WASHINGTON (AFP) – The United States is stepping up security at "soft targets" like hotels and shopping malls, as well as trains and ports, as it counters the evolving Al-Qaeda threat, a top official said Sunday.
A year after a foiled plot to bomb a US-bound passenger plane, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told CNN's "State of the Union" program that other places and modes of transportation must now be scrutinized.
"We look at so-called soft targets -- the hotels, shopping malls, for example -- all of which we have reached out to in the past year and have done a fair amount of training for their own employees," Napolitano said.
1. Call the Office of Management and Budget, Office of Information and Regulation Affairs, Department of Justice, Desk Officer at (202) 395-6466.
2. E-mail Barbara A. Terrell, ATF, Firearms Industry Programs Branch at Barbara.Terrell@atf.gov
3. Call your Senators and Representative: United States Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121
Points to make: 1. Multiple sales reporting of long guns will actually make it more difficult for licensed retailers to help law enforcement as traffickers modify their illegal schemes to circumvent the reporting requirement. Traffickers will go further underground, hiring more people to buy their firearms. This will make it much harder for retailers to identify and report suspicious behavior to law enforcement. 2. Long guns are rarely used in crime (Bureau of Justice Statistics). 3. Imposing multiple sales-reporting requirements for long guns would further add to the already extensive paperwork and record-keeping requirements burdening America's retailers -- where a single mistake could cost them their license and even land them in jail. 4. Last year, ATF inspected 2,000 retailers in border states and only two licenses were revoked (0.1%). These revocations were for reasons unknown and could have had nothing to do with illicit trafficking of guns; furthermore, no dealers were charged with any criminal wrongdoing. 5. According to ATF, the average age of a firearm recovered in the United States is 11 years old. In Mexico it's more than 14 years old. This demonstrates that criminals are not using new guns bought from retailers in the states. 6. Congress, when it enacted multiple sales reporting for handguns, could have required multiple sales of long guns -- it specifically chose not to.
Skeptics who continue to assert that the economic plight of the United States has been overstated need not look further than the Pentagon to find out just how wrong they are. CNBC has learned that the Pentagon is currently playing out “war games” pertinent to an American economic meltdown.
According to CNBC, “The Pentagon is planning for real economic threats to America.”
CNBC’s Business News analyst Eamon Javers explains:
Ever since the crash of 2008, the Defense Intelligence establishment has really been paying a lot of attention to global markets and how they could serve as a threat to U.S. National security interests. At one upcoming seminar that we’re going to see here next month, they’re going to be taking a look at a lot of the issues … [including] the use of sovereign wealth funds to manipulate markets, currencies; nation state economic collapse, sovereign default, nation state instability; U.S. Allies’ budgets, deficits, national security infrastructures.
Similarly, the Army has launched an operation called “Unified Quest 2011” in which it studies the “implications of ‘large scale economic breakdown’ inside the United States that would force the Army to keep ‘domestic order amid civil unrest.'” The Quest also trains the Army in how to “deal with fragmented global power and drastically lower budgets.”
There are numerous reports circulating that Canada and the U.S. are secretly negotiating a North American Security and Trade deal which could be signed as early as January 2011.
The proposed agreement would establish a security perimeter as a means to better secure North America and stimulate trade.
The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), along with other U.S.-Canada initiatives have allowed the two countries to incrementally move towards creating a common security perimeter, otherwise known as the North American Union.
FOR PERSONAL STUDY ON THIS ISSUE AND IT'S RAMIFICATIONS GOOGLE "NAFTA","TRI-LATERALISM" and "GLOBALISM".
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – NASA failed to delete sensitive data on computers and hard drives before selling the equipment as part of its plan to end the Space Shuttle program, an audit released on Tuesday shows.
NASA is getting rid of thousands of surplus items as it prepares to end the space shuttle program next year.
The Office of Inspector General found what it termed "serious" security breaches at NASA centers in Florida, Texas, California and Virginia.
"Our review found serious breaches in NASA's IT (information technology) security practices that could lead to the improper release of sensitive information related to the Space Shuttle and other NASA programs," NASA Inspector General Paul Martin said in a statement.
"NASA needs to take coordinated and forceful actions to address this problem."
Since WikiLeaks has published just over 1,200 of its 250,000 State Dept. cables, it's hard for news organizations to counter claims of what other revelations may be be contained in the full trove.
But the Guardian, which had been given all the documents by WikiLeaks, is now calling out the Pakistani media for publishing fake cables that supposedly cast longtime enemy India in a negative light.
Four Pakistani newspapers published the unbylined claims, attributing the information to the pro-military Islamabad-based news service Online Agency. In the fake cables, U.S. diplomats praised Pakistani generals while taking shots at Indian generals -- one being "rather a geek" and another likened to Slobodan Milosevic.
Declan Walsh, a Guardian correspondent based in Islamabad, described the publication as "the first case of WikiLeaks being exploited for propaganda purposes."
Skirmishes raged across cyberspace Thursday between WikiLeaks supporters and the companies they accuse of trying to stifle the group, with websites on both sides of the battle line taken out of service or choked off by attacks.
The U.N.'s top human rights official raised the alarm over officials' and corporations' moves to cut off WikiLeaks's funding and starve it of server space — something she described as a "potentially violating WikiLeaks' right to freedom of expression."
Navi Pillay also expressed surprise at the scale of the online attacks that have targeted major American financial players — in some cases denying access to their websites for hours at a time.
"It's truly what media would call a cyber-war. It's just astonishing what is happening," Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters in Geneva.
