The missiles that brought down TWA Flight 800

http://youtu.be/BTpLnuuxRBg

Yeah, remember this? David Swanson:

If you watch Kristina Borjesson’s new film, TWA Flight 800, you’ll see a highly persuasive case that this passenger jet full of passengers was brought down by missiles, killing all on board.

A CIA propaganda video aired by U.S. television networks fits with none of the known facts, makes the claim that there were no missiles, and offers no theory as to what then did cause the explosion(s) and crash into the sea.

A coverup by the FBI and the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) was blatant and extensive, involving intimidation of witnesses and investigators, tampering with evidence, false testimony before Congress, censoring reports, and numerous violations of normal protocols.  Some of the government’s own official investigators concluded that the explosion(s) occurred outside the airplane.  They were not permitted to write analyses in their reports, as in every other investigation.  Their reports were censored.  They were forbidden to testify.  Some 200 eyewitnesses — people on the ground and in other planes, at least many of whom described seeing one or more missiles rising from the ground to the airplane — were censored as well.  Not a single witness was permitted to testify at the public hearing.

The military staged a test firing of missiles with witnesses, in an attempt to prove that the witnesses would either not see the missiles or testify inaccurately about what they saw.  However, the witnesses all reported seeing the missiles well.  The report on this test came to the opposite conclusion of what had been hoped for, but the government fed the original, hoped-for line to the media, which dutifully reported it.

Investigators thought and still think a missile or missiles brought down the plane.  Eye-witnesses thought and still think the same.  Explosives residue in the plane wreckage and other physical evidence in the wreckage suggests missile(s).  Data from several different radars at the time of the disaster show pieces of the plane being blown off at speeds that could only have been generated by high explosives, not by a fuel tank exploding.  Radar data also show the plane falling, not rising.  (The CIA claimed, without offering any evidence, that the plane rose into the sky as it was exploding, thus accounting for witnesses’ reports of seeing objects rising.)  The damage to the seats and passengers in the plane was random, not greater closer to a fuel tank.

No more evidence was ever offered for a fuel tank exploding than could be offered in the theoretical fiction of a wedding cake exploding, or — for that matter — was ever offered for the Maine having been attacked by the Spanish in Havana harbor or for the Gulf of Tonkin incident having occurred or for the WMDs piling up in Iraq, or than has been offered thus far for the dreaded Iranian nuclear bomb program.  There was no wiring near the fuel tank that could have caused it to explode and no other explanation than faulty wiring even hypothesized.

The film concludes that likely three missiles were shot from near the Long Island coast, including at least one from a ship at sea.  The film does not address the question of who did this or why.  But it presents the evidence that it happened, and that the coverup began immediately, with the disaster site being quickly closed off and guarded by roughly 1,000 police officers, roughly half of them FBI — not the normal procedure for a plane crash.  The likely speculation is, of course, that the U.S. military committed this crime.  Was someone on the plane targeted for murder, and everyone else killed in the process?  Was this a test of technology?  Was it a mistake?  Was it part of some larger plot that failed to develop?  I don’t know.

But I do know that the nation didn’t go into a collective state of vicious rabid insanity, demanding vengeance against evildoers who hate us for our freedoms.  No nations were destroyed in a sick parody of justice following the destruction of TWA flight 800.  But neither were those responsible held publicly accountable in any way.

The New York Times seems impressed by the film and favors a new investigation but laments the supposed lack of any entity that could credibly perform an investigation.  Think about that.  The U.S. government comes off as so untrustworthy in the film that it can’t be trusted to re-investigate itself.  And a leading newspaper, whose job it ought to be to investigate the government, feels at a loss for what to do without a government that can credibly and voluntarily perform the media’s own job for it and hold itself accountable.

And then there were two

Update on the earlier story. Now two providers are shutting down — which will lead users of other services to wonder if they already cooperated with the government:

Two major secure e-mail service providers on Thursday took the extraordinary step of shutting down service.

A Texas-based company called Lavabit, which was reportedly used by Edward J. Snowden, announced its suspension Thursday afternoon, citing concerns about secret government court orders.

By evening, Silent Circle, a Maryland-based firm that counts heads of state among its customers, said it was following Lavabit’s lead and shutting its e-mail service as a protective measure.

Taken together, the closures signal that e-mails, even if they are encrypted, can be accessed by government authorities and that the only way to prevent turning over the data is to obliterate the servers that the data sits on.

Mike Janke, Silent Circle’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview late Thursday that his company had destroyed its server. “Gone. Can’t get it back. Nobody can,” he said. “We thought it was better to take flak from customers than be forced to turn it over.”

The company, in a blog post dated Friday, Aug. 9, said it had taken the extreme measure even though it had not received a search order from the government.

Ladar Levison, the owner of Lavabit, suggested — though did not say explicitly — that he had received a search order, and was opting to shut the service so as not to be “complicit in crimes against the American people.”

H/t Cos.

Boxing in Edward Snowden

This is the email service Edward Snowden has been usingFrom Lavabit owner Ladar Levison:

My Fellow Users,I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC

Defending the constitution is expensive! Help us by donating to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund here.

NSA analyst: Under Bush, we spied on Scalia, Powell, reporters, officials

Watch NSA Collects ‘Word for Word’ Every Domestic Communication on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

This is big news. No one’s actually come out and admitted this before, although Marcy Wheeler says that during John Bolton’s confirmation hearing, it was clear he had seen intercepts with Colin Powell’s name on it. This is why we have to fight this stuff, the potential for abuse is just too tempting for political animals. Just keep asking yourself: WWTCD? (What Would Ted Cruz Do?)

Joel Brenner, former NSA IG (and currently affiliated with the Chertoff Group security profiteers) pinky swears it’s all changed since then and everything’s hunky dory!

From PBS Newshour:

JUDY WOODRUFF: And we pick up on the continuing fallout from the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Last night, we debated the role of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence court, which approves the government’s requests to gather intelligence information on Americans.

Tonight, we have a conversation with three former NSA officials, a former inspector general and two NSA veterans who blew the whistle on what they say were abuses and mismanagement at the secret government intelligence agency.

William Binney worked at the NSA for over three decades as a mathematician, where he designed systems for collecting and analyzing large amounts of data. He retired in 2001. And Russell Tice had a two-decade career with the NSA where he focused on collection and analysis. He says he was fired in 2005 after calling on Congress to provide greater protection to whistle-blowers.

He claims the NSA tapped the phone of high-level government officials and the news media 10 years ago.

RUSSELL TICE, former National Security Agency analyst: The United States were, at that time, using satellites to spy on American citizens. At that time, it was news organizations, the State Department, including Colin Powell, and an awful lot of senior military people and industrial types.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, this is the early 2000s.

RUSSELL TICE: This was in 2002-2003 time frame. The NSA were targeting individuals. In that case, they were judges like the Supreme Court. I held in my hand Judge Alito’s targeting information for his phones and his staff and his family.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Bill Binney, what was your sense of who was being targeted and why they were being targeted? And what was being collected, in other words?

WILLIAM BINNEY, former National Security Agency technical leader: Well, I wasn’t aware of specific targeting like Russ was. I just saw the inputs were including hundreds of millions of records of phone calls of U.S. citizens every day. So it was virtually — there wasn’t anybody who wasn’t a part of this collection of information.

So, virtually, you could target anybody in this country you wanted.
Continue reading “NSA analyst: Under Bush, we spied on Scalia, Powell, reporters, officials”

They hate us for our freedom

cooker

UPDATE: Local police say the Catalanos were reported by an employer. See something, say something — even if you’re just a possibly-paranoid job creator, I guess!

I’m surprised no one showed up here. I’ve researched both these things in the past few months:

Freelance journalist Michele Catalano, a former music contributor at Forbes, received a friendly visit at her Long Island home from six agents from a joint terrorism task force on Wednesday morning.

In March Google reported that the FBI monitors the Web for potential terrorist activity, although the FBI told Adrien Chen of Gawker that the “FBI had no part in this law enforcement action.”

The FBI told to the Guardian that Catalano was “visited by Nassau County police department … They were working in conjunction with Suffolk County police department.”

Catalano said she had researched pressure cookers and her husband was looking for a backpack, a combination of terms that raises flags in the wake of bombings at the Boston Marathon on April 15 that killed three people and injured more than 260.

In a post describing the incident, Catalano writes:

Mostly I felt a great sense of anxiety. This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.

“But if you’re not doing anything wrong, what’s the big deal?”

Lawyer: Snowden has left airport

Washington Post:

MOSCOW — A Russian lawyer for Edward Snowden says the National Security Agency leaker has received asylum in Russia for one year and left the transit zone of Moscow’ airport.

Anatoly Kucherena said he handed over the papers to Snowden on Thursday. He said Snowden left Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport where he was stuck since his arrival from Hong Kong on June 23.

Kucherena said that Snowden’s whereabouts will be kept secret for security reasons.

The U.S. has demanded that Russia send Snowden home to face prosecution for espionage, but President Vladimir Putin has dismissed the request.