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

[Magda Hassan]

From Craig Murray.

All Law is Gone: Naked Power Remains

by craig on July 3, 2013 8:39 am in [URL="http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/category/uncategorized/"]Uncategorized
[/URL]The forcing down of the Bolivian President's jet was a clear breach of the Vienna Convention by Spain and Portugal, which closed their airspace to this Head of State while on a diplomatic mission. It has never been thought necessary to write down in a Treaty that Heads of State enjoy diplomatic immunity while engaged in diplomacy, as their representatives only enjoy diplomatic immunity as cyphers for their Head of State. But it is a hitherto unchallenged precept of customary international law, indeed arguably the oldest provision of international law.To the US and its allies, international law is no longer of any consequence. I can see no evidence that anyone in an official position has even noted the illegality of repeated Israeli air and missile strikes against Syria. Snowden, Manning and Assange all exposed illegality on a massive scale, and no action whatsoever has been taken against any of the criminals they exposed. Instead they are being hounded out of all meaningful life and ability to function in society.
I have repeatedly posted, and have been saying in public speeches for ten years, that under the UK/US intelligence sharing agreements the NSA spies on UK citizens and GCHQ spies on US citizens and they swap the information. As they use a shared technological infrastructure, the division is simply a fiction to get round the law in each country restricting those agencies from spying on their own citizens.
I have also frequently remarked how extraordinary it is that the media keep this "secret", which they have all known for years.
The Guardian published the truth on 29 June:
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[TD]At least six European Union countries in addition to Britain have been colluding withthe US over the mass harvesting of personal communications data, according to aformer contractor to America's National Security Agency, who said the public shouldnot be "kept in the dark".[/TD]
[TD]This article hasbeen takendown pendinganinvestigation.[/TD]
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[TD]Wayne Madsen, a former US navy lieutenant who first worked for the NSA in 1985 and over the next 12 years held several sensitive positions within the agency, names Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy as having secret deals with the US.[/TD]
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[TD]Madsen said the countries had "formal second and third party status" under signal intelligence (sigint) agreements that compels them to hand over data, including mobile phone and internet information to the NSA if requested.[/TD]
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[TD]Under international intelligence agreements, confirmed by declassified documents, nations are categorised by the US according to their trust level. The US is first party while the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand enjoy second party relationships. Germany and France have third party relationships.[/TD]
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The strange script which appears there happens when I try to copy and paste from this site which preserved the article before the Guardian censored all the material about the UK/US intelligence sharing agreement from it.
As you can see from the newssniffer site linked above, for many hours there was just a notice stating that the article was "taken down pending investigation", and then it was replaced on the same URL by the Guardian with a different story which does not mention the whistleblower Wayne Madsen or the intelligence sharing agreements!!
I can give, and I would give on oath, an eye witness guarantee that from my direct personal experience of twenty years as a British diplomat the deleted information from Wayne Madsen was true.