Military bases put on alert ahead of 10th anniversary of 9/11.

WASHINGTON — The United States raised its alert level at military bases on Wednesday ahead of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as a report warned of “gaps and weaknesses” in the nation’s security apparatus.

The Pentagon said it had upped security at installations as “a prudent and precautionary measure,” and not in response to a particular threat, as attention began to build towards Sunday’s commemorations.

A decade on, America is marking 9/11 with a series of events to honor the nearly 3,000 people who died when hijackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania.

The biggest occasion will be the reading of victims’ names at Ground Zero, an event that will be attended by victims’ family members, President Barack Obama, former president George W. Bush, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Announcing the decision to increase security, a Pentagon official said Al-Qaeda had “focused on holidays and milestone events in the past,” noting that the 10-year anniversary “was mentioned in the documents seized” in the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden at his compound in Pakistan on May 2.

The Al-Qaeda leader was reportedly planning a major attack to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of September 11, but US officials have stressed there was no evidence the “nascent plot” ever went beyond the planning phase.

Security is the main concern among organizers of all ceremonies remembering those who died and large crowds are expected as the country reflects on a decade of war abroad and fear of further attacks at home.

Although there have been no attacks on the scale of 9/11 in the United. States in the 10 years since, a palpable fear of a similar outrage persists and is often heightened ahead of major events.
An official report on Wednesday said that the Department of Homeland Security created after 9/11 to protect American soil had made progress in the past 10 years but security measures at airports remained inadequate.

“Work remains for DHS to address gaps and weaknesses in its current operational and implementation efforts, and to strengthen the efficiency and effectiveness of those efforts,” said the Government Accountability Office.

“DHS does not yet have a plan for deploying checked baggage screening technologies to meet recently enhanced explosive detection requirements,” its report said.
The State Department on September 2 issued a worldwide travel to alert citizens living and traveling abroad to remain vigilant.

Obama’s top counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan on Wednesday cautioned that the US must maintain high vigilance on security matters, as “Al-Qaeda is still there,” despite bin Laden’s death.
US Navy commandos tracked down Bin Laden at his hideout in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad and killed him in a raid which many 9/11 victims’ families have said gave them a level of closure 10 years on.

A former Saudi Arabia ambassador to the United States, however, said Bin Laden’s death should have been used as an opportunity to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, where a Taliban insurgency continues to rage.

“It would have been the perfect moment to declare victory and withdraw from Afghanistan … and not to continue with this endless fight,”
Prince Turki al-Faisal said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank in Washington.

The 9/11 attacks left 2,977 people dead. The vast majority of those killed, 2,753, were in New York, while 184 people died at the Pentagon amd nd another 40 on Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Those figures exclude the 19 hijackers.

Breaking: Two Pakistani planes forced to land due to bomb threat

Two Pakistan Airlines planes RE being searched by police at Istanbul’s main airport where they made unscheduled landings after receiving multiple bomb threats, Turkey’s state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

One plane, en route from Islamabad to Manchester, received the threat while in Bulgarian airspace and landed in Istanbul at about 5 p.m. local time, Anatolia said, without saying where it got the information.

The 378 passengers were evacuated and security forces began to search the plane for explosives, the agency said.

Pakistan’s state airline says second flight receives bomb threat and was grounded at Kuala Lumpur. More details soon.

Breaking: Russian plane crash kills 44.

MOSCOW — A passenger airplane that had been chartered by one of Russia’s best known hockey teams crashed during take-off Wednesday, killing many of its star players and a major portion of the team, in the latest air disaster here this summer.

The Yak-42 jet was carrying the team, called Lokomotiv, from their home in Yaroslavl, a city northeast of Moscow, to an away game in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.

The initial accounts of the number of people on board varied from 37 to 44. A Russian aviation official told the Interfax news agency that all but one — a member of the crew — had died.

The list of victims was not immediately published, but a spokesman for Lokomotiv said the starting lineup and many of the top players had died.

“We have no team any more,” Vladimir N. Malkov, the spokesman, said in a telephone interview. “All our starting players, and all the service people, they all burned in the crash.”

The plane was one of the vintage, Soviet-designed needle-nosed aircraft that have been the focus of safety concerns after a series of crashes and mishaps, including a crash in June that killed most of the 52 passengers on board.

The plane that crashed Wednesday came down about 500 yards from the runway shortly after 4 p.m., the Russia Today television news channel reported.

Russian MiG 31s collide ...

(CNN) -- Two Russian pilots aboard a MiG-31 fighter jet were killed when it crashed Tuesday, state media said.

The plane crashed minutes after take off from a military airport in the Perm region, the state-owned Ria Novosti news agency said.
It was on a routine training flight, the news agency said, citing the defense ministry.
A similar jet crashed in the region last year, but the pilots were able to parachute to safety, the news agency said.

Following the crash, the defense ministry grounded all MiG-31s while it investigated the cause.
The plane was not carrying weapons when it went down, said Itar-Tass, another official news agency.

US: terrorists may use small planes to mark 9-11.

Washington (CNN) -- U.S. officials say terrorists could try to use small aircraft in attacks, but have no specific information that such a plot is in the works, according to a new notice distributed by federal officials.

"Violent extremists with knowledge of general aviation and access to small planes pose a significant potential threat to the Homeland," according to an intelligence bulletin issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

But according to the alert, U.S. officials "do not have current, credible information or intelligence of an imminent attack being planned against aviation" by al Qaeda or its affiliates.
In the alert, which was obtained by CNN, officials say as recently as early 2011, al Qaeda was considering options for targeting aviation "possibly believing such operations would have a greater impact than other types of attacks." Among the strategies al Qaeda members have discussed are using a private aircraft to carry explosives, finding a Western operative who could easily travel to the United States or Europe to get flight training or renting private planes for attacks, "believing supervision would be lax due to the large number of private aircraft."

Minutes after Flight 93 crashed Global travel alert on 9/11 anniversary 9/11 10 years later Heroines of 9/11
The bulletin was issued to state and local law enforcement agencies on Friday, a little over a week before the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. Al Qaeda operatives killed nearly 3,000 people in those attacks by hijacking four commercial airliners and turning them into missiles, and some of the terrorists had received flight training in the United States.

Matthew Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said although there is no specific intelligence about a plot, alerts are regularly shared with law enforcement partners on "evolving tactics that could be used by violent extremists to carry out attacks against the United States." He noted al Qaeda and others have targeted aviation since the 1990s and persist in seeking aviation training.

Chandler said the bulletin is intended to "highlight the need for continued awareness and vigilance."
U.S. officials including President Barack Obama have expressed concerns about so-called lone-wolf attackers who do not belong to terror organizations and have no co-conspirators, but believe in a radical ideology. The intelligence alert says a lone wolf who engaged in an aviation attack would be particularly hard to detect, because "their plans to misuse or steal small aircraft would be difficult to monitor and predict."

In the past, some members of Congress, including West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller have expressed concern about possible security vulnerabilities in the general aviation sector.