Belgian police have arrested almost 500 peace activists outside the NATO HQ in Brussels. Protesters attempted to storm the building, but were met with a heavy-handed response from hundreds of officers. Demonstrators say the march was called to protest NATO’s hawkish intervention policies. For more on this RT talks to one of the activists who actually took part. Hans Lammerant, a spokesman for ‘NATO Game Over’, joins us now from Brussels.

Two British tourists were barred from entering America after joking on Twitter that they were going to ‘destroy America’ and ‘dig up Marilyn Monroe’.

Leigh Van Bryan, 26, was handcuffed and kept under armed guard in a cell with Mexican drug dealers for 12 hours after landing in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting.

The Department of Homeland Security flagged him as a potential threat when he posted an excited tweet to his pals about his forthcoming trip to Hollywood which read: ‘Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?’

After making their way through passport control at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) last Monday afternoon the pair were detained by armed guards.

Despite telling officials the term ‘destroy’ was British slang for ‘party’, they were held on suspicion of planning to ‘commit crimes’ and had their passports confiscated.

CONTINUED at The Daily Mail.

Critics say it proves Senator wasn’t being detained

Security video of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s run in with the TSA earlier this week has been leaked to a newspaper, and critics say it proves that Paul was not detained by the federal agency.

The footage, obtained by The Tennessean shows the Senator seated in a chair within a glass walled cubicle in the security area of Nashville airport after refusing to undergo a pat down.

As Paul talks on the phone, presumably to his office as he had stated in interviews, three TSA officials stand guard, along with police officers standing outside the cubicle.

The video then shows Paul later being escorted through the airport by an official. The footage represents about one minute of the incident which Paul said lasted over an hour.

The Senator is partially obscured by a column blocking part of the cubicle for some portions of the video. When asked why the camera would be set up only to be obscured by a column, airport spokeswoman Emily Richard told The Tennessean that cameras are “placed for the widest view possible, not a specific area.”

The airport authority and the TSA have declined to comment on the footage.

Watch the video below:

Although the report in The Tennessean points out that the footage contradicts a police report that claimed Paul was “irate”, critics jumped on the footage to suggest Paul over reacted and exaggerated the incident.

Max Read of blog site Gawker said he believes the video proves the Republican was “totally full of sh-t” when he called his spokesperson.

“I got a lot of mail, some of it syntactically and orthographically correct, disputing my account of Rand Paul’s full-of-sh-tness by referring to the dictionary definition of the word ‘detained.’” Read wrote.

“Here is my feeling: when your argument centers around ‘the dictionary definition’ of anything and involves the adverb ‘technically,’ you are full of sh-t. When you tell someone you are being ‘detained by the TSA,’ you don’t mean ‘sitting in a chair while they decide what to do.’”

Another blogger suggested that “the way Paul was treated (not a finger laid on him) doesn’t quite illustrate the harshness that word [detainment'] usually suggests.”

In response Paul supporters pointed out that just because Paul wasn’t shackled and pushed around doesn’t mean he wasn’t being detained by the TSA.

“‘Detained’ is a legal term that very much applies to this situation. It does not matter that he is not in handcuffs or behind bars; when a peace officer restricts your freedom to vacate an area through verbal instruction (the consequence of disobedience being immediate arrest for disorderly conduct), you are detained.” one commenter noted.

Following the incident Monday, Rand Paul told reporters “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.”

——————————————————————

Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, andPrisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.

Source: Prison Planet.

Sen. Rand Paul told his communications director this morning he was being detained by TSA at the Nashville airport.

The Twitter account associated with Paul staffer Moira Bagley, @moirabagley, tweeted around 10 a.m., ET, “Just got a call from @senrandpaul. He’s currently being detained by TSA in Nashville.”

A TSA spokesman said the agency was looking into the matter but could not immediately comment.

Paul apparently set off  an airport security full-body scanner “on a glitch,” a spokesman in Paul’s office told ABC News.

The Paul staffer said TSA agents would not let Paul walk back through the body scanner and were demanding a full body pat-down.

The Paul spokesman said his office called TSA administrator John Pistole about the incident this morning.

The Senate is back in session today at 2 p.m., with votes scheduled at 4:30 p.m.

The issue of pat-downs has been an important one to Paul, the son of libertarian-leaning Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. Sen.  Paul brought this issue up at a hearing earlier this year.

Source: ABC News. Video at link.

Obama Wants to Veto the Indefinite Detention Bill Because It Would Hold the U.S. to the Geneva Convention

I – like everyone else – am horrified by the Senate’s passage of legislation that would allow forindefinite detention of Americans.

And at first, I – like many others – assumed that Obama’s threat to veto the bill might be a good thing. But the truth is much more disturbing.

As former Wall Street Street editor and columnist Paul Craig Roberts correctly notes:

The Obama regime’s objection to military detention is not rooted in concern for the constitutional rights of American citizens. The regime objects to military detention because the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war. As Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin put it: Should somebody determined “to be a member of an enemy force who has come to this nation or is in this nation to attack us as a member of a foreign enemy, should that person be treated according to the laws of war? The answer is yes.”

Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights. These rights would interfere with the regime’s ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas. [Yes, Obama is still apparently allowing "extraordinary renditions" to torture people abroad.] This is what the Obama regime means when it says that the requirement of military detention denies the regime “flexibility.”

CONTINUED at Washington’s Blog.

Why is the Senate the winner of the D-Bag trophy this week? Well, 93-7 they passed the NDAA. If you do not know what that is, you are an uninformed idiot that needs to pay more attention. Rand Paul fought nearly a one man battle against his colleagues in order to squash this tyrannical new law but his efforts had little to no effect against these tyrants and control freaks. Read on the NDAA here, here, here and here.

The Senate last night codified into law the power of the U.S. military to indefinitely detain an American citizen with no charge, no trial and no oversight whatsoever with the passage of S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act.

One amendment that would have specifically blocked the measures from being used against U.S. citizens was voted down and the final bill was passed 93-7.

Another amendment introduced by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein that attempted to bar the provision from being used on American soil, an effort to ensure “the military won’t be roaming our streets looking for suspected terrorists,” also failed, although Feinstein voted in favor of the bill anyway.

Feinstein was able to include a largely symbolic amendment which states that “nothing in the bill changes current law relating to the detention of U.S. citizens and legal aliens,” but this measure is meaningless according to Republican Congressman Justin Amash, a fierce critic of the bill.

“Some have asserted that Sen. Feinstein’s amendment, S Amdt 1456, protects the rights of American citizens and preserves constitutional due process. Unfortunately, it does not. It’s just more cleverly worded nonsense,” Amash wrote on his Facebook page.

CONTINUED on Prison Planet.

Two new amendments that would attempt to halt the indefinite detention of American citizens on U.S. soil under a section of the National Defense Authorization Act have been introduced and could be voted on by the end of the day, even as Obama administration lawyers reaffirmed their backing for state sponsored assassination of U.S. citizens.

Ron Paul’s Campaign For Liberty website has the details.

Senate Amendment (SA) 1126 would “clarify” Section 1031 to explicitly state within the section that the authority of the military to detain persons without trial until the end of hostilities does not apply to American citizens.

SA 1125 would limit the mandatory detention provision in Section 1032 to persons captured abroad, not in America.

However, given the fact that a previous amendment which merely sought to provide oversight for the egregious Section 1031 of the NDAA bill was voted down comprehensively yesterday, getting these two new amendments passed seems a tall order.

Indeed, despite some expressing confidence that Obama will veto the NDAA bill because of the indefinite detention provision, the Obama administration today reaffirmed the notion that it considers American citizens as legitimate targets for state assassination in the war on terror.

CONTINUED on Prison Planet.

Top national security lawyers in the Obama administration say U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida.

The lawyers were asked at a national security conference Thursday about the CIA killing of Anwar al-Alwaki, a U.S. citizen and leading al-Qaida figure. He died in a Sept. 30 U.S. drone strike in the mountains of Yemen.

The government lawyers – CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson – did not directly address the al-Alwaki case. But they said U.S. citizens don’t have immunity when they’re at war with the United States.

Johnson said only the executive branch, not the courts, are equipped to make decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.

Source: AP.

Forget about the obvious violation of Constitutional rights that the recently-approved $662 billion Defense Authorization bill inflicts by allowing for indefinite military detention of United States citizens without formal charges or trial by a jury of peers, the justification for doing so just became more absurd. In the clip below, Rand Paul (R-KY) asks John McCain (R-AZ), “if an American citizen is declared an enemy combatant, could they be sent to Guantanamo Bay and detained indefinitely?”

To which McCain replied affirmative; “If they pose a threat to the security of the United States of America.” McCain claimed this new anti-American authority was needed because of the “facts” that “27% of detainees who were released get back into the fight.”

CONTINUED at Activist Post.