BBC

The Vatican has denounced attempts to link Pope Benedict XVI to a child abuse scandal in his native Germany.

Spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said there had been “aggressive” efforts to involve the Pope, but added: “It’s clear that these attempts have failed.”

The Holy See’s prosecutor meanwhile said that “to accuse the current Pope of hiding [cases of abuse] is false”.

The Pope’s former diocese earlier said he once unwittingly approved housing for a priest accused of child abuse.

The episode dates back to 1980 when he was archbishop of Munich and Freising, and known as Joseph Ratzinger.

However, a former deputy said he – not the future Pope – had made the decision to re-house the priest, who later abused other children and was convicted.

SEE FULL ARTICLE

New York Daily News

Tear it up.

Tear up the settlement for the 9/11 workers and revive that rarest of government programs, one actually efficient and responsive to the needs of those it was supposed to serve.

That program was the federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. It disbursed more than $7 billion to 5,560 claimants, while generating overhead costs of only 3%.

The fund was prepared to continue indefinitely, rightly predicting that people might not fall ill until years after exposure to the Pit’s poisons and carcinogens.

But such foresight and efficiency had no place in government.

Congress let the fund expire at the end of 2003, even though lawmakers had to know many more recovery workers would get sick and that some would die.

SEE FULL ARTICLE

CNN

A television station in Georgia triggered a panic when it broadcast a mock half-hour report about a Russian invasion of the country.

Emotions are still raw in many parts of Georgia after Russian tanks, troops and armored vehicles advanced into the former Soviet Republic in August 2008.

That invasion was triggered after Georgian troops attacked pro-Russian separatists in the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. In the fighting that ensued, each side offered conflicting figures on how many people died.

On Saturday night, the pro-government Imedi TV in Georgia broadcast what it called a “simulation” of what a fresh invasion would look like. And the broadcast ended with a note that the events in it were not real.

However, the show did not run any on-screen notes during the half-hour broadcast to alert viewers that what they were watching was not real.

SEE FULL ARTICLE

MI5 would have acted on the intelligence gained by waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the September 11 attacks, even if they had known how it was gained, sources say.

London Telegraph

A security source has told the Daily Telegraph that the intelligence gained saved lives and as such, they were obliged to use it.

In most cases they are not aware of the source of the information they are given by foreign intelligence agencies, and where they are aware, they are rarely told about how it was obtained.

Nevertheless, they are obliged to act on it where it could save lives, sources say.

One of the key details to have come from the US interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was his reference to a man called Esa al-Britani – a man later identified as the terrorist Dhiren Barot.

It remains unclear whether this information was gained after the waterboarding.

Barot, from Willesden, North West London, was planning an attack on hotels in London using gas canisters packed into limousines in a plot he called the “gas limos project.”

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who was the director general of MI5 at the time of Mohammed’s arrest, told a meeting on Tuesday that she did not realise Mohammed was being tortured.

“I said to my staff, ‘Why is he talking?’ because our experience of Irish prisoners and terrorist was that they never said anything.

“They said the Americans say he is very proud of his achievements when questioned about it. It wasn’t actually until after I retired that I read that in fact he had been waterboarded more thah 163 times.”

SEE FULL ARTICLE

Prison Planet – February 15th 2010

In the face of rapidly growing populist anger, the Obama administration has signaled that it will fall back on a form of power well known to all successful dictators – rule by decree – and that Obama will use the very instrument he campaigned against to ram through the new world order agenda – Executive Orders, and lots of them.

“With much of his legislative agenda stalled in Congress, President Obama and his team are preparing an array of actions using his executive power to advance energy, environmental, fiscal and other domestic policy priorities,” reports the New York Times.

Despite the fact that Obama campaigned on the platform of eliminating abuse of executive powers which occurred under Bush, he is on course to pass more executive orders than Bush did during his eight years in the White House.

During a May 2008 campaign event in Colorado, Obama promised to “not use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress,” and yet the administration’s announcement that they will use not merely signing statements, but wholesale Executive Orders, as a means of enforcing what Congress refuses to pass, is exactly that – an end run around the Constitution.

The government is keenly aware of the depth of unpopularity for measures like cap and trade, health care, bailouts, and other big government initiatives, which is why they are moving to rush them through by authoritarian decree before we see mass national strikes, protests and civil unrest.

Obama’s promise on signing statements was completely contradicted by his aides last month, who said that he “still reserves the right to ignore sections of bills he considers unconstitutional if objections have been lodged previously by the executive branch,” reports the NY Times.

Indeed, back in August the Times‘ Charlie Savage wrote that Obama “has issued signing statements claiming the authority to bypass dozens of provisions of bills enacted into law since he took office,” thereby doing exactly what he promised not to.

Over the course of his two terms in office, Bush had a total of 289 Executive Orders. After a little over a year in office, Obama has already passed 39 Executive Orders, meaning he is on course to be in the 300’s presuming he is re-elected in 2012.

Perhaps Obama’s most notorious Executive Order is the Establishment of the Council of Governors, which creates a body of ten state governors directly appointed by Obama who will work with the federal government to help advance the “synchronization and integration of State and Federal military activities in the United States”.

Critics have expressed fears that the order further blurs the lines between state and federal power, as well as greasing the skids for more military involvement in domestic affairs, and has stoked fears that Obama may be laying the groundwork for his promised “national civilian security force”.

Hopefully, since Obama has broken just about every major promise he made during the campaign, while not scaling back but expanding U.S. military operations abroad, his agenda to create what many have denounced as a brown shirt domestic cadre, not too far removed from the ominous “green police” depicted in the recent Audi commercial, will also fall by the wayside in the face of vociferous populist anger towards his policies.

SEE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Loss of basic freedoms has spurred a mass awakening, next decade will be defined by restoration of liberties

Prisonplanet.com

During the first nine years of the new millennium we have been witness to a rapid erosion of freedom. Our basic liberties have been systematically denigrated and diluted by a vast expansion of coordinated global tyranny.

The decade is not over yet, there is still another year to go, however, given that the mainstream media is obsessively compiling it’s own decade lists, we felt it necessary to draw up our own to highlight the major events that have shaped the world we now live in and the future we face.

It is important to stress the fact that while we have indeed experienced a decade of tyranny, we have also seen a mass awakening, an expansion of knowledge and an exponential increase in opposition to the agenda we have come to know as the new world order.

Here in chronological order, follow’s Prisonplanet.com’s defining moments of the decade.

2001 – 9/11

9/11 was the precursor for everything that followed during the decade of tyranny. The immediate invasion of Afghanistan saw the U.S. go to war without a formal declaration.

The passage of the USA PATRIOT Act overnight, with members of Congress not even being afforded time to read it, paved the way for a decade of freedom stripping government legislation.

The expansion of the phony war on terror as justification for big government, a domestic police state and an interventionist foreign policy also stemmed directly from 9/11.

Over the past decade we have ceaselessly exposed the lies behind 9/11. We have seen the 9/11 truth movement blossom from the efforts of a select few individuals to encompass the work of thousands.

While there is no doubt 9/11 is the decade of tyranny’s defining moment, exposing the truth behind it has also led to to an equally influential awakening that is still ongoing.

2002 – Creation Of The Department of Homeland Security

The fallout of 9/11 led to a re-alignment of power in the U.S., with the shadow government stepping out into the open and implementing elements of a long term agenda to subvert Constitutional freedom.

After the passage of the PATRIOT Act in late 2001, the next major step toward tyranny came with the expansion of the federal government through the creation of the DHS.

The DHS has played the role of the domestic police state enforcer agency, encompassing every major law enforcement agency in the nation under one single office.

With multiple subsequent reports and video productions fingering the American people as potential terrorists, the Orwellian titled agency has proven it has nothing to do with security and everything to do with limiting the freedoms of people all over the country.

2003 – Invasion Of Iraq

The March 2003 invasion of Iraq was a war based on a mountain of lies and deceit, and yet at the time the public swallowed the propaganda with wanton bloodlust. The constant invocation of a link between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein was repeatedly debunked both before and after the invasion, but the course for war was set.

The invasion was an illegal attack based on a wholly contrived pretext and the war was not approved by Congress. This set the precedent for unconstitutional global pre-emptive strikes in the name of the war on terror. Conservative estimates put the death told as a result of the invasion at around 655,000, but this number is far higher when the previous years sanctions are taken into account. Upon U.S. occupation of the country, Iraq was turned into one giant gulag, with hundreds of thousands detained and held in internment camps for the most menial offenses.

The occupation of Iraq provided the opportunity to build hundreds of military bases to be used as launch pads for future pre-emptive wars in the key geopolitical region of the Middle East.

2004 – The Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal

The Abu Ghraib torture scandal was shocking for two primary reasons. The first being the treatment of the prisoners themselves, the vast majority of whom were innocents caught up in random sweeps who had nothing to do with insurgents or terrorism whatsoever. However, the photographs that were broadcast around the world only scratched the surface of the the true horror of what happened not just at Abu Ghraib, but what happened and continues to occur at dozens of U.S. torture camps around the world where suspects are illegally kidnapped and imprisoned on a whim via a process euphemistically labeled “rendition”.

The second most disturbing aspect to the story was how the media covered it and how the public’s reaction was carefully manipulated. By only showing the most mild examples of torture, which in reality were disgusting but to a public immersed in violent movies and television were seen as tame, the true depth of the scandal, as revealed in the Taguba military report, was disguised. Abu Ghraib was also about inoculating the public against the idea that torture was something only history’s despotic regimes engaged in. To many who have been completely brainwashed by this tyranny – torture is now as American as Mom and apple pie.

Low-level culprits in the scandal were burned while their superiors who ordered them to torture in complete violation of both the U.S. constitution and the Geneva Conventions were protected by the Bush administration and continue to be protected by Obama who has failed to fulfil his election promise that they would be prosecuted and that similar detention sites like Guantanamo Bay would be closed.

2005 – Hurricane Katrina Fallout

The disaster in New Orleans provided the federal government with the perfect opportunity to wargame a martial law takeover.

Emergency preparedness legislation and FEMA executive orders that have been in effect for decades, were suddenly put into use at the expense of basic freedoms.

The Posse Comitatus Act was overturned as active duty military paraded the streets and aided police in confiscating firearms and implementing mandatory evacuation orders.

The precedent has now been set for natural disasters to constitute broad sweeping changes to ancient laws and rights, overturning and replacing basic liberties with repressive mechanisms of government control.

2006 – Liquid Bombing Scam

The biggest story of 2006 was undoubtedly the staged liquid bomb plot, which led to tighter restrictions on carrying fluids aboard airliners and heralded a new wave of invasive technologies to be implemented in airports and eventually introduced on a day-to-day basis.

Despite the fact that the alleged terrorists involved in the plot to explode multiple airliners were closely tracked for months beforehand, added to the fact that they didn’t have flight tickets or even passports, it was announced on August 10th that authorities had busted the plot amidst a wave of propaganda about continuing the war on terror, similar to what we are hearing in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt.

According to news reports the British government and MI5 wanted to wait at least a week before busting the liquid terror cell that their agents had fully infiltrated, including planting a mole within the bomb squad. From the acknowledged timeline and admission that the real attack was scheduled for August 16th – little else can be deduced but the shocking fact that MI5 wanted the bombings to go forward – arresting the perpetrators only after the attack.

A deluge of fearmongering and paranoia ensued, with ridiculous measures hastily enforced in airports which remain with us to this day, such as mothers being forced to drink their own bottled breast milk to prove it is not an explosive liquid.

2007 – Ron Paul Revolution, The Rise Of The Resistance

After years of endless war, economic decline and suppression of basic freedoms, 2007 saw a mobilization of resistance amid a clamor for change.

With a presidential election looming, Congressman Ron Paul, a public representative with an immaculate record, emerged as an icon of counteraction against the growth of big government and the erosion of liberty.

Beginning as an underground phenomenon driven by grassroots activists, the Ron Paul Revolution soon became a mainstream talking point and the Congressman was propelled to the forefront of the debate over America’s future.

Of course, big money and the monopoly of power eventually won out, so the 2008 election saw a new new world order puppet installed in the shape of Barack Obama.

However, Ron Paul’s incredible efforts throughout 2007 and 2008 during his presidential campaign provided a platform for the restoration of liberty and proved that the electoral process has not been completely usurped by those who have shown they have no allegiance to we the people.

2008 – The Bailout Heist

In October 2008, the central banks that own the U.S. government set the course for the most egregious looting of the American public in history with the passage of the TARP “bailout” legislation.

The bailout merely increased the severity of the financial downturn and allowed the same elite to exploit the crisis as a pretext for centralizing control of the world economic system and creating a new world order and a single global currency.

Henry Paulson, one of the chief architects of the bailout and the man who committed financial terrorism by threatening the Congress with martial law and food riots if they didn’t pass the initial TARP package, brazenly pocketed $200 million in Goldman Sachs profits tax free while handing out billions in ill-gotten gains to his bankster buddies, all this after he pulled a bait and switch by changing the entire focus of the bailout from buying up toxic debt to giving money directly to financial institutions.

Following the election of Barack Obama in November 2008, the new President’s actions made it abundantly clear that he would pick up where the Bush administration left off, increasing the looting exponentially to a figure well over $24 trillion by the latest estimates, which don’t even account for the last 6 months.

2009 – Acceleration of World Government

2009 represents the year that the agenda for a world government was both openly announced and the acceleration of its implementation reached breakneck speed as globalists exploited both the engineered financial crisis and the contrived global warming scam to move to finalize total dictatorial control over the planet.

In an October New York Times editorial entitled “We Can Do It,” Ki-moon wrote that efforts to impose restrictions on CO2 emissions “Must include an equitable global governance structure.”

New EU President Herman Van Rompuy said in a December press conference that the Copenhagen conference was, “The first step towards the global management of our planet.”

Similarly, Al Gore said in a speech earlier this year that attempts to regulate CO2 emissions would be driven through “global governance and global agreements.”

Although it failed to ram through a large portion of the global government agenda, the Copenhagen agreement laid the foundation for the introduction of a global transaction tax which would be paid to the World Bank, representing a massive transfer of wealth to the new world government now being primed for total takeover.

Ten years ago, people who warned about a coming new world order bossed by a global government were called paranoid conspiracy theorists. Is the march towards a one world government still a conspiracy theory, even as its architects openly announce its implementation?

The Decade of Freedom?

The battle between tyranny and freedom is a long term game of brinkmanship, however, as we move into 2010, we are reaching a crucial time in modern history. Humanity must decide whether to engage in a battle for freedom or accept a future under the rule of tyranny.

SEE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Bloomberg

A suspected terrorist’s attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner may override privacy concerns and intensify a push for full-body scanning equipment at airports.

U.S. officials charged a 23-year-old Nigerian man with trying to blow up Northwest Flight 253 as it prepared to land in Detroit on Christmas Day. President Barack Obama said yesterday he ordered a thorough review of the episode and called for new scrutiny of screening policies and technologies.

Metal detectors currently used to screen passengers wouldn’t have found the explosive allegedly carried aboard by the suspect, said former Federal Aviation Administration security chief Billie Vincent. Only more sophisticated devices such as low-level X-rays and millimeter-wave technology would work, Vincent said.

Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, called for more widespread use of the full-body scanners after the aborted attack. “We were very lucky this time but we may not be so lucky next time, which is why our defenses must be strengthened,” Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a statement yesterday.

The committee said it would hold a hearing next month on airline security and how the alleged terrorist got onto the plane.

Advanced Equipment

Companies such as OSI Systems Inc., Smiths Group Plc, Safran SA and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. may benefit from any requirement that airports get more security equipment. London-based Smiths is the world’s biggest maker of airport scanners. Safran, based in Paris, is the world leader in biometric technologies, such as fingerprint scanners. New York- based L-3 also makes scanners for airport use.

SEE FULL ARTICLE

Travelers harassed by intense airport security after Nigerian on terror list was allowed to attempt attack on Flight 253

PrisonPlanet.com

A passenger who boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam with attempted plane bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab says the would-be terrorist had no passport and was aided by a sharp-dressed man who claimed Mutallab was a Sudanese refugee, just one of a plethora of startling inconsistencies surrounding an incident that has led to ramped up security and increased levels of harassment in airports.

Every single fact that has come to light since the attempted bombing on Christmas Day directly indicates that the bomber was deliberately allowed to board the plane and that his attack would have succeeded if not for the alert and brave reactions of the passengers and flight crew.

According to Kurt Haskell, an attorney with the Haskell Law Firm in Taylor, Michigan, “He and his wife were sitting on the ground near their boarding gate in Amsterdam, which is when they saw Mutallab approach the gate with an unidentified man.”

Mutallab was a poorly dressed, young looking individual, but he was accompanied by a man in an expensive suit, Haskell told MLive.com.

“He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. “The guy said, ‘He’s from Sudan and we do this all the time.’”

Although Mutallab is Nigerian, Haskell said the well-dressed man portrayed him as a desperate Sudanese refugee in an attempt to elicit sympathy and as a way of bypassing his lack of documents.

“The ticket agent referred Mutallab and his companion to her manager down the hall, and Haskell didn’t see Mutallab again until after he allegedly tried to detonate an explosive on the plane,” states the report.

Crucially, Haskell said that after the plane landed he saw another man being taken into custody by the FBI along with Mutallab. However, the FBI later said that Mutallab was the only individual taken into custody.

Were the feds retrieving their own agent, the sharp dressed man who ensured that Mutallab boarded the plane despite his overwhelmingly suspicious circumstances?

Mutallab was a known security threat who was on the terror watch list. He is barred from entering Britain after being refused a new visa due to applying for a fake university course. Separate reports said that he did hold a valid visa, which begs the question, how can someone on a terror watch list be allowed to fly?

“On the one hand, it seems he’s been on the terror watch list but not on the no-fly list,” he said. “That doesn’t square because the American Department for Homeland Security has pretty stringent data-mining capability. I don’t understand how he had a valid visa if he was known on the terror watch list,” Dr Magnus Ranstorp of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies told the London Independent.

It has also been revealed that Mutallab’s father contacted U.S. intelligence officials a month ago and warned them that his son was a threat, but nothing was done.

The bomber’s father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, was a a former minister and chairman of First Bank in Nigeria. The bomber does not fit the image of a disgruntled, rag-tag terrorist. His considerable wealth allowed him to live in luxury at an imposing London mansion.

As a result of the failed attack, new security directives have been introduced for anyone traveling into America. Intense body and hand-luggage searches and sniffer dogs have been beefed up at departure gates and passengers have been ordered not to stand during the final hour of the flight and are not allowed access to any of their hand luggage during the final hour.

There can be little doubt that whatever the nature of this incident, it will be exploited to the maximum in order to further tighten the stranglehold of police state security measures that are increasingly finding their way out of the airport and into our everyday lives. Homeland Security proposals to use a mandatory shock bracelet that will be fitted to all travelers will now move closer to implementation, as will the increased global rollout of x-ray scanning machines that produce naked images of passengers.

However, if you’re a suspicious looking man on a terror watch list with no passport carrying explosives, you should breeze through security with no questions asked, just be sure to have a sharp-dressed man with you at all times.

New York Daily News

They didn’t find that out until early Christmas morning 2009, eight years later, when the firefighter’s lungs finally overfilled with fluids, the side-effects of pancreatic cancer inflicted on him by the toxic dust he swallowed in hundreds of hours at Ground Zero.

Ryan answered the call of duty on 9/11, then went beyond, returning to the blasted ground for months. First, he hunted survivors, then victims, then just fragments of people – his FDNY brothers among them – whose lives and bodies were shattered that day.

He didn’t realize how his own life was being shattered. Officials said the air was safe. He got cancer in 2006 that the Fire Department said came from the poison rubble. He beat it once. He couldn’t beat it a second time, as a 48-year-old father of three.

On Christmas Eve, he tried to be himself, optimistic, helping with the morning dishes in his Kings Park, L.I., home as if he were not dying. By then, though, he had been off his cancer treatments since November because they no longer worked.

“That’s just the way he is,” his wife, Magda, said Christmas night, hours after her husband lost his final struggle.

That’s the way most real heroes are, but there were no national headlines the next day mourning a hero firefighter’s death, the way there were on Sept. 12, 2001, when 343 of Ryan’s brethren met their ends.

The news yesterday was instead full of a botched airline terror attempt.

SEE FULL ARTICLE