Archive for February, 2015

Guantanamo Bay’s Place in U.S. Strategy in the Caribbean

Guantanamo Bay’s Place in U.S. Strategy in the Caribbean is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

By Sim Tack

Last week, the Cuban government declared that for the United States and Cuba to normalize relations, the United States would have to return the territory occupied by a U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Washington clearly responded that returning the base is not on the table right now. This response makes sense, since quite a bit of politicking goes into the status of the base. However, the Guantanamo Bay issue highlights a notable aspect to the U.S.-Cuban negotiations — one that is rooted in the history of the U.S. ascension to superpower status as it challenged European powers in the Western Hemisphere.

U.S. Expansion in the Western Hemisphere

Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean, has a prominent position at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, separating access to the gulf into two choke points: the Yucatan Channel and the Straits of Florida. It is also situated on the sea-lanes between the U.S. East Coast and the Panama Canal, the shortest route for naval traffic between the two coasts of the United States. Cuba thus has been pivotal to the U.S. strategy to safeguard economic activity in the Gulf of Mexico and naval transport routes beyond that. The evolution of U.S. naval capabilities, however, has changed the part that Cuba, and thus the base at Guantanamo, has played. Read the rest of this entry »

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Criminals Kill Venezuelan Police for Their Guns

From PanAm Post:

On January 9, the security camera in a shopping center captured the moment when a uniformed Polimiranda officer entered a bakery and was attacked by a criminal at his side. The perpetrator shot him and stole his regulation firearm. The victim was 49-year-old Detective Supervisor Álvaro Blanco Escobar.

 

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Thermal Imager That You Can Mount on a Rail

From Torrey Pines Logic:

Thermal Imager T10â„¢

T10 mini‑thermal imager models T10‑S (50° FOV, 9Hz video), T10‑N (25° FOV, 9Hz video) and T10‑M (50° FOV, 30Hz video) offer a robust feature set commonly found in more expensive devices:

  • On‑board image processing enhancement modes
  • Manual and automatic NUC capability
  • Temperature read‑out
  • Battery read‑out and protection
  • Auto power‑save
  • Multiple display views: white hot / color / black hot / NV green
  • Flexible mounting options: Picatinny rail / wrist strap / user‑handle mount and more

9Hz units are ideal for hunters and are export ready. 30Hz units support more sophisticated domestic user needs. Wide angle units augment law enforcement agency capabilities conducting search operations.

The low cost T10 family is a leader in among thermal red-dot accessories.

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Bill Whittle on the True Numbers of Gun Control

Number One with a Bullet:

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US Citizen Joins Iraqi Kurds To Fight Islamists

From The Washington Free Beacon:

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NY SAFE Act Kills Business and Jobs

From TWC News:

Jackson Guns and Ammo in Henrietta has closed up shop, and owner Kordell Jackson said that New York’s SAFE Act is to blame.

“We were struggling with all the rules and regulations, the New York SAFE Act as well as the New York State payroll taxes, the state taxes, all these taxes,” Jackson said. “You can’t stay in business with all this going on.

Jackson closed up shop Jan. 17.  He says the decision was difficult.  After spending five to six months looking for ways to keep his business viable, Jackson said closing made the most sense.

 

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First Carry Permits in D.C.

From Washington Free Beacon:

The District of Columbia has issued its first concealed handgun carry permits. As of January 26, there are eight civilians who can legally carry a firearm in the nation’s capital. Currently, more permit applicants have been denied than approved.

 

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DEA Wanted to Spy on Gun Show Attendees

From The Wall Street Journal:

A federal agent proposed using license-plate readers to scan vehicles around gun shows in order to aid gun-trafficking investigations, according to an internal Justice Department email.

Justice Department officials said Tuesday that the 2009 proposal was rejected by superiors and never implemented. The email was part of a series of Drug Enforcement Administration documents describing how the agency is building a national database tracking the movements of vehicles in the U.S. The documents were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act request and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

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Firearms Manufacturers Still on Edge

From National Review:

But there’s more to the industry’s concerns than the fear that the punch bowl might soon disappear, if indeed sales haven’t already peaked. And in spite of the boost Obama’s given their sales, many would rather have a president who was less obviously hostile to their industry and their livelihoods. Johanna Reeves, executive director of the F.A.I.R. Trade Group – the Firearms Import/Export Roundtable – expressed it this way: The Obama administration, and the ATF in particular, are “pushing the envelope and testing the boundaries to see how far they can go.”

The ATT and other U.N. programs play into this. As Reeves and a colleague put it in a recent piece on the treaty, their concern is that the “legitimate trade and industry will bear the brunt of ‘norms’ that will develop out of these instruments, norms that will further restrict the ability of U.S. firms to import and export firearms and ammunition.” Indeed, the worries stem fundamentally from the trade’s realization that the gun-control battle is moving from the national political level, where the Second Amendment has rarely looked healthier, to the international, national administrative, and state and local levels. In other words, the challenges are becoming more diffuse and harder to combat — or even, in the case of administrative restrictions, to follow.

 

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Pentagon Tried to Stop Secretary of State Clinton From Going to War in Libya

From The Washington Times:

Mrs. Clinton’s main argument was that Gadhafi was about to engage in a genocide against civilians in Benghazi, where the rebels held their center of power. But defense intelligence officials could not corroborate those concerns and in fact assessed that Gadhafi was unlikely to risk world outrage by inflicting mass casualties, officials told The Times. As a result, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, strongly opposed Mrs. Clinton’s recommendation to use force.

Instead of relying on the Defense Department or the intelligence community for analysis, officials told The Times, the White House trusted Mrs. Clinton’s charge, which was then supported by Ambassador to the United Nations Susan E. Rice and National Security Council member Samantha Power, as reason enough for war.

“The decision to invade [Libya] had already been made, so everything coming out of the State Department at that time was to reinforce that decision,” the official explained, speaking only on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

 

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Individuals Need Weapons to Stop Unforeseen Attacks

From Fox News:

After the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris earlier this month, France placed10,000 uniformed soldiers in front of Jewish sites across the country.  Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be very effective.

Possibly this lesson is why this past week a leading European rabbi, Menachem Margolin, called for European Jews to be able to carry handguns.  Of course, in countries that won’t even let off-duty police carry guns, that isn’t going to happen.

Parisians, who were as close as a dozen yards away from the terrorists, took videos of the killers, but they were powerless to stop the attackers.

French gun laws only disarmed the law-abiding citizens.

 

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