TSA Admits Lying About Naked Boy Controversy

Federal agency caught in yet another act of deception after first claiming shirtless 5-year-old had set off metal detector

The TSA has been caught in yet another act of public deception after the agency was forced to admit that it lied when it initially claimed a 5-year-old boy was strip-searched at Salt Lake City International Airport last month because he had set off a metal detector.



The video of a disgruntled father removing his young son’s shirt so TSA agents could pat down the boy arrived at the height of the outrage against Big Sis last month and prompted widespread condemnation of ludicrous airport security measures. One of the media personalities who spearheaded the TSA revolt, Matt Drudge, ran the story at the top of his website for nearly two days.

The TSA tried to placate the fury many Americans felt when watching the clip by claiming that the boy had set off a metal detector and therefore had to be subjected to advanced screening. Even after the boy’s shirt was removed, he was still subjected to a pat down around his genital area.

However, Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who will soon take charge of the House subcommittee overseeing the TSA, forced the agency to back down and concede that the TSA’s original statement was a total fabrication.

“I said, ‘You guys knew that at the beginning. You lied at the beginning,’” Chaffetz told the Salt Lake Tribune.

“New information was brought to light that indicated the initial report was incorrect,” the TSA said, admitting that the boy was patted down not because he set off a metal detector but due to “bulky clothing”.

However, the video clearly shows that the only item of clothing the boy is wearing is a pullover sweatshirt – he is not wearing a bulky coat or anything of that nature. So in effect, the TSA has attempted to cover up a lie with yet another lie, in its farcical efforts to justify groping naked 5-year-old boys in the name of security.

As we have documented, the TSA has proven itself to be completely untrustworthy and deceitful, having lied about almost every issue related to airport security since the very outset.

- Immediately after naked body scanners were introduced, TSA lied in claiming that scanner images did not show intricate details of genitalia, a claim disproved by images taken from the TSA’s own website which clearly show the size and detail of a man’s penis, as well as several incidents where airport security workers have abused the scanners to ogle naked pictures of their colleagues and go on to describe details of their genitalia.

- Janet Napolitano herself brazenly lied when she claimed that Johns Hopkins University had studied naked body scanners and declared them to be completely safe. In reality, Dr Michael Love, who runs an X-ray lab at the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at the Johns Hopkins school of medicine stated, “statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays,” adding, “…we have a situation at the airports where people are so eager to fly that they will risk their lives in this manner.”

- TSA has consistently lied in claiming that naked body scanner images cannot be stored, a claim disproved by a Homeland Security letter which specifically states that the machines “have the capability to retain and export images”.

- TSA continues to lie about the fact that it temporarily curtailed security measures as a political ploy to deflate the national opt out day protest, despite verified reports from all over the country confirming that body scanner machines were roped off and aggressive pat downs were dispensed with.

- TSA has been caught in numerous other lies, all of which are documented here.

Given the plethora of examples of TSA deceit, and the agency’s ceaseless habit of lying to cover up its own malfeasance, state and local authorities across the country need to unite and follow New Jersey’s example by kicking the bums out for good, eliminating the TSA not only from airports, but as a federal agency altogether.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com

Coming Soon to Britain: Protest and Porno Bans

First the British government floated the idea of banning protests. Now they are talking about censoring the internet.

The UK government has announced it is discussing a plan that would automatically block all pornographic websites. It is said the effort is designed to protect children.

Draconian efforts to limit the free choices of individuals are often sold to citizens as a way to protect children.

According to NewsCore, the biggest broadband providers in the UK, including BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk, are being ordered to a meeting next month by Ed Vaizey, the communications minister, and will be instructed to block content.

In the past, people decided what to view on the internet. It was their responsibility to monitor what content their children viewed. Now the British nanny state will take over that job.

Draconian efforts to limit the free choices of individuals are often sold to citizens as a way to protect children. Far too many parents defer to the state and surrender control of their children to faceless bureaucrats and cops.

“This is a very serious matter. I think it is very important that it’s the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children,” declared bureaucrat Vaizey.

“There is this very uneasy sense for parents of children that we do not have to tolerate this Wild West approach,” said Claire Perry, the Tory MP for Devizes who is described as a “keen lobbyist for more restrictions,” in other words an advocate for more state power over the individual. “We are not coming at this from an anti-porn perspective. We just want to make sure our children aren’t stumbling across things we don’t want them to see.”

The totalitarian state of China also decides what people will see over the internet.

China’s focus is not on porno per se, but protest against its authoritarian rule. It has cracked down on instant messaging, chatrooms, text messages, and blogs because the technology was successfully used to organize demonstrations against the government.

China’s move to censor the internet began with regulations. It soon introduced measures to prevent citizens from “defaming” the government and ultimately moved to institute what has become known as the Great Firewall of China. All internet traffic is routed through proxy servers and gateways controlled by the government.

The effort to block content from Britons began with child pornography. It will now include adult pornography. No telling what sites will be next. Maybe political sites disapproved by the government. If the British government can shut down political protest in the street, it can likewise shut it down over the internet, especially when the example of violent jihadist websites is used to scare people into submission.

Earlier this month, after students protested the government’s plan to double college tuition, Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson said he wouldn’t “rule out” shutting down the civil liberties of Britons. “It is one of the tactics we will look at and something we will keep under review, and if we think it is the right thing to do then we will do it,” he said.

The decision to deny citizens the right to protest grievances came after the building housing Tory HQ in Millbank was severely damaged, violence occurred in Parliament Square, mass arrests were conducted in Trafalgar Square, and and a car carrying Prince Charles and Camilla was attacked.

The media in Britain raised the specter of violence against the royal couple. It also mentioned the 1974 kidnap attempt on Princess Anne.

The riots followed a predictable pattern. As thousands of students and others protested the tuition increase, the usual “anarchist” subjects attacked Millbank and assaulted police. Cameras captured the violence and put the appropriate spin on the events in the lead-up to Stephenson’s announcement.

In 2008, firebrand MP George Galloway accused the London cops of engaging in “a deliberate conspiracy to bring about scenes of violent disorder” during Bush’s visit to the UK in 2008. Agents provocateurs — otherwise known as anarchists – attacked banks on Victoria Street in London during the G20, providing the cops with an excuse to arrest activists and even kill a man.

During the Olympics in Vancouver earlier this year, activists accused the police of dispatching agents provocateurs. During the G20 in September, 2009, undercover cops infiltrated a March Against Police Brutality at the University of Pittsburgh.

From FBI “stings” of clueless patsies to cops pretending to be activists in Greece and Canada and beyond, government is in the business of creating violence and chaos – and some would say pornography – in order to propose, enact, and enforce draconian laws that rob the average person of his or her liberties in order to make the claim they are protecting them.

Kurt NimmoInfowars.com

Monitoring America: The Government’s Development Of A Vast Panopticon Spy Network

Washington Post reports on feds targeting all Americans as possible domestic extremists

The Washington Post today reports on the vast growing domestic spying apparatus that the federal government is using, in conjunction with the Pentagon, to target millions of law-abiding American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

In a lengthy report entitled “Monitoring America”, the Post details how a vast centralized snooping machine is being constructed and employed by local, state and federal agencies as well as military investigators, to collect, store and analyze swathes of personal information.

Everything contained within the Post’s article has already been reported and covered in depth by this website and others in the alternative media that have consistently warned of the threat of the exponential rise of the big brother spy system over the past decade.

The report details Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano’s recent “See something, say something” campaign, which encompasses the federal government hooking up with Wal-Mart, Amtrak, major sports leagues, hotel chains and metro riders to encourage citizens to file “suspicious activity reports” if they see any activity they think could be criminal or terroristic.

The government defines a suspicious activity as “observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity” related to terrorism.

As we reported recently, critics of the program have been literally dubbed insane by it’s coordinators, despite legitimate concerns over asking citizens to effectively spy on each other for the government.

The Washington Post report notes that such suspicious activity reports are just one piece of information being collected at the local and state levels and fed into a vast “Guardian” database via fusion centers, which ultimately connect to the FBI, the DHS and even the Department of Defense.

According to the report, the spook network includes 4,058 federal, state and local organizations.

Intelligence centers run by states across the country have access to personal information about millions of Americans, including unlisted cell phone numbers, insurance claims, driver’s license photographs and credit reports.

Dozens of the fusion centers were created after 9/11 to identify potential threats and “improve the way information is shared”. The centers use law enforcement analysts and sophisticated computer systems to compile, or fuse, disparate tips and clues and pass along the refined information to other agencies.

The centers have received billions in funding from the Department of Homeland Security and also work in conjunction with the military arm of the DHS, NORTHCOM.

They also have subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans’ locations, employment history, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like.

Some of these data-brokers, such as one in Maryland called Entersect, claim to hold records about 98 percent of Americans.

The Washington Post report also details how equipment developed for use against insurgents and fighters in combat situations such as in Afghanistan is now being employed by police and law enforcement agencies to collect information on the American people.

From military-grade infrared cameras, to hand-held, wireless fingerprint scanners, to facial recognition surveillance cameras, to license plate readers, to Predator drones along the borders – all are being used to snap pictures and video and record swathes of information. This will all then be fed into a giant database, cross referenced with every other piece of information collected, analyzed and stored.

This year for the first time, the FBI, the DHS and the Defense Department are able to search each other’s fingerprint databases, said Myra Gray, head of the Defense Department’s Biometrics Identity Management Agency, speaking to an industry group recently. “Hopefully in the not-too-distant future,” she said, “our relationship with these federal agencies – along with state and local agencies – will be completely symbiotic.”

The justification is, as always, the war on terror, but the targets of the information gathering are everyday Americans.

As the Washington Post report also notes, Homeland Security and its state and local partners have routinely targeted peaceful and lawful groups and individuals as part of its surveillance reporting.

As we have seen from the MIAC report, DHS spying on tea Party and second amendment activists in Pennsylvania and a host of other examples in recent years, the federal government has little interest in Muslim extremists and has instead targeted Americans knowledgeable of their rights and critical of big government as the primary domestic terror threat. The feds have defined “terrorist propaganda” as any material critical of the state. The Department of Defense characterizes peaceful protest as “low level terrorism” in its own report.

Over the years we have seen countless instances of unaccountable government and military programs that have been in operation for decades, all centered around covertly spying and gathering information on American citizens.

We have extensively documented such programs from COINTELPRO through to Operation CHAOS, the Defense Department’s Counterintelligence Field Activity and the recent NSA warrantless wiretapping.

Large corporations such as Google, AT&T, Facebook and Yahoo to name but a few are also intimately involved in the overarching program. Those corporations have specific government arms that are supplying the software, hardware and tech support to US intelligence agencies in the process of creating a vast closed source database for global spy networks to share information.

We are now witnessing the coordination and mass consolidation of scores of these operations into one all encompassing panopticon program.

After 9/11 the work of 16 different intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the giant National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on international communications, as well as the Energy Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration was centralized under the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Why such rampant centralization? Why is the military now so intent on fusing itself with the federal government via Homeland security and through the FBI and why are the targets of their operations always American citizens?

We are constantly bombarded with the notion that the biggest threat we face is from those who reject and abhor western values, yet the government and military continue to relentlessly focus their anti-terror activity directly upon freedom loving American people, while telling them they would be completely insane to voice any concern.

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com

ATF To Require Dealers To Report Bulk Semiautomatic Rifle Sales

Ryan J. Reilly
TPM
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) on Friday requested emergency permission to require that gun dealers report to them bulk sales of the high-powered semiautomatic rifles favored by drug cartels — all part of the Administration’s effort to combat the flow of guns to Mexico.

It is a plan that had languished for months at the Justice Department because of concerns over what the National Rifle Association (NRA) might think. The Washington Post reports now that it was held up by the White House in the spring — around the same time that President Barack Obama promised Mexican President Felipe Calderon he’d work to prevent gunrunning south of the border.

The effort, sources told the newspaper, was shelved by Rahm Emanuel, then-White House chief of staff. The plan “was perceived as too volatile just before midterm elections,” the Post reported. But the plan made it into the Federal Register last week after ATF Deputy Director Kenneth Melson asked DOJ to try again.

Full story here.

Heathrow Responds To Big Freeze By Freezing Passengers

Stranded travelers who refused to leave airport shivered after Heathrow bosses turned off heating

Heathrow responded to Britain’s big freeze by freezing the passengers who were left stranded at the airport after all flights were cancelled, according to eyewitnesses.

Victims of Britain’s coldest December on record were stuck at the airport after Heathrow announced all flights had been cancelled. Flights would remain grounded throughout the whole of Sunday, airport officials later announced, despite the fact that Saturday’s deluge of snow has been replaced by blue skies.

After less than enthusiastic efforts to clear runways (two guys with shovels if the picture above is any indication), passengers who had their flights cancelled were forced to sleep on the airport floor because all trains and taxis from the airport had also been suspended.

Newspaper reports this morning unquestionably regurgitated Heathrow’s PR talking points by reporting that “several hundred people were working to… keep passengers in the terminal as warm and comfortable as possible,” but travelers tell a different story.
According to a passenger whose flight to Moscow was cancelled, airport staff walked around shouting at travelers, telling them to leave immediately. When passengers refused to go after pointing out that they had no means of transportation because all the taxis and trains had been cancelled, Heathrow bosses simply turned off the heating and lights overnight and let hundreds of people, including young children and babies, freeze in temperatures of minus 5 degrees.

Pictures sent to Sky News show people wrapped in thermal blankets, proving the heating was turned off. In addition, as the Telegraph reports, “Travellers whose flights were cancelled were told to go home and file lost baggage reports rather than wait for their luggage to be returned from planes.”

Britons have again expressed fury about how a country that once survived 8 months of almost ceaseless bombing at the hands of the Nazis during the second world war is now completely paralyzed by weather that other European countries like Switzerland, Austria and Poland take in their stride on a regular basis, without widespread chaos.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com

“Hottest Year On Record” Myth Based On Fabricated Temperature Data

It’s ‘the hottest year on record’, as long as you don’t take its temperature

Christopher Booker
London Telegraph

We have lately heard much of the claim that 2010 will turn out to have been “the hottest year on record”. No one has done more to promote this belief than Dr James Hansen, head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), responsible for one of the four main official global temperature records.

As reported by the US blogs Real Science and Watts Up With That, in a post headed “GISS temperatures out of line with the rest of the world”, the GISS record has in recent months been diverging wildly from the others. While three have shown global temperatures dropping sharply, by as much as 0.3C, the GISS figures (based, despite the link to Nasa, on surface temperatures) have shot up by 0.2C.

In a second post (“Hansen’s ‘Hottest Year Ever’ is primarily based on fabricated data”), Real Science demonstrates that the parts of the world which GISS shows to be heating up the most are so short of weather stations that only 25 per cent of the figures are based on actual temperature readings.

The rest are simply conjectured by GISS. This is not the first time Dr Hansen’s temperature record has come under expert fire. Three years ago, GISS was forced to revise many of its figures when it was shown that wholesale “adjustments” had been made, revising older temperatures downwards and post-2000 figures upwards.

Full story here.

9/11 Joe Lieberman – WTC 7 Did Not Occur …. I Do Not Support A New Investigation

You Tube





Joe Lieberman claims that there is no evidence the collapse of Building 7 occurred and that he would not support a new investigation of 9/11.