation of property, minimal taxation, and rejection of the welfare state, all within the context of the rule of law.

According to Graney, Paul’s mainstream Libertarianism is not consistent with the beliefs of residents in the district. Mr. Graney apparently believes the residents support undeclared and illegal wars, unchecked federal power over the states, federalized local police, and an astronomical federal debt that threatens to impoverish them and their children.

It is not clear if Mr. Graney’s campaign is supported by defenders of the Federal Reserve and the bankers. In February, Ron Paul introduced HR 1207, a bill to audit the Federal Reserve. If enacted, the bill would enable the Comptroller General of the GAO to audit the Federal Reserve system before the end of 2010. HR 1207 now has 307 sponsors. Committee hearings were held on September 25.

On October 12, the neocon Republican Lindsey Graham, a senator from South Carolina, told a town hall meeting he would not allow Paul to “hijack” the Republican Party. Graham supports a big government climate bill “because it could mean good business,” according to Politico. He told Politico he backs “combining an energy independence bill with one to control carbon dioxide emissions.”

“I am more resolute than ever to help steer our nation back onto the path of common-sense energy initiatives,” said Graney.

Ron Paul has signed the “No Climate Tax Pledge” sponsored by Americans for Prosperity. The pledge opposes “legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue” through taxation.

Click here for the full report.