Obama Accused of Contempt of Court in ‘Birther’ Hearing

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Secretary of State warns Obama – miss hearing “at your own peril”

by Paul Joseph Watson

President Barack Obama was accused by prosecution lawyers of being in contempt of court after failing to show up for a ‘birther’ hearing in Georgia that seeks to establish whether he is eligible to appear on the state ballot in November.

 

As we reported earlier this month, so-called ‘birthers,’ those who claim there is evidence to suggest Obama was not born in the United States, hailed a judges decision to hear the case as a potential roadblock to Obama even being permitted to run for a second term in the White House.

“Lawyers for area residents mounting “birther” challenges told Deputy Chief Judge Michael Malihi that Obama should be found in contempt of court for not appearing when under subpoena to do so. But Malihi did not indicate he would recommend that and cut off one lawyer when he criticized Obama for not attending the hearing,” reports the Atlanta-Journal Constitution.

“It shows not just a contempt for this court, but contempt for the judicial branch,” lawyer Van Irion told Malihi.

Earlier this week, Obama’s lawyer, Michael Jablonski, requested that Secretary of State Brian Kemp suspend the hearing, claiming it was not a legitimate issue and insisting he and his client would boycott the hearing. However, Kemp fired back, warning that the hearing was necessary under Georgia law and that Obama and Jablonski’s failure to participate would be “at your own peril.”

Attendants packed the Georgia courtroom yesterday for the trial brought by residents who affirm that Obama was born in Kenya, making him ineligible to be US President.

The ‘birther’ argument was addressed by the White House in an unprecedented acknowledgement of the controversy surrounding the issue last year when a document purporting to be Obama’s birth certificate was released to coincide with the publication of bestselling author Jerome Corsi’s book, Where’s the Birth Certificate?

Corsi and other skeptics were unconvinced by the move however, claiming that the document is a forgery created using modern computer techniques and has numerous discrepancies with a genuine 1961 birth certificate created by a typewriter.

Corsi has also presented evidence that the supposed social security number contained on the document was never issued to Obama and in fact belonged to an individual in Connecticut.

One time Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump repeatedly raised questions surrounding Obama’s background during the spring of 2011 before going cold on the issue, a move Corsi claimed was an organized political stunt to neutralize the issue.

The judge in Georgia is expected to make a final ruling on the case after February 5, by which time attorneys are required to file their briefs.

source: InfoWars

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EU signs ACTA, global internet censorship treaty

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by Rady Ananda

Today, the European Union and 22 member states signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced. They have now joined the US and seven other nations that signed the treaty last October.

Anti-ACTA protest video: Thousands march in Poland

 
This signing ceremony merely formalized the EU’s adoption of ACTA last month, during a completely unrelated meeting on agriculture and fisheries, reports TechDirt.

Though initiated by the US, Japan is the official depository of the treaty.

Removal of the Three Strikes clause, in which users accused of three counts of piracy would be barred from the internet, paved the way for the EU to adopt ACTA last month.

Related to ACTA, a chapter in the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) “would have state signatories adopt even more restrictive copyright measures than ACTA,” reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Both ACTA and TPP were developed without public input and outside international trade groups, like the World Trade Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Leaked cables published by WikiLeaks in 2009 exposed early drafts of ACTA, resulting in a firestorm of controversy. Those cables, coupled with later releases, showed that ACTA negotiations began in 2006 and were controversial even to participating states.  An historical summary of the treaty’s progress through December can be found here.

ACTA Violates Magna Carta and US Constitution

Like PIPA and SOPA, two domestic internet censorship bills that prompted major websites to blacken their name or website in a Jan. 18th protest, ACTA allows accusers of copyright infringement to bypass judicial review.  Lack of “due process” makes these bills and ACTA unconstitutional and violates the Magna Carta, a charter signed in 1215 on which most Western law is based, including the US Constitution.  It is often cited as the most important legal document in the history of democracy.

(The USA PATRIOT Acts, Obama’s assassination program, and the National Defense Authorization Act that allows indefinite detention are among many recent laws passed in the US which directly breach the Magna Carta.)

“The Constitution states only one command twice,” explains Peter Strauss of Cornell University Law School, further elaborating:

The Fifth Amendment says to the federal government that no one shall be ‘deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.’ The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, uses the same eleven words, called the Due Process Clause, to describe a legal obligation of all states. These words have as their central promise an assurance that all levels of American government must operate within the law (‘legality’) and provide fair procedures.

 
Not only due process, but US adoption of ACTA also violates Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which provides that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.”
 
The Senate never voted on ACTA.

During the Jan. 18 internet blackout, Darrell Issa (R-CA) introduced OPEN, (H.R. 3782, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act).  Heather Callaghanpoints out that even though OPEN targets foreign-based websites,

The bill’s wording is wide open to pursue American sites. Just one example: when describing an infringing site, it starts with those ‘that are accessed through a non-domestic domain name,’ but continues in section (8)(A)(ii) for any site that ‘conducts business directed to residents of the United States.’

 
As this slew of internet censorship bills and treaties make their way into law, “the United States fell 27 places on the Reporters Without Borders tenth annual Press Freedom Index of 2011 to 47th overall,” reports Activist Post.

Today’s signatories included the EU, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Last October, Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and the United States signed ACTA.

Though involved in early ACTA negotiations, Switzerland and Mexico have not yet ratified it.  However, “Since the agreement remains open to signature until May 2013, it is possible that other states may make a move to join it as well,” said Maira Sutton of EFF.

———————————————————————————————————————

This article first appeared at Activist Post

Rady Ananda is an investigative reporter and researcher in the areas of health, environment, politics, and civil liberties.  Her two websites, Food Freedom and COTO Report are essential reading.

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Even Israel Admits that Iran Has Not Decided to Build a Nuclear Bomb

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Despite Misleading Hype, No Government Leaders Think that Iran Is Building a Nuclear Bomb


American and European leaders say that there is no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.

Even Israel – which has threatened to attack Iran on its own – now admits the same thing.

As Haaretz noted on January 18th:

The intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present later this week to [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin ] Dempsey indicates that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb.

The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon – or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile. Nor is it clear when Iran might make such a decision.

 source: Washington’s Blog

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Persian Gulf Option One: A False Flag

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by Patrick Henningsen

The USS Liberty incident took place in 1967

 
“Remember the Maine!”, was the cry back in 1898 from William Randolph Heart’s New York Journal – a forerunner the modern Murdoch press. Then, some 274 men lost their lives as a result of the explosion which sunk the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. Hearst even told a story of how the enemy had planted a torpedo beneath the Maine and detonated it from shore. The only problem was – it never happened. Nonetheless, the event used as the popular pretext for the United State’s entry into the Spanish-American War, and ultimately, the acquisition of Cuba itself by the US. This was now the modern blueprint for using propaganda in conjunction with, what is accepted by many historians, a type of false-flag event.

Some 70 years later, on June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War, a similar event took place off the coast of Egypt. It could well have been, “Remember the Liberty!”, following an event which saw 34 US men killed and 170 wounded when the USS Liberty was attacked by both the Israeli Air Force and Israeli Navy torpedo boats. History now reveals that Israel’s slaughter of the USS Liberty crew was designed as a false flag event, but luckily Russia intervened at the last minute before Israel could sink the decorated American ship. Had it worked, it could have been used to drag the US and her allies into a new regional, or even a third world war - with who knows what consequences.

If a conflict is to ignite in the Persian Gulf in 2012, it is highly likely that the US or Israel will use the false flag option. Two reasons support this. Firstly, Iran lacks a motive to want to engage in a suicidal first strike against the axis powers – a move which would no doubt cost them thousands of innocent lives and billions in infrastructure. Frankly, it’s safe to say that it’s not at all in the Iranian national interest to start such a conflict. History does show however, that the US and Israel can – and will, employ the technique of the false flag attack, where they would engineer an incident and then blame it on the Iranians. By all accounts, this is also how the US was able to fake their way into the costly and bloody Vietnam War, via the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Incident. 

Recent weeks have seen a massive build-up of naval assets in the Persian Gulf by both the US and the British. The irony of surface naval power in the 21st century is that it is only good for one thing, and that is the ‘projection of force’. In fact, Naval Power ceased to be a major factor geopolitical power-play since the dawn of the 20th century, when it was usurped by Air Power.

As Great Britain learned in the Falklands War back in 1982, even a single French Exocet missile can sink a battleship, or aircraft carrier. Iran has more than this capability, so for all practical purposes, any American ships in the region are nothing more than bait – large, slow sitting targets. Which begs the obvious question: why would the US be sending its soon-to-be decommissioned, rusty chess piece – the 50 year old nuclear-powered USS Enterprise carrier into the line of fire in the Persian Gulf? A very large and expendable, floating museum, and one which, interestingly enough with its six on board nuclear reactors… would probably cost a fortune to dispose of.


If other sides are drawn in to a conflict, most experts agree that it has the danger of escalating into a WWIII situation, and both sides would surely be losers in such a scenario, not to mention the global economy.

However, we have the ideal set of conditions for a New Cold War to emerge in the early 21st Century – one where the Western Axis powers of the US, Europe, Israel and GCC countries sit on one side, and with Iran, Syria, Pakistan, China, and perhaps Russia sitting on the opposite side. This New Cold War will be more about the projection of power and securing sub-regional dominance in terms of economics – natural gas, mineral and trade relationships, as well as petroleum – than it will about the political ideologies that seemed to dominate the previous 20th Century Cold War.

On the surface, this latest spat between the US and Iran looks like a step closer to war, but on closer examination however, the present conditions are not at all ideal for a preemptive strike against Iran by the US, or Israel. Why? In a time when fuel consumption is down worldwide, and oil supplies are high, oil prices are defying economics and maintaining strength above $100 per barrel. It’s also worth noting that defense contracts – particularly in the GCC countries – are way up, meaning there is still much money to be made from this current crisis – on both sides, including Iran.

Still though, we must keep our eyes open for that false flag from the west.

source: InfoWars

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Obama Signs Global Internet Treaty Worse Than SOPA

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White House bypasses Senate to ink agreement that could allow Chinese companies to demand ISPs remove web content in US with no legal oversight

by Paul Joseph Watson

Months before the debate about Internet censorship raged as SOPA and PIPA dominated the concerns of web users, President Obama signed an international treaty that would allow companies in China or any other country in the world to demand ISPs remove web content in the US with no legal oversight whatsoever.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was signed by Obama on October 1 2011, yet is currently the subject of a White House petition demanding Senators be forced to ratify the treaty. The White House has circumvented the necessity to have the treaty confirmed by lawmakers by presenting it an as “executive agreement,” although legal scholars have highlighted the dubious nature of this characterization.

The hacktivist group Anonymous attacked and took offline the Federal Trade Commission’s website yesterday in protest against the treaty, which was also the subject of demonstrations across major cities in Poland, a country set to sign the agreement today.

Under the provisions of ACTA, copyright holders will be granted sweeping direct powers to demand ISPs remove material from the Internet on a whim. Whereas ISPs normally are only forced to remove content after a court order, all legal oversight will be abolished, a precedent that will apply globally, rendering the treaty worse in its potential scope for abuse than SOPA or PIPA.

A country known for its enforcement of harsh Internet censorship policies like China could demand under the treaty that an ISP in the United States remove content or terminate a website on its server altogether. As we have seen from the enforcement of similar copyright policies in the US, websites are sometimes targeted for no justifiable reason.

The groups pushing the treaty also want to empower copyright holders with the ability to demand that users who violate intellectual property rights (with no legal process) have their Internet connections terminated, a punishment that could only ever be properly enforced by the creation of an individual Internet ID card for every web user, a system that is already in the works.

“The same industry rightsholder groups that support the creation of ACTA have also called for mandatory network-level filtering by Internet Service Providers and for Internet Service Providers to terminate citizens’ Internet connection on repeat allegation of copyright infringement (the “Three Strikes” /Graduated Response) so there is reason to believe that ACTA will seek to increase intermediary liability and require these things of Internet Service Providers,” reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The treaty will also mandate that ISPs disclose personal user information to the copyright holder, while providing authorities across the globe with broader powers to search laptops and Internet-capable devices at border checkpoints.

In presenting ACTA as an “international agreement” rather than a treaty, the Obama administration managed to circumvent the legislative process and avoid having to get Senate approval, a method questioned by Senator Wyden.

“That said, even if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement?” asks TechDirt. “The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the president legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.”.

26 European Union member states along with the EU itself are set to sign the treaty at a ceremony today in Tokyo. Other countries wishing to sign the agreement have until May 2013 to do so.

Critics are urging those concerned about Obama’s decision to sign the document with no legislative oversight to demand the Senate be forced to ratify the treaty.

source: Obama Signs Global Internet Treaty Worse Than SOPA

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Drowning In Hypocrisy

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by Paul Craig Roberts

The US government is so full of self-righteousness that it has become a caricature of hypocrisy. Leon Panetta, a former congressman who Obama appointed CIA director and now head of the Pentagon, just told the sailors on the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, that the US is maintaining a fleet of 11 aircraft carriers in order to project sea power against Iran and to convince Iran that “it’s better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy.”

If it requires 11 aircraft carriers to deal with Iran, how many will Panetta need to project power against Russia and China? But to get on with the main point, Iran has been trying “to deal with us through diplomacy.” The response from Washington has been belligerent threats of military attack, unfounded and irresponsible accusations that Iran is making a nuclear weapon, sanctions and an oil embargo. Washington’s accusations echo Israel’s and are contradicted by Washington’s own intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Why doesn’t Washington respond to Iran in a civilized manner with diplomacy? Really, which of the two countries is the greatest threat to peace?

Read full article at: IPE

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Shock Docs: Total Federalization of Police Under New Homeland Security Mission

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Mission Creep: DHS Agency Abandons Fighting Terrorism, Shifts to Hiring Police, Taking Over America

by Aaron Dykes

A new white paper presented to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence carves out an ‘evolving mission’ for Homeland Security that moves away from fighting terrorism and towards growing a vast domestic intelligence apparatus that would expand integration with local/state agencies and private-public partnerships already underway via regional fusion centers.

Crafted by the Aspen Institute Homeland Security Group, co-chaired by former DHS chief Michael Chertoff and composed of a who’s who of national security figures, the report outlines a total mission creep, as the title “Homeland Security and Intelligence: Next Steps in Evolving the Mission” implies.

Significantly, it puts on paper and into the Congressional record a proposed transition from outwardly dealing with the threats posed by terrorism towards intelligence gathering “focused on more specific homeward-focused areas.” That is, the homegrown, domestic threats we’ve heard so much about from Big Sis already.

In short, it confirms the intentions of key insiders– including former NSA/CIA head Michael Hayden, former Rep. Jane Harmon, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, 9/11 Commissioners Philip Zelikow and Richard Ben-Viniste, former National Security Advisor Samuel Berger and others– to flesh out a plan we have already seen developing from an outside perspective– namely, to build a domestic Stasi-like force to takeover, monitor and control the population.

Moreover, the media has reported on this changed mission– towards the full spectrum domination of the people under a patently-fascist framework– with the same calm as the weekly weather forecast.

LOCALIZED INTELLIGENCE: HIRING POLICE & BOWING TO PRIVATE INTERESTS

Achieving this new aim includes co-opting local law enforcement and other regional agencies.

“As the threat grows more localized,” the report reads, “the federal government’s need to train, and even staff, local agencies, such as major city police departments, will grow.”

That’s right, the feds want to oversee the hiring of your local police.

Fusion Centers, now spread across the nation, have already infected police agencies and local governments with a federalization takeover mentality. A Dec. 2010 Aspen Homeland Security Group report, quoting the Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, recommends that “every mayor and governor of a major city in the country should have to attend a DHS-sponsored emergency management course where various scenarios – like hurricanes, levy breaks, and explosions – are exercised.”

But directing local police departments, mayors and governors is only the beginning. Indeed, the Aspen group envisions the ‘foundation for a separate DHS intelligence mission’ by building upon ‘decentralized’ partnerships with the private sector as well.

Homeland Security Should Re-Orient Its Mission, Aspen Panel Says

The bloated umbrella agency aims to lean on its ties with the hospitality (hotel), security and transportation industries, among others, as well. Already, Homeland Security conducts background checks on many security guards working with ‘critical infrastructure,’ and clearly, it aims to expand the use of quasi-government groups like InfraGard and other private snitch networks. Ultimately, all employment would be subject to federal background checks and security clearances.

Private interests should even shape Homeland Security priorities, according to the report: “different private sectors in the United States, from the hospitality industry to transportation, should drive requirements for DHS.”

ABANDONING THE FIGHT AGAINST TERRORISM

As unbelievable as it sounds, DHS says other agencies can handle the all-encompassing threat of terrorism that was used to justify the super-agency’s own existence and powers.

Abandoning specific focus on tracking terrorist cells and organizations, DHS instead plans to shift into broad coverage of border protection, integrating travel data, cyber defense, critical infrastructure protection and other areas.

“There are enough agencies pursuing the terrorist adversary to allow DHS to build a new analytic foundation that emphasizes data, analytic questions, and customer groups that are not the focus for other agencies,” the report states.

And funding should be cut from terrorism-focused areas:

“Analysis that helps private-sector partners better understand how to mitigate threats to infrastructure, for example, should win more resourcing than a focus on all-source analysis of general threats, such as work on assessing the perpetrators of attacks. Conversely, all-source analysis of terrorist groups and general terrorist trends should remain the domain of other intelligence agencies.”

Instead, the “national security experts” who’ve brought us naked body scanners, checkpoints on highways, streets, airports, bus & train stations, and who have projected the homegrown terror threat into the theaters of private hotels, shopping malls and sports stadiums, are again expanding the bureaucratic growth of tyranny by infiltrating areas traditionally spared from federal intrusion.

A promotional article at the Homeland Security News Wire blog highlights the shift: “With a slew of intelligence agencies with similar missions safeguarding the United States, the report posits that DHS should avoid competing with other agencies and overlapping responsibilities, instead focusing on its areas of core strengths – analysis and the dissemination of critical intelligence to local law enforcement agency, the private sector, and critical infrastructure operators.”

“THE NEW, GROWING WORLD OF HOMELAND SECURITY INTELLIGENCE”

Further the Aspen report recommends “an entirely new enterprise,” stating that “DHS might consider the development of a homeland security training institute.” It hails the security-complex workforce that has been fostered by Homeland Security in the decade since 9/11, now seeking to influence and train its future recruits as well.

The report verifies previous information suggesting that DHS wants to comb the American homeland with private security contractors, trained and overseen by Homeland Security– a giant army of enforcers and snitches, brainwashed by propaganda scaremongering about terrorism, who could respond to crime as a whole with an atmosphere of universal preemptive suspicion that targets anyone who appears out of place.

“Working with state/local/private sector partners to draw their intelligence capabilities into a national picture” is a stated aim of this redirection of Homeland Security’s core mission. Installing and training individual members of these partner groups- from local police departments to the eyes and ears it would tap in the security, transportation and infrastructure industries- would facilitate the kind of over-arching homeland security infrastructure the document aims to construct over society.

DOMESTIC EXTREMISM: TARGETING AMERICAN SOCIETY

Doing so would put greater emphasis on the kind of politically-slanted domestic profiling (read: “intelligence product“) that has already drawn criticism and forced the agency to disavow one of its own reports, which targeted ‘right-wing extremism’:

The numerous federal and other officials familiar with the matter Homeland Security Today interviewed frankly said the April 7, 2009 DHS report that generated so much outrage, Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, was the most “poorly constructed” analytical “product in DHS history,” and that numerous reports dealing with rightwing extremists have in fact been produced by DHS since it disavowed that one report.

The Department of Homeland Security was sold to public on a wave of fear in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, under the promise of keeping America safe from terrorism. Instead, the Homeland Stasi agency is solidifying its role as a secret police over the United States. Not only have local police agencies been instructed that non-violent protesters, returning veterans and supporters of third party candidates are potential domestic terrorists, but Federal Protective Service (FPS) agents- dispatched with Homeland Security oversight- have been caught arresting photographers and spying on dissenters (in this case during an Occupy Wall Street protest in Portland).

Recent Homeland Security-related documents have already revealed that the American people have been designated as an enemy under emergency plans and that the feds are contracting and activating FEMA relocation centers for use during a crisis or catastrophe.

MISSION CREEP: HANDING OVER UNACCOUNTABLE POWER

Sadly, this warped mission creep is nothing new to the United States’ intelligence agencies.

Former President Harry Truman lamented the CIA’s extreme power grab some 16 years after he signed the bill ushering it– and the entire national security infrastructure– into existence. One month after the JFK assassination in 1963, he stated:

“For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government… I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”

Behind the scenes, it was former CIA director Allen Dulles, along with a number of fellow travelers, who crafted the CIA’s transformation under a limited, intelligence gathering mandate into the unaccountable monster it became. During a decade as head of the CIA, Dulles utilized the Jackson-Correa white paper he helped write to usher in black ops and other operational aspects never intended to be, from assassinations, to coups, to revolutions, and more (see Col. Fletcher Prouty’s The Secret Team). Suddenly, the CIA was operating from the shadows, a virtual government-within-government, with no clear path towards reigning in its power.

Will the already-controversial Department of Homeland Security be allowed, too, to creep so far into our lives that we can never look back?

source: PrisonPlanet

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Soros Mouthpiece Calls On Google To Police “Conspiracy Theories”

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Stanford scholar wants search engines to flag global warming, vaccine skepticism as thought crimes

by Paul Joseph Watson

Former fellow of George Soros’ Open Society and current Stanford University scholar Evgeny Morozov has called on Google and other search engines to become thought crime enforcers, by providing warnings about websites that contain “conspiracy theories” such as the belief, held by a majority of Americans, that global warming is not primarily man-made.

Morozov, whose biography confirms him as a well-connected insider, decries in a Slate piece how the Internet is a useful tool for “People who deny global warming” as well as “the anti-vaccination movement,” calling on Google to provide a “socially responsible curated treatment” that would marginalize such beliefs by amending search results.

His solution is to, “Nudge search engines to take more responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control in presenting search results for issues like “global warming” or “vaccination.” Google already has a list of search queries that send most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries? Thus, whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists, Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources before making up their minds.”

Morozov describes the potential that such a move will be judged as Google “shilling for Big Pharma or for Al Gore” as “a risk worth taking”.

This represents a similar argument to Cass Sunstein’s “cognitive infiltration,” an effort by Obama’s information czar to slap government warnings on controversial websites (including those claiming that exposure to sunlight is healthy). In a widely derided white paper, Sunstein called for political blogs to be forced to include pop ups that show “a quick argument for a competing view”. He also demanded that taxes be levied on dissenting opinions and even suggested that outright bans on certain thoughts should be enforced.

Giving companies like Google, which has grown to virtually become the gatekeeper of the entire Internet itself and is already engaging in SOPA-like acts of censorship, the power to denote which political and scientific positions are acceptable and which are fringe “conspiracy theories” is an insult to free thinking and smacks of Chinese-style thought control.

Morozov’s argument is also completely undermined by the fact that the two so-called fringe “conspiracy theories” he forwards as being in need of Google’s thought crime control, skepticism about global warming and the dangers of vaccines, are views held by millions of Americans and are not “fringe” at all.

According to the most recent polls, less than half of Americans now believe that global warming is caused by human activity, a number that has been slipping for the past several years.

In addition, polls show that a quarter of Americans, some 75 million of them, believe that vaccines are unsafe and can cause autism. To characterize this as a minority conspiracy belief is like labeling Catholicism as a doctrine of a tiny fringe.

At best, views about global warming and the safety of vaccines can be described as being split, but to claim that skepticism over man-made climate change and the dangers of inoculations are “kooky” fringe conspiracy beliefs, as Morozov does in his article, is brazenly inaccurate and exposes the agenda-driven bias of his rhetoric.

This is further illustrated by the reader comments, which almost universally deride Morozov and attack his argument as being a thinly veiled demand for Internet censorship.

“The day Google starts doing things like this is the day I find a new search engine,” writes one.

“So, you are a supporter of internet censorship? Only of information that you disagree with, of course. So I assume Slate and NAF did not support the recent action regarding SOPA?” adds another.

Morozov’s rhetoric is merely one aspect of the wider move to turn the Internet into an echo chamber of establishment propaganda, drowning out alternative voices to the benefit of large pharmaceutical companies who make billions from selling risky vaccines and scientific bodies whose very survival depends upon the global warming myth being upheld.

It represents another effort to win an information war the establishment is currently losing, as Hillary Clinton herself admitted, by not just creating a new Orwellian Internet Ministry of Truth, as Bill Clinton demanded, but by ascribing this role to the very gatekeeper of the Internet itself – Google.

source: InfoWars

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Did TSA Target Rand Paul for Intrusive Pat-down?

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by Kurt Nimmo

Following Rand Paul’s incident earlier today with the TSA, the corporate media spun the story to say Paul was not detained. Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, set the tone when he insisted Paul – or rather, the passenger in question – was not detained.

“Let’s just be clear,” Carney said in his Monday press briefing. “The passenger was not detained. He was escorted out of the area by local law-enforcement.”

 
“If you’re told you can’t leave, does that count as detention?” Paul asked in response to Carney’s assertion. “I tried to leave the cubicle to speak to one of the TSA people and I was barked at: ‘Do not leave the cubicle!’ So, that, to me sounds like I’m being asked not to leave the cubicle. It sounds a little bit like I’m being detained.”

During an interview following the incident, Paul said TSA alarms are often set off as “part of a random process” in an effort to be unpredictable. (See video above.)

Infowars.com, however, has confirmed from sources that the TSA often targets certain individuals for intrusive pat-downs and uses alarms to initiate the process.

It appears Rand Paul was deliberately targeted, although this cannot be definitively confirmed.

Paul questioned the TSA after a 6-year-old Bowling Green girl on a trip with her parents in April of last year was patted-down at an airport in New Orleans. The parents videotaped the incident and uploaded it to YouTube, where it went viral and created a public relations headache for the agency.

Paul had called TSA boss John Pistole “clueless” during a hearing held by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in June of 2011.

source: Did TSA Target Rand Paul for Intrusive Pat-down?

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