Flight 253 passenger Kurt Haskell: 'I was visited by the FBI'


By Aaron Foley
MLive.com
December 31, 2009


Following up on a visit from FBI officials about an eyewitness account first described to MLive.com, Michigan attorney Kurt Haskell described the visit in comment sections across MLive on Wednesday.

Haskell and his wife, Lori, were aboard Flight 253 when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to destroy the plane. They say another man tried to help Abdulmutallab board the plane in Amsterdam.

Haskell had two detailed posts in two different stories.

Here is Part One, originally posted here (nothing below in the indent has been changed):

Today is the second worst day of my life after 12-25-09. Today is the day that I realized that my own country is lying to me and all of my fellow Americans.

Let me explain.

Ever since I got off of Flight 253 I have been repeating what I saw in US Customs. Specifically, 1 hour after we left the plane, bomb sniffing dogs arrived. Up to this point, all of the passengers on Flight 253 stood in a small area in an evacuated luggage claim area of an airport terminal. During this time period, all of the passengers had their carry on bags with them. When the bomb sniffing dogs arrived, 1 dog found something in a carry on bag of a 30 ish Indian man.

This is not the so called "Sharp Dressed" man. I will refer to this man as "The man in orange". The man in orange, who stood some 20ft away from me the entire time until he was taken away, was immediately taken away to be searched and interrogated in a nearby room. At this time he was not handcuffed. When he emerged from the room, he was then handcuffed and taken away. At this time an FBI agent came up to the rest of the passengers and said the following (approximate quote) "You all are being moved to another area because this area is not safe. I am sure many of you saw what just happened (Referring to the man in orange) and are smart enough to read between the lines and figure it out."

We were then marched out of the baggage claim area and into a long hallway. This entire time period and until we left customs, no person that wasn't a law enforcement personnel or a passenger on our flight was allowed anywhere on our floor of the terminal (or possibly the entire terminal) The FBI was so concerned during this time, that we were not allowed to use the bathroom unless we went alone with an FBI agent, we were not allowed to eat or drink, or text or call anyone. I have been repeating this same story over the last 5 days.

The FBI has, since we landed, insisted that only one man was arrested for the airliner attack (contradicting my account). However, several of my fellow passengers have come over the past few days, backed up my claim, and put pressure on FBI/Customs to tell the truth.

Early today, I heard from two different reporters that a federal agency (FBI or Customs) was now admitting that another man has been held (and will be held indefinitely) since our flight landed for "immigration reasons." Notice that this man was "being held" and not "arrested", which was a cute semantic ploy by the FBI to stretch the truth and not lie.

Just a question, could that mean that the man in orange had no passport?

However, a few hours later, Customs changed its story again. This time, Mr. Ron Smith of Customs, says the man that was detained "had been taken into custody, but today tells the news the person was a passenger on a different flight." Mr. Ron Smith, you are playing the American public for a fool. Lets take a look at how plausible this story is (After you've already changed it twice). For the story to be true, you have to believe, that:

1. FBI/Customs let passengers from another flight co-mingle with the passengers of flight 253 while the most important investigation in 8 years was pending. I have already stated that not one person who wasn't a passenger or law enforcement personnel was in our area the entire time we were detained by Customs.

2. FBI/Customs while detaining the flight 253 passengers in perhaps the most important investigation since the last terrorist attack, and despite not letting any flight 253 passenger drink, eat, make a call, or use the bathroom, let those of other flights trample through the area and possibly contaminate evidence.

3. You have to believe the above (1 and 2) despite the fact that no flights during this time allowed passengers to exit off of the planes at all and were detained on the runway during at least the first hour of our detention period.

4. You have to believe that the man that stood 20 feet from me since we entered customs came from a mysterious plane that never landed, let its passengers off the plane and let this man sneak into our passenger group despite having extremely tight security at this time (i.e. no drinking even).

5. FBI/Customs was hauling mysterious passengers from other flights through the area we were being held to possibly comtaminate evidence and allow discussions with suspects on Flight 253 or to possibly allow the exchange of bombs, weapons or other devices between the mysterious passengers from other flights and those on flight 253.

Seriously Mr. Ron Smith, how stupid do you think the American public is?

Mr. Ron Smith's third version of the story is an absolute inplausible joke. I encourage you, Mr. Ron Smith, to debate me anytime, anywhere, and anyplace in public to let the American people see who is credible and who is not.

I ask, isn't this the more plausible story:

1. Customs/FBI realized that they screwed up and don't want to admit that they left flight 253 passengers on a flight with a live bomb on the runway for 20 minutes.

2. Customs/FBI realized that they screwed up and don't want to admit that they left flight 253 passengers in customs for 1 hour with a live bomb in a carry on bag.

3. Customs/FBI realize that the man in orange points to a greater involvement then the lone wolf theory that they have been promoting.

Mr. Ron Smith I encourage you to come out of your cubicle and come up with a more plausible version number 4 of your story.

Haskell continued his comment in a different post on MLive.

For the last five days I have been reporting my story of the so called "sharp dressed man."  For those of you who haven't read my account, it involves a sharp dressed "Indian man" attempting to talk a ticket agent into letting a supposed "Sudanese refugee" (The terrorist) onto flight 253 without a passport. I have never had any idea how it played out except to note that the so called "Sudanese reefugee" later boarded my flight and attempted to blow it up and kill me. At no time did my story involve, or even find important whether the terrorist actually had a passport. The importance of my story was and always will be, the attempt with an accomplice (apparently successful) of a terrorist with all sorts of prior terrorist warning signs to skirt the normal passport boarding procedures in Amsterdam. By the way, Amsterdam security did come out the other day and admit that the terrorist did not have to "Go through normal passport checking procedures".

Amsterdam security, please define to the American public "Normal passport boarding procedures".

You see the FBI would have the American public believe that what was important was whether the terrorist in fact had a passport.

Seriously think about this people.

You have a suicide bomber who had recently been to Yemen to buy a bomb, whose father had reported him as a terrorist, who supposedly was on some kind of U.S. terror watchlist, and most likely knew the U.S. was aware of these red flags. Yet, he didn't go through "Normal passport checking procedures." What does that mean? Maybe that he flashed a passport to some sort of sympathetic security manager in a back room to avoid a closer look at the terrorist's "red flags"? What is important is that the terrorist avoided using normal passport checking procedures (apparently successfully) in order to avoid a closer look into his red flags. Who cares if he had a passport. The important thing is that he didn't want to show it and somehow avoided a closer inspection and "normal passport checking procedures." Each passport comes with a bar code on it that can be scanned to provide a wealth of information about the individual. I would bet that the passport checking procedures for the terrorist did not include a bar code scan of his passport (which could have revealed damning information about the terrorist).

Please note that there is a very easy way to verify the veracity of my prior "sharp dressed man" account.

Dutch police have admitted that they have reviewed the video of the "sharp dressed man" that I referenced.

Note that it has not been released anywhere, You see, if my eye witness account is false, it could easily be proven by releasing the video.

However, the proof of my eyewitness account would also be verified if I am telling the truth and I am. There is a reason we have only heard of the video and not seen it. Dutch authorities, "RELEASE THE VIDEO!" This is the most important video in 8 years and may be all of two minutes long. Show the entire video and  "DO NOT EDIT IT"!

The American public deserves its own chance to attempt to identify the "sharp dressed man". I have no doubt that if the video indicated that my account was wrong, that the video would have already swept over the entire world wide web.

Instead of the video, we get a statement that the video has been viewed and that the terrorist had a passport. Each of these statements made by the FBI is a self serving play on semantics and each misses the importance of my prior "sharp dressed man" account.

The importance being that the man "Tried to board the plane with an accomplice and without a passort".

The other significance is that only the airport security video can verify my eyewitness account and that it is not being released.

Who has the agenda here and who doesn't? Think about that for a minute.

Source:
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/12/flight_253_passenger_kurt_hask.html
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A Coup at Foggy Bottom?


By Conn Hallinan
TPJ Magazone
December 20, 2009



Watching the Obama Administration’s about-face in the Middle East and Latin America raises an uncomfortable question: have neo-conservative Democrats—a section closely associated with the Clinton wing of the Party— undermined U.S. foreign policy? Whatever the source of the shifts, their effect has been to heighten tensions in both areas of the world and marginalize the U.S. just as it was beginning to break out of the isolation of the Bush years.

When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton abandoned the White House’s demand to halt the growth of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, it not only drew outrage from U.S. allies like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, it brought into question the entire peace process. For the first time in decades, Palestinians are threatening to unilaterally declare a state, and some are openly raising the possibility of abandoning a two-state solution in favor of a single bi-national entity.

A bi-national solution would “spell the end of Israel as a democratic state,” editorialized the Financial Times. “It would come to resemble in many ways the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. If [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu believes that he has achieved a victory by refusing to halt the settlements, he is wrong. It is more like a project of national suicide.”

The Economist put the blame squarely on Obama: “From the Palestinian and Arab points of view, his administration…has meekly capitulated to Israel.”

The recent announcement that Israel would build 900 units in East Jerusalem suggests that the Netanyahu government feels it can now act without fear of a break with Washington. While Tel Aviv announced a 10-week “freeze” last week, the “freeze” will not cover 3,000 units already under construction, more than 20 “public” buildings, or any of the new construction in East Jerusalem.

If outrage is the reaction to the Administration’s U-turn in the Middle East, shock is the common response in Latin America to the State Department’s about face on the Honduran coup.

When President Manuel Zelaya was ousted by the military June 28, the White House joined the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations in demanding his reinstatement. “We believe the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the democratically elected president there,” said Obama.

Now, according to State Department spokesman Ian Kelly, the U.S. intends to break that pledge and recognize the winner of the Nov. 29 elections, which were organized by the coup government. According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, demonstrations opposed to the election have been savagely repressed.

So far, only Panama and Costa Rica have supported the U.S. position.

Almost overnight, the good will Obama created by his Cairo address to the Muslim world, and his Administration’s quick denunciation of the Honduran coup has vanished.

What happened?

On Honduras, the Republicans are taking credit for the Administration’s change of heart. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) claims it was his hold over two State Department nominees that caused the White House to drop its support of Zelaya. DeMint said he was “very thankful” that Obama and Clinton “have finally taken the side of the Honduran people.”

According to COIMER & OP poll, only 22.2 percent of Hondurans support the coup government led by Roberto Micheletto.

But it seems unlikely that the White House would cave over two appointments. In fact, the State Department had begun backing away from Obama’s statement long before DeMint came into the picture. Zelaya’s name was suddenly dropped in favor of a formula that called for a “return to constitutional order.”

A muscular foreign policy—and strong support for Israel—are policies that have long been touchstones for the right wing of the Democratic Party. It was the Clinton Administration that first intervened in the Colombian civil war, bombed the Sudan, and launched the war against Serbia. Secretary Clinton, along with other hawks, is pushing for a major expansion of the war in Afghanistan.

It seems more likely that the State Department’s support for the Nov. 29 election was a not-so-subtle shot across the bow aimed at countries that the U.S. considers unfriendly.

The recent release of a U.S. Air Force document on current U.S.-Colombian military agreement suggests that the U.S. is indeed preparing to exert greater military power in Latin America. According to Venezuelan lawyer Eva Golinger, the document, submitted to the U.S. Congress last May as part of the 2010 budget considerations, contradicts claims by the U.S. and the Colombian government of Alvaro Uribe that the deployment of U.S. forces in Colombia is solely aimed at local narcotics traffic and terrorism, and will not affect Colombia’s neighbors.

The agreement says U.S. deployment in seven bases scattered around Colombia will allow Washington to engage in “full spectrum military operations in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from narcotics funded terrorists insurgencies…and anti-US governments…”

And further, that the Palanquero Base in particular  “…will also increase our capability to conduct Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), improve global reach, support logistics requirements, improve partnerships, improve theater security cooperation and expand expeditionary warfare capability.” *

In a statement that had a strong whiff of the Monroe Doctrine about it, U.S. Southern Command head General Douglas Fraser warned that Iran’s “growing influence” in the region poses a “potential risk.” Speaking in Miami last June, the General charged that Iran is building connections to “extremist organizations” on the continent, and has forged close ties with Venezuela and Cuba.

The U.S. recently reactivated the Fifth Fleet, giving it the ability to project considerable naval power throughout Latin America.

The scope of the Colombia base agreement should make a number of countries nervous, especially those that the State Department considers “anti-US”: Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. The term “unfriendly” could also include Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and even Brazil, which has helped lead a continent-wide independence movement against U.S. domination of the region.

The Bolivian government of Evo Morales charges that U.S. organizations like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) support a separatist movement in the oil and gas rich eastern provinces of the country. This past April, Bolivian special forces stormed a hotel in Santa Cruz—the center of the anti-Morales movement—and killed several heavily armed mercenaries who apparently planned to sow chaos in the province.

Weapons and explosives used to attack Morales supporters were traced to wealthy business owners who are active in the rightwing separatist Santa Cruz Civic Committee. The Committee has received support from USAID and NED.

Venezuela says that the Colombian bases threaten the government of Hugo Chavez, against whom the U.S. supported a short-lived coup in 2002. Chavez and Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa both charge that the U.S. aided a recent invasion of Ecuador by Colombian troops seeking out members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Ecuador’s Defense Minister, Javier Ponce, has requested a meeting with the President Obama over the U.S.-Colombia agreement.

The atmosphere in Paraguay is tense following the removal of the country’s top military leaders by leftist President Fernando Lugo. There have been several coup attempts since the end of the 35-year military dictatorship in 1989, and Chavez recently charged that a plan to overthrow Lugo was recently hatched in Bolivia by “ultra-rightwing elements.”

In neighboring Uruguay left-wing former guerrilla Jose “Pepe” Mujica won the election for president, and some of the right-wing in that country vows he will never be allowed to take power.

An outbreak of coups in all these countries seems unlikely, but is certainly not out of the question, particularly if right-wingers—who  dominated the continent throughout the 1980s and ‘90s—think  overthrowing an “unfriendly” government will be met with a wink and a nod from Washington.

U.S. support for the Honduran elections effectively torpedoed a diplomatic solution to the crisis. When Micheletti formed a “unity” government excluding Zelaya, the ousted president, holed up in the Brazilian embassy, announced that the U.S. brokered agreement was “dead.” The Honduran congress said it would not consider reinstating Zelaya until after the election.

U.S. isolation on this issue is palpable.

Meeting in Jamaica, the foreign ministers of the Rio Group—every country in Latin America and most the Caribbean—called for reinstating Zelaya. OAS President Jose Miguel Insulza demanded that the Honduran government be led by its “legitimate” president. Both the UN and the European Union say they will not recognize the Nov. 29 elections.

More than 240 leading U.S. academics and Latin American experts sent a letter to Obama calling on the State Department to denounce human rights violations by the Micheletti government and re-instate Zelaya.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka demanded that the Obama Administration oppose the Nov. 29 election and return Zelaya to the presidency.

Mark Weisbrot, director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, says unless the Obama Administration reverses course, it is going to be “just as isolated as Bush vis-à-vis the hemisphere.”

Whatever the explanation for the shift in foreign policy , there is little argument about the results: anger, charges of betrayal, and a diminishment of hope, from the Middle East to Latin America.

Source:

http://tpjmagazine.us/hallinan09

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The Dirty Secrets of Carbon Trading


By Elliot Hannon
Time
Dec. 03, 2009



Toranagallu, INDIA  - Two hundred miles north of Bangalore and 4,500 miles southeast of Copenhagen, where world leaders will meet next week in a landmark conference on climate change, sits the southern Indian village of Toranagallu. While the residents of this mostly rural hamlet may not realize it, the same environmental problems they grapple with in their daily lives may well be on the table at the UN's Copenhagen conference, as attendees decide whether to overhaul an international carbon-trading mechanism designed to help developing nations cut greenhouse gases.

That's because Toranagallu is also home to a 3,700-acre forest of puffing smokestacks that make up the Jindal South West steel factory. Opened a over a decade ago, Jindal South West has over the past several years claimed an estimated $150 million in carbon credits thanks to its internationally recognized status as a part of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) administered by the UN under the Kyoto Protocol. But while the steel plant's efforts to reduce its emissions may in a very small way be helping the earth's atmosphere, villagers complain any benefits are lost on them. "Since the plant has come, the village's water supply is polluted, and the air is polluted from the dust and smoke," says KSL Swamy, the Toranagallu representative in the state legislature. "Salaries at the plant are very good," he says, "but the pollution is very bad. We feel it." (See pictures 25 years after India's Bhopal industrial disaster.)

The controversy in Toranagallu raises questions about the effectiveness of CDM projects and the wisdom of relying on the carbon market to combat climate change. While carbon trading has helped lower overall global emissions, some argue the CDM system has significant flaws that need to be addressed in Copenhagen. One problem, critics say, is that the mechanism is subject to manipulation and creates undeserving winners. For example, the UN body in charge of managing carbon trading reportedly has suspended approvals that would have awarded credits for the construction of dozens of wind farms in China. Projects only qualify for credits if applicants can prove they could not be built without them. According to the Financial Times, the UN determined some 50 wind power projects were in fact viable without the credits because they qualified for Chinese government subsidies — but Beijing had deliberately lowered subsidies to make them eligible for CDM funding.

Toranagallu illustrates another unintended consequence of the CDM system: it tends to prop up the dirtiest industries in developing countries such as India, essentially allowing the industrialized West to outsource the heavy lifting of greenhouse-gas reduction to the world's poorer nations. "The trouble is the design of the CDM has been to guarantee the cheapest option for the Western countries to balance their carbon books," says Sunita Narain of the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi. "It's not [just]what is happening in India that is flawed, it is flawed in design."

The CDM was meant to create a market-based system to curb global emission of greenhouse gases. To help make this happen, instead of strictly holding countries to their emission reduction commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, it allows companies and countries to continue to pollute if they offset their emissions by purchasing Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs) — each representing 1 ton of carbon — from developing countries —where carbon-reducing modifications to power plants, factories and other facilities would be less costly. This was meant to promote the dispersion of green technology to the developing world, and also give emerging economies like India and China a financial incentive to start cleaning up their dirty industries. In mid-2005 the global carbon market sprang to life and three years later had grown twelve-fold to $126 billion, according to the World Bank. "In terms of total investment it's been a remarkable success," says Henry Derwent, President and CEO of the Geneva-based International Emissions Trading Association(IETA). "It's done exactly what was expected of it."

But concerns persist about whether the market is generating enough highly effective carbon-reducing projects, such as solar power plants and public transit systems — or if it is actually retarding the pace of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by subsidizing the dirtiest industries, which can rather easily and cheaply generate credits because they have the most to clean up and often have the resources to make improvements. Fluorochemical companies in India, for example, have been the biggest generators of CERs for the global market. That's because companies like SRF, a fluorochemical company headquartered outside of New Delhi, emit a gas called HFC-23 during the process of making chemicals for refrigerators and air conditioners. HFC-23 is 11,700 times more harmful to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. SRF invested $3 million to equip its factory to burn the gas instead of releasing it into the atmosphere, a project that could earn it some 3.8 million CERs annually, worth about $600 million over the next decade.

It's easy to rush to condemn projects like these that seem counterintuitive to the very logic of the CDM. But the planet's atmosphere is perfectly happy with the tradeoff, says Derwent of the IETA, "just as much as it would be happy with the reduction of CO2 over a long period by the adoption of wind power in the place of coal." What matters is the absolute reduction in carbon emissions, regardless of the source, he says. "That's what markets do, they find the cheapest, most cost-efficient way of producing whatever it is that's demanded," says Derwent. "That's a good thing, not a bad thing. That means that the atmosphere gets an emissions reduction at a cheaper cost."

In Toranagallu, the Jindal plant continues to expand as the company pursues carbon credits by generating power through the burning of waste gas created during steel manufacture. In a bid for more carbon dollars, a second power plant was built. "The carbon revenues were a major factor in taking up these projects," says Suresh Iyer, the chief coordinator of carbon trading at Jindal South West. If a project is reducing carbon, he says, "we do take the initiative and put up the plant because of that." The second plant, which Iyer estimates cost the company $50 million to build, was approved by the CDM in January 2007 and now earns an estimated 700,000 CERs a year.

The carbon financial windfall has yet to trickle down to the villagers in Toranagallu, many of whom say life has gotten worse, not better, since the steel mill first arrived. What they don't know is that, like it or not, the global battle against climate change is being fought in their backyard.

Source:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1945243,00.html
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Dear Tea Baggers,

I am convinced that close to 90% of you have no clue what you're even protesting.

If it's the debt or the deficit, where were you the last eight years? You scream about ignoring the Constitution, but when pressed for specific examples you stutter on about Socialism. Most of you don't even know the definition of socialism, it's just a buzzword your rich corporate sponsors injected into the debate to further their own agenda.

You shout people down in town halls while they talk about loved ones who were denied care by health insurance company "death panels." Classy.

And stop calling it a "government take over of health care," if anything, the current bills are the opposite, driving more people into the free-market health care system and making those insurers even wealthier. Shouldn't that make you happy?

Also? Please stop bringing up the founding fathers. You did not know them. You do not have some sort of special access to their views on the current debate if they were alive today. For all you know, they would have voted for Barack Obama.

If you want to go back to the days of the founding fathers as your misspelled signs and civil war garb suggests, you will also have to give up the following:


■ Cars
■ Sneakers
■ Fast food
■ Telephones
■ Chocolate chip cookies
■ Fox News
■ Medicare
■ Rush Limbaugh
■ Automatic weapons

I knew those last two would change your mind. Oh, and the founding fathers read....a lot, and not books by Glenn Beck.

Maybe you should start by reading the Constitution, I suggest Article I Section 8.

Sincerely,

Coffee Filterer


By By Ken Kupchik
Air America
Dec. 1, 2009

Source:
http://airamerica.com/really/12-01-2009/letter-tea-baggers/
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