Panetta: US May Have to Use Military Force Against Iran

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Photo Credit: REUTERSWhile the US has “implemented unprecedented sanctions and pressure on Iran, we may very well have to use military force to back up our policy,” Leon Panetta said on Thursday night.

The former US defense secretary and CIA director made the remarks while addressing around 600 people at the Anti-Defamation League’s 100th annual meeting.

Panetta, who was receiving the ADL’s William and Naomi Gorowitz Institute Service Award, said the US needs to “maintain a healthy skepticism” when negotiating to suss out Iran’s true level of commitment to negotiations over its nuclear program.

“It is the Supreme Leader [Ali Khamenei] who is key, and he is not likely to give up [uranium] enrichment,” Panetta warned. “We have to remain strong. We have to remain consistent.”

Panetta reiterated the American line that the US has “no friend, no better ally in the world than Israel,” but he expressed concern over the “growing sense of isolationism in this country [the US]” over the last 10 years of fighting two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the shifting power dynamics among world leaders.

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Interpol Chief: Citizens Need Guns

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Photo Credit: WND As the United Nations seeks to push its global anti-gun campaign – through a treaty U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry just signed – the chief of the International Criminal Police Organization, or Interpol, believes open societies can be protected from terrorists by citizens defending themselves with guns, according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

The U.N. effort in the U.S. is expected to be dead on arrival at the U.S. Senate, which would have to ratify the treaty. The United States for years has refrained from signing it, until now.

Mindful of the recent terrorist attack at the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said that armed citizens in open societies need to be able to defend themselves and others against terrorist attacks.

In the Sept. 21 shopping mall attack, considered to be a “soft target,” some 72 people were killed, including five of the attackers from the Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab. While five of the dead were members of the Kenyan military, 61 were civilians.

Noble said in a report on ABC the attack on the mall marks an “evolution in terrorism.” Instead of targets like the Pentagon and other high-security locations, attackers have begun to focus on sites with little security that attract large numbers of people.

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Murder Charges for Suspected Gunman in LAX Shooting

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Photo Credit: Fox News Federal prosecutors announced Saturday that they have filed charges of murder and commission of violence at an international airport against the man suspected of carrying out the deadly shooting at Los Angeles International Airport in which a TSA officer was fatally shot, and several others were wounded.

If convicted, 23-year-old Paul Anthony Ciancia could get the death penalty. He was arrested Friday after authorities say he barged into a terminal, pulled an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle from his duffel bag and opened fire. The bullets killed a Transportation Security Administration officer and injuring four others before Ciancia was gunned down by airport police.

The killing was “believed to be a premeditated act of murder in the first-degree,” U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte Jr. said in announcing the charges.

The announcement comes after authorities say they have found a note handwritten by Ciancia in which he describes his intent to kill TSA employees and “pigs,” a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.

Federal authorities said Ciancia had “a bunch of threatening language directed at the TSA and lots of anti-government rants.”

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Gun Rights Groups Throwing their Weight Behind Efforts to Rein In NSA

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe National Rifle Association (NRA) is among a number of groups that have signed on to an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit against the secretive government agency.

The NRA has also endorsed bipartisan legislation proposed by House and Senate Judiciary committees that would end the NSA’s collection of bulk phone records.

Another Second Amendment advocate, the Gun Owners of America, expects to back NSA legislation as well.

“There are issues that, maybe at first blush, wouldn’t seem like a gun issue, but once you start looking closely at the issues, they really do affect our gun rights,” said Erich Pratt, the director of communications for Gun Owners of America.

Gun groups fear the NSA could have the authority under a section of the PATRIOT Act to collect information that could be used to create a federal gun database. They also fear the government could be spying on, or eventually targeting, gun owners.

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Senate Republicans Pushing for Federal Ban on 20-Week Abortions

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Photo Credit: APSenate Republicans, led by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, are pushing for a federal ban on abortions after the end of the 20th week of pregnancy.

Graham is expected to introduce the bill this upcoming week, reports The Washington Examiner, and the legislation will be a companion bill for the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, passed in the House earlier this year.

The planned legislation, though, will face many challenges, not only from the Democratic-controlled Senate, but from some Republicans like Sen. Mike Lee, Utah, who has concerns about Congress’ authority to regulate commerce as the law’s basis.

Back in 2003, a partial-birth abortion plan based on the Commerce Clause was upheld by the Supreme Court, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia emphasising that the “court’s abortion jurisprudence has no basis in the Constitution.”

Graham is up for re-election in South Carolina next year, so his push on the late-term abortion ban may help him fight challengers in the Republican primary. He holds the lead by 51 percent, according to current surveys, but several conservative groups, including the Senate Conservatives Fund, for one, have in an effort to oust the veteran senator.

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Scuba Divers to Monitor NYC Marathon

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Photo Credit: Richard Drew/APSunday’s New York City Marathon will be the best-protected race that runners can enter as a result of enhanced security measures and police presence on land and by sea, according to New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. Helicopters, scuba divers, police boats, K-9 dogs with explosive-detection capabilities and hundreds of cameras are among the precautionary measures that will be deployed along the marathon route and throughout the city’s five boroughs.

Kelly said that while security planning for the event typically takes several months, the New York Police Department began preparing for this year’s marathon the day after the Boston Marathon bombing in April, which killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.

“Planning for the marathon is always a major undertaking and I can assure you this year was no exception,” Kelly said Friday at a security briefing on the marathon, which is expected to draw more than 45,000 runners.

Hundreds of cameras will be monitored in real-time by the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, he said. The department has also located more than 1, 400 privately owned cameras along the 26.2-mile route that can be tapped for additional security footage if necessary.

NYPD scuba divers began sweeping the shoreline and surrounding infrastructure on Thursday “to safeguard all five bridges that the runners will cross on their way ultimately to Manhattan,” Kelly said.

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Pro-Amnesty Organizations Campaigning Heavily for Democrat Terry McAuliffe

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Photo Credit: APPro-amnesty organizations are campaigning heavily for Democrat Terry McAuliffe, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and a close ally of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in Virginia’s gubernatorial election on Tuesday.

“Latino groups are intensifying get-out-the-vote efforts in the Virginia governor’s race against a national backdrop of a congressional struggle over immigration reform,” NBC News Latino reports. “The groups said Thursday immigration reform is a critical issue on which candidates will be measured by Latino voters in the race.

As the groups work to have a strong showing of Latino turnout in Tuesday’s race, pressure has intensified on House Republicans to move immigration reform legislation in the waning days of this congressional year. That has helped keep the issue in the forefront as the Virginia candidates head to Election Day and groups try to turn out Latino voters in the state, home to the 16th largest population of Hispanic-eligible voters.”

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West Point Hosts First Marriage Ceremony for Homosexual Men

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Photo Credit: Mike Groll, APTwo West Point graduates were married Saturday in the military academy’s first wedding between two men.

Larry Choate III, class of 2009, married Daniel Lennox, class of 2007, before about 20 guests.

Choate, 27, taught Sunday school at the U.S. Military Academy’s Cadet Chapel and said he always thought of it as the place he would get married if he could.

West Point hosted two same-sex weddings of women in late 2012, more than a year after New York state legalized gay marriage. But Saturday’s wedding was the first time two men wed at West Point.

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Obama Adds Climate Change Initiatives to List of Executive Branch Power Grabs

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Photo Credit: NOAAThrough the stroke of a pen, President Obama on Friday used his executive powers to elevate and take control of climate change policies in an attempt to streamline sustainability initiatives – and potentially skirt legislative oversight and push a federal agenda on states.

The executive order establishes a task force of state and local officials to advise the administration on how to respond to severe storms, wildfires, droughts and other potential impacts of climate change. The task force includes governors of seven states — all Democrats — and the Republican governor of Guam, a U.S. territory. Fourteen mayors and two other local leaders also will serve on the task force.

All but three of those appointed are Democrats. The task force will look at federal money spent on roads, bridges, flood control and other projects. It ultimately will recommend how structures can be made more resilient to the effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels and warming temperatures.

“We’re going to need to get prepared. And that’s why this plan will also protect critical sectors of our economy and prepare the United States for the impacts of climate change that we cannot avoid,” Obama said last June, when he first launched a Climate Action Plan.

“States and cities across the country are already taking it upon themselves to get ready… And we’ll partner with communities seeking help to prepare for droughts and floods, reduce the risk of wildfires, protect the dunes and wetlands that pull double duty as green space and as natural storm barriers.”

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MI Gem Merchant Says he Should Get $25M Reward for bin Laden’s Death

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Photo Credit: APA Michigan gem merchant who claims he tipped the FBI on the location of Osama bin Laden’s secret compound in Pakistan eight years before his killing has hired a high-powered Chicago law firm to help him go after the $25 million reward offered for the terrorist’s capture.

Tom Lee, 63, of Grand Rapids, “accurately reported” to an FBI special agent in 2003 that bin Laden was hiding in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, according to a letter sent in August to FBI Director James Comey by an attorney for the Loevy & Loevy firm.

Lee, a U.S. citizen of Egyptian descent, said he learned of the complex’s location from a Pakistani intelligence agent who told him he had personally escorted bin Laden and his family from Peshawar to Abbottabad. The agent was a member of an anti-Al Qaeda family who had done business with Lee for decades, according to the letter.

Lee claimed he relayed the information to a U.S. customs agent who had previously worked with Lee on investigations into corruption in the international gem trade. Lee and the customs agent later met with an FBI agent who wrote a report of the interview, the letter stated.

Bin Laden was killed in May 2011 during a raid by U.S. special forces on a heavily fortified compound in Abbottabad.

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