Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Stu­art Young says on­ly a few phras­es in the most re­cent US trav­el ad­vi­so­ry have brought any con­cern to him.

The US Em­bassy re­leased its lat­est trav­el ad­vi­so­ry for US cit­i­zens vis­it­ing Trinidad on Wednes­day, but Young ex­plained yes­ter­day that the ad­vi­so­ry was very sim­i­lar to the last few from the US.

"The on­ly changes in lan­guage were styl­is­tic changes. There has been no change in the US trav­el ad­vi­so­ry sys­tem, in fact, I made this point dur­ing the Car­ni­val pe­ri­od, that it was a good en­dorse­ment of all we had been do­ing at Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty that none of our for­eign al­ly coun­tries in is­su­ing trav­el ad­vi­sories had changed it on us," Young at Thurs­day's post-Cab­i­net press brief­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre.

"The US trav­el ad­vi­so­ry that was re­cent­ly re­leased does not in­crease any threat lev­el or any con­cern about crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty com­pared to the last one."

How­ev­er, Young was con­cerned that the threat of ter­ror­ist ac­tiv­i­ty re­mained list­ed in the ad­vi­so­ry.

The ad­vi­so­ry stat­ed, "Gang ac­tiv­i­ty, such as nar­cotics traf­fick­ing, is com­mon. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of vi­o­lent crime is gang-re­lat­ed and ge­o­graph­i­cal­ly con­cen­trat­ed.

"Ter­ror­ists may at­tack with lit­tle or no warn­ing, tar­get­ing tourist lo­ca­tions, trans­porta­tion hubs, mar­kets/shop­ping malls, lo­cal gov­ern­ment fa­cil­i­ties, ho­tels, clubs, restau­rants, places of wor­ship, parks, ma­jor sport­ing and cul­tur­al events, ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions, air­ports, and oth­er pub­lic ar­eas."

Young said he had ap­proached US of­fi­cials about the ter­ror­ist state­ment.

"I've en­gaged the US em­bassy here in Trinidad and told them I'd like the mes­sage sent back to the US gov­ern­ment in Wash­ing­ton that we want to relook some of the lan­guage in there. In par­tic­u­lar, the lan­guage with re­gard to ter­ror­ist at­tacks etc which were pre­vi­ous­ly em­ployed in the trav­el ad­vi­so­ry last year when we were fac­ing a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent pe­ri­od of time," the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter said.

He knocked those who at­tempt­ed to use the re­lease to cre­ate ten­sion in the coun­try.

Young said, "All of those fear-mon­gers out there, all of those per­sons try­ing to cre­ate some sense of pan­ic, some sense of dis­tor­tion of truth, some sense of dis­tor­tion of re­al­i­ty. There has been no up­grade in the trav­el ad­vi­so­ry in the sense of any threat analy­sis for Trinidad and To­ba­go by our US part­ners."