A Canadian man and his young son were kicked off a US-bound flight for watching a video of the 9/11 terror attacks just before take-off from Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.
The crew of an Air Canada flight bound for Orlando in Florida were alerted by a passenger when he saw the young boy watching on his iPod the planes hitting the Twin Towers on 9/11.
The street below Danny Chen’s window in lower Manhattan has changed over the last decade from a bustling four-lane thoroughfare to an empty road lined with police barricades.
To get home each day, Chen has to present his ID at a police checkpoint. When the officer lowers the metal gate into the ground to let him in, he drives through as quickly as he can. More than once, the barricade has risen too soon, lifting his wife’s minivan into the air.
Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the New York Police Department barricaded off its headquarters on Park Row. About 2,000 residents in two apartment complexes found themselves living inside a security zone.
Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law Professor and Confidant of Obama was appointed to be Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
He became infamous within this movement for writing a paper on how to best to combat “Government Conspiracy Theory Groups,” including by covert infiltration, as described by Glen Greenwald.
By Paul Craig Roberts source: Counter Punch March 25, 2010
There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.
Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.
Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”
Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.
Democrats have retreated from adding new privacy protections to the primary U.S counterterrorism law, stymied by Senate Republicans who argued the changes would weaken terror investigations.
The proposed protections were cast aside when Senate Democrats lacked the necessary 60-vote supermajority to pass them. Dashing the hopes of liberals, the Senate Wednesday night instead passed — by voice vote without debate — a one-year extension of key parts of the USA Patriot Act that would have expired on Sunday.
Thrown away were restrictions and greater scrutiny on the government’s authority to spy on Americans and seize their records.
Americans have been losing the protection of law for years. In the 21st century the loss of legal protections accelerated with the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” which continues under the Obama administration and is essentially a war on the Constitution and U.S. civil liberties.
The Bush regime was determined to vitiate habeas corpus in order to hold people indefinitely without bringing charges. The regime had acquired hundreds of prisoners by paying a bounty for terrorists. Afghan warlords and thugs responded to the financial incentive by grabbing unprotected people and selling them to the Americans.
In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama’s appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated “cognitive infiltration” of groups that advocate “conspiracy theories” like the ones surrounding 9/11.
Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine” those groups.
As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Sunstein is in charge of “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs,” according to the White House Web site.
Eleven boys from Edsel Ford High School’s graduating class of 2011 in Dearborn, Mich., wore hooded sweatshirts to school Monday depicting the numeral 11 with windows drawn on each digit, so they looked like towers. Alongside the towers is a thunderbird, the school’s mascot, flying towards them. The text below the images read “You can’t bring us down.”
“The whole design gave prominence to the 9/11 tragedy, and of course was very upsetting to staff and students,” said Principal Hassane Jaafar in a statement.
School officials said the boys intended the shirts to be displays of class pride and did not understand that they would be perceived as offensive.
KPRC news in Houston recently filmed a secret experiment by law enforcement agencies including the Dept. of Homeland Security of a drone intended to spy on Americans.
The drone uncovered during this investigation are not like the large, expensive models used by the military for targeted strikes on militants half a world away. These are manufactured by Insitu out of Bingen, Washington (corporate offices located in Australia), only weigh about 40 pounds (18.1 kg) before monitoring equipment is installed. This model has the capacity to stay airborne for up to a day.
Try to tell me this is not a fear-based police-state consumer control-grid hyped out of rationality by big media and “intelligence” agencies. Courtesy of false flags like the Christmas Day plane incident and the need to further break us, and our liberties down, with legislation like the Patriot Act and Military Commissions Act. This tops last week lunacy of honey shutting down an airport and making”two people complain of feeling ill.” Brian
Portland, Oregon – Two F-15 fighter jets escorted a passenger jet that had been headed for Hawaii back to Portland International Airport in Oregon after a passenger in coach became “uncooperative,” an airline official said Wednesday.
Hawaiian Airlines Flight 39 took off from Portland at 10:10 a.m. with 231 passengers and a crew of 10 when — 90 minutes into the flight — its captain decided to turn around the Boeing 767, said Keoni Wagner, the airline’s vice president of public affairs.
The fighter jets intercepted the plane at 1 p.m., North American Aerospace Defense Command said in a written statement.
It landed at 1:16 p.m. without further incident, the TSA said.
Upon the plane’s return, the passenger — a 56-year-old Salem, Oregon, man — was escorted from the plane with his female companion without incident, the FBI and the Port of Portland said in a joint statement.
The FBI said it was not releasing his name because he had not been charged.
Radio talk show host Alex Jones is calling for petitions, boycotts and lawsuits en mass in an effort to block the nationwide implementation of full body scanners that represent a total violation of privacy, a health risk, and the next wave of tyranny being metered out against the American people and the people of the world under the phony pretext of fighting terrorism.
“Our long journey into domestication and dependency on the scientific dictatorship is accelerating, our entire society is being turned into a massive surveillance grid, it has been designed to persecute the people,” Jones warned on his show yesterday, adding that the scanners were the latest manifestation of the prison planet being constructed around humanity.
Allied with the contrived global warming movement, terrorism is the other prong of the pincer being used to crush freedom and advance totalitarianism in the developed world as Homeland Security follows the plan it was created to carry out – the gradual implementation of martial law in America characterized by the kind of stifling security we now see in airports being introduced into our daily lives in shopping malls, public schools, and many other buildings.
A federal appeals court this week ruled that a California police officer can be held liable for injuries suffered by an unarmed man he Tasered during a traffic stop. The decision, if allowed to stand, would set a rigorous legal precedent for when police are permitted to use the weapons and would force some law enforcement agencies throughout the state — and presumably the nation — to tighten their policies governing Taser use, experts said.
Michael Gennaco, an expert in police conduct issues who has conducted internal reviews of Taser use for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and other agencies, said the ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals prohibits officers from deploying Tasers in a host of scenarios and largely limits their use to situations in which a person poses an obvious danger.
Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in black sites such as those at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo Bay, but also at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. Hashmi is a U.S. citizen of Muslim descent imprisoned on two counts of providing and conspiring to provide material support and two counts of making and conspiring to make a contribution of goods or services to al-Qaida. As his case prepares for trial, his plight illustrates that the gravest threat we face is not from Islamic extremists, but the codification of draconian procedures that deny Americans basic civil liberties and due process. Hashmi would be a better person to tell you this, but he is not allowed to speak.
This corruption of our legal system, if history is any guide, will not be reserved by the state for suspected terrorists, or even Muslim Americans. In the coming turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many others, who are not Muslim, will endure later. Radical activists in the environmental, globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements–who are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism–have discovered that his fate is their fate. Courageous groups have organized protests, including vigils outside the Manhattan detention facility. They can be found at www.educatorsforcivilliberties.org or www.freefahad.com. On Martin Luther King Day, this Jan. 18 at 6 p.m. EST, protesters will hold a large vigil in front of the MCC on 150 Park Row in Lower Manhattan to call for a return of our constitutional rights. Join them if you can.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding an untold number of people in secretively maintained detention facilities all over the United States, according to a report set to be published next year in The Nation.
Many of the sites are unmarked and unlisted, going unnoticed in office parks and commercial zones, according to reporter Jacqueline Stevens. The so-called ICE “subfield offices” are mainly used to house prisoners in transfer and are not subject to the basic standards applied to ICE and even military prisoners.
At a subfield office known as B-18, located near a Los Angeles federal building, ICE keeps immigrant prisoners in “a barely converted storage facility.”