A dramatic video showing fighter jets shooting down a small plane carrying an American family over Peru in a CIA operation gone tragically wrong has emerged. The video footage was taken by a CIA surveillance plane over the Peruvian jungle in 2001. It shows Peruvian fighter jets opening fire on the light Cessna carrying Jim and Veronica Bowers and their children Cory, 6, and adopted baby Charity, who was just seven months, as well as pilot Kevin Donaldson. On the tape, they can be heard screaming for help.

'They're killing me! They're killing us!' Mr Donaldson can be heard yelling to ground control. CIA officers, realising their mistake, can be heard shouting: 'Don't shoot! No more, no más!' But by the time the guns stopped, it was too late. Mrs Bowers and Charity both died in the horrific accident when a single bullet pierced the plane's hull and passed through both their bodies. The pilot managed to crash land the plane in a river, where Mr Bowers and his son watched Mrs Bowers' body float away as they clung to the debris. The Bowers, an American family of missionaries, were returning to Iquitos in Peru from a routine trip to Brazil on April 20, 2001 when they were spotted by the CIA. The skies over the Peruvian jungle are a hotspot for drug traffickers. Since 1995 the CIA and Peru's air force have been operating a joint program to intercept traffickers - shooting them down if necessary. ABC News: Statement from the CIA on the 2001 Peru Shootdown: Peru, 2001, CIA Shoots Down Drug Smuggler Plane - Covers Up for 9 Years no procedures were followed - Killing Missionary couple and 7 year old daughter.

"Al Qaeda" [the CIA] can be expected to attempt an attack on the United States in the next three to six months, senior intelligence officials told Congress yesterday. CIA Director Leon Panetta said the terror organisation was deploying operatives to the US to carry out new attacks from inside the country, including "clean" recruits with a negligible trail of terrorist contacts. "Al Qaeda" was also inspiring homegrown extremists patsies to trigger violence on their own, he said. Creeping Fascism: Texas: Coke-can explosive device, Koran found in street. WRH: When was the last time you heard of a Christian leaving a Bible with a bomb at an abortion clinic, or a Jew leaving behind a Torah after torching a Palestinian home? The Koran is PLANTED to frame Muslims. Rense: False Flags Unfurled. WikiPedia: Fear mongering. + False flag.

“Blackwater’s Youngest Victim” is a short film we made about the death of 9-year-old Ali Kinani at the hands of Blackwater forces. He was shot in his head during the 2007 Nisour Square massacre and is the youngest victim of that shooting. The film is based on my article by the same title in The Nation magazine. This video was produced with Rick Rowley of Big Noise Films and aired on Democracy Now!

Thousands of US and British forces are preparing to launch the biggest offensive in Afghanistan since the [illegal] 2001 invasion. 03 Feb 2010 American commanders gave notice on Wednesday that the assault is imminent. US, British and Afghan forces will flood into a Taliban enclave in southern Helmand province in a massive show of force intended as a decisive start to President Barack Obama's "surge" of 30,000 extra troops. The operation is expected to involve up to 15,000 personnel and could last between six and eight weeks. Reuters: Afghans prepare for NATO assault on Taliban enclave.

Time Magazine has enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon to back Microsoft executive Craig Mundie's call for Internet licensing, as authorities push for a system even more stifling than in Communist China, where only people with government permission would be allowed to express free speech. As we reported earlier this week, during a recent conference at the Davos Economic Forum, Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, told fellow globalists at the summit that the Internet needed to be policed by means of introducing licenses similar to drivers licenses - in other words government permission to use the web.

His proposal was almost instantly advocated by Time Magazine, who published an article by Barbara Kiviat - one of Mundie's fellow attendees at the elitist confab. It's sadistically ironic that Kiviat's columns run under the moniker "The Curious Capitalist," since the ideas expressed in her piece go further than even the free-speech hating Communist Chinese have dared venture in terms of Internet censorship. Despite Kiviat's mealy-mouthed authoritarianism and feigned reasonableness in advocating such a system, Mundie's proposal is little different to a similar system already considered by officials in Communist China to force bloggers to register their identities before they could post. At the time the idea was attacked by human rights advocates as an obvious ploy "by which the government could control information" and crack down on dissent.

Yesterday Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad surprised everyone when he declared publicly that the terms of the draft third party enrichment deal Western nations have been demanding that Iran sign are perfectly acceptable. Today, as Iranians debate the relative merits of the deal and wonder if it amounts to “caving in” to Western demands, Western officials are responding quite negatively to getting exactly what they have demanded for months. PressTV: Israel threatens to 'use force' against Iran: War criminal Moshe Yaalon says Israel might use force to prevent Iran from developing "nuclear weapons", a claim Iran vehemently rejects. "Iran's plan will probably be stopped by a regime change or, if there is no other choice, by recourse to force to deprive Iran of its nuclear arms production capabilities," Yaalon told a security conference in Herzliya.

An ever increasing number of U.S. troops are fighting for peace in Afghanistan. But an investigative journalist claims to have revealed the shocking truth about surprise night raids by American forces and secret prisons where detainees are routinely tortured. In an exclusive interview to RT, Anand Gopal says Obama's mission in Afghanistan is not much different from Bush's in Iraq.

"[N]one of the polls found indications of support for regime change. Large majorities, including majorities of Mousavi supporters, endorse the Islamist character of the regime such as having a body of Islamic scholars with the power to veto laws they see as contrary to sharia.” This result hardly means that there isn't serious opposition within Iran; nor does it absolve the clerical regime from having dealt with the protesters in an harsh and brutal fashion. But it ought to give those who think the Iranian people are panting for U.S.-led "liberation" a moment of pause (though I doubt it will lead the hawks to revise their views).

Scientists have been able to reach into the mind of a brain-damaged man and communicate with his thoughts. The research, carried out in the UK and Belgium, involved a new brain scanning method. Awareness was detected in three other patients previously diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. The study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that scans can detect signs of awareness in patients thought to be closed off from the world. Patients in a vegetative state are awake, not in a coma, but have no awareness because of severe brain damage. The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which shows brain activity in real time. New England Journal of Medicine: Willful Modulation of Brain Activity in Disorders of Consciousness [the original scientific article].

Whistle blowing site Wikileaks has secured enough money in donations to resume operations. The site stopped publishing leaked documents in December to concentrate on a pledge drive aimed at rising a minimum of $200,000 to keep the lights on, and $600,000 if staff were to be paid. Wikileaks also canvassed for technical support and legal help. In a update via Twitter late on Wednesday night, Wikileaks announced that it had reached its minimum target. Achieved min. funraising goal. ($200k/600k); we're back fighting for another year, even if we have to eat rice to do it.

American International Group [AIG] is paying out another round of whopping bonuses to execs. Not surprisingly, the move has led to anger on Capitol Hill, at street level here in the US and I'm sure wherever you are now. American International Group is lavishing up to $100 million in bonuses to executives in the firm's financial products division - yes - that's the outfit that nearly brought the giant insurer to the brink of collapse at the height of the financial crisis in 2008. (Hey! Nice work if you can get it). This latest round of payouts comes almost a year after bonuses worth $168 million went to the same department. Al Jazeera Blogs: The Investment bank Goldman Sachs is facing a storm of criticism over reports its chief executive could pocket a bonus of up to $100m.

Despite being legalized nearly 40 years ago, the topic of abortion still raises huge controversy in the US, as some argue it is leading to genocide of the African-American population. The founder of www.blackgenocide.org website, Rev. Dr. Clenard H. Childress Jr., has told RT that African-American women are being sold abortions.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has insisted that he will remain in post for another four years despite having failed to act on a serious error in the body’s 2007 report. John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , said that Dr Pachauri should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the error, even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit. A journalist working for Science had told Dr Pachauri several times late last year that glaciologists had refuted the IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Dr Pachauri refused to address the problem, saying: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.” He suggested that the error would not be corrected until 2013 or 2014, when the IPCC next reported. AWIP: Even more humiliation: UK Telegraph: UN IPCC based ice claims on student dissertation and article in a mountaineering magazine. + Uh Oh – Pachauri caught out in IPCC 2035 glacier melt issue.

Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui has been found guilty of trying to kill US military personnel and FBI agents in Afghanistan two years ago. The Pakistani national was found guilty on all seven counts listed in the complaint against her by a jury in a US Federal Court on Wednesday. Siddiqui has vehemently denied all charges against her during the trial, calling them 'ridiculous' and insisting that she was framed, jailed and tortured by US agents in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Siddiqui was accused of grabbing a US warrant officer's M-4 rifle in a police station in Ghazni province in 2008 and firing two shots at FBI agents and military personnel while being interrogated for her alleged possession of documents detailing a 'terrorist' plan. Al Jazeera: Pakistani found guilty of US attack.

And a Reagan-Thatcher pragmatic Christian Tory like me is now a conservative heretic. And a centrist like Obama is a communist. God help us. AWIP/Glen Greenwald: America's regression.

Anyone with an e-mail account likely knows that police can peek inside it if they have a paper search warrant. But cybercrime investigators are frustrated by the speed of traditional methods of faxing, mailing, or e-mailing companies these documents. They're pushing for the creation of a national Web interface linking police computers with those of Internet and e-mail providers so requests can be sent and received electronically.

Chomsky had no trouble perceiving as a “fraud” the Tonkin Gulf incidents that led the U.S. to attack North Vietnam, and the resulting Congressional resolution that had already been drafted some months in advance.[4] But he is not interested in the close analogies between the Tonkin Gulf incidents of 1964 and the 9/11 incidents of 2001, which were almost immediately followed by the Patriot Act, likewise already drafted well in advance. Chomsky argues that the 9/11 movement has drawn “enormous amounts of energy and effort away from activism.”[5] But the strong analogies between the Tonkin Gulf deception and the 9/11 deception have energized and activated me, and not me alone.

Six years after first collection of Breaking the Silence testimonies, organization releases booklet of testimonies from female soldiers who served in territories. Stories include systematic humiliation of Palestinians, reckless and cruel violence, theft, killing of innocent people and cover-up. Here are only some of testimonies.

Today, when you look at it three years later, would you have done things differently? "I would change the system. It's seriously defective."

What does that mean? "The system is deeply flawed. The entire administration, the way things are run, it's not right. I don't know how I would… I don't think I did the right thing in this incident but it was what I had to do. It's inevitable under these circumstances."

You're saying the small soldiers on the ground are not the problem, but the whole situation surrounding them? "Yes, this entire situation is problematic."

Clinical student was entering country to perform human rights research. “They told me that if I didn’t let them read my emails, not only would I not be allowed into Israel, I would be banned for life.”

The first part of Bill O’Reilly interview with Jon Stewart aired on FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor tonight, and when the topic to turned to Fox News’ balance Stewart said, “I think Fox in and of yourselves say that you are not a news organization all day…” Stewart consistently turned the tables on O’Reilly. MediaIte: Jon Stewart And Bill O’Reilly: Together – And Edited – At Last!

Mr Llwyd said he had offered to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry himself, in private if necessary. The Meirionnydd Nant Conwy MP said: “I think other things should have been pursued [at the inquiry], in particular the detailed conversation at the ranch in Crawford in April 2002. I do know that the deal was struck, I know for certain it was struck at that stage so just to pretend months down the road that no deal had been struck. [...] I have offered to give evidence and Chilcot has said ‘I’ll come back to you’. At that stage I will have private discussions with him. What I do know for sure is that the deal was struck, incontrovertibly,” said Mr Llwyd. The Scotsman: Call for Blair to face trial in Scotland.

Drivers in Enfield have been hit by more than 45,000 parking tickets and fines issued by CCTV cameras in the past 12 months – sparking claims that the technology is being abused.

Tunisia has become the most electrified country in Africa according to a recent report on "Powering Africa" published by African Business. Tunisia which is credited with an electrification rate of 99% comes ahead of Algeria, 98%, Egypt 98%, Libya 97%, Mauritius 94%, Morocco 85% and South Africa 70%.

Legendary author of scores of books and pamphlets demolishing the lies of warmaking mainstream media, historian Eustace Mullins died Tuesday, Feb. 2, at the home of his caretaker in a small town in Texas.