Snowden on Board? Bolivian President's Plane Forced to Land in Austria

[Peter Lemkin]

From the Guardian live blog:

Audio has been posted purporting to be of the conversation between a pilot aboard Morales's flight and the control room at Vienna airport. Although the Guardian cannot 100% verify the audio, it comes from a source who has a track record of monitoring aviation communications. (In this 2011 article, Huub, also known online as "BlackBox" and @FMCNL, is described as a former member of the Dutch military who has been monitoring radio frequency scanners, amplifiers, and antennas for more than 25 years.)
Part of the conversation goes:

"Do you need any assistance?"
"Not at this moment. We need to land because we cannot get a correct indication of the fuel indication...we need to land."

This problem might indicate why Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca accused France and Portugal of putting the president's life at risk by cancelling authorisation for the plane. But it is hard to believe that those countries would have refused permission to land if a problem was reported.
A press officer at Vienna airport said she could not confirm whether or not the audio recording was genuine.

That seems very far fetched....and too easy to expose. No government has denied it refused the plane permission to enter its space and they too could have offered it to land to fix any physical problems! Things don't 'fit'....but such is the nature of Deep Politics.