MV-22 makes hard landing in Nevada

By KEITH ROGERS LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

A Marine Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft made a hard landing Monday near Creech Air Force Base during a routine training operation, Air Force and Marine officials said Monday.

No injuries were reported during the 3:38 p.m. incident involving the MV-22 Osprey assigned to the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar near San Diego.

“There were four crew members and all four walked away from the aircraft,” said Marine Capt. Anton Semelroth, a spokesman for the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing.

A map from Clark County fire officials indicates the Osprey landed on public land about 3 miles northwest of the base along U.S. Highway 95 near Indian Springs, about 48 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Base officials, however, had not confirmed the hard-landing location at 7:15 p.m.

MV-22 Ospreys can make vertical takeoffs and landings but their twin turboprops can be shifted into horizontal positions so the aircraft can fly like a fixed-wing plane.

Semelroth said no damage estimate was available for the Osprey involved in Monday’s hard landing. In 2008, the MV-22 was priced at $67 million per aircraft.

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Syrian airports - most likely first cruise missile targets

The idea for the surgical strikes was set out by Chris Harmer, an analyst at the US Institute for the Study of War, who argued it was possible to keep an attack against the Assad regime short and sharp and cost-efficient, while avoiding significant risk to US servicemen.

The Pentagon is considering a plan to fire cruise missiles at six Syrian airports, including a runway at Damascus International, to demonstrate the limits of President Bashar al-Assad's military power.

Since those were precisely the factors that had paralysed the US as the Syrian crisis has unfolded during the past 30 months, it has been eagerly seized on.

Senator John McCain, a critic of President Barack Obama's apparent inaction in Syria, said Mr Harmer's analysis "confirms what I and many others have long argued - that it is militarily feasible for the US and our friends and allies to significantly degrade Assad's air power at relatively low cost, low risk to our personnel, and in very short order".

The study indicates the Syrian Air Force regularly conducts three missions which give it a strategic advantage over rebel forces: it brings weapons and other supplies from Iran and Russia, it resupplies army units fighting the rebels, and it has been involved in the bombing of rebel-held districts.

"An initial strike would require just three US navy surface combatant vessels and 24 total US navy and USAF aircraft," Mr Harmer said.

"A limited strike resulting in the degradation of Syrian Air Force infrastructure could be accomplished with no US military personnel entering Syrian air space or territory, at relatively small cost."

Syria attack options

Six of Syria's 27 airbases would be primary targets: Damascus International (which also takes civilian traffic), Damascus Mezzeh military base, al-Qusayr, Bassel al-Assad International, Dumayr and Tiyas. The plan would be to damage runways, fuel storage plants, maintenance hangars and control towers and radars.

Cruise missiles were not designed for all-out destruction, he said, but could crater runways, thus putting them out of action. It would also hinder Russian cargo aircraft trying to land with weapons or ammunition, and Iranian transporters bringing in fighters.

A typical initial sortie, Mr Harmer calculated, would entail eight cruise missiles fired from each of three naval vessels, backed up by 24 strike fighters.

Mr Harmer was nervous yesterday that his analysis was being talked up by military planners who are anxious to give an Allied strike a modest flavour.

"Tactical action in the absence of strategic objectives is usually pointless and often counter-productive," he told the US foreign policy blog The Cable.

NY Times - Twitter hacked by Syria?

By Gerry Shih and Joseph Menn

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Media companies, including the New York Times, Twitter and the Huffington Post, lost control of some of their websites Tuesday after hackers supporting the Syrian government breached the Australian Internet company that manages many major site addresses.

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a hacker group that has attacked media organizations it considers hostile to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, claimed credit for the Twitter and Huffington Post hacks in a series of Twitter messages.

Security experts said electronic records showed that NYTimes.com, the only site with an hours-long outage, redirected visitors to a server controlled by the Syrian group before it went dark.

New York Times Co spokeswoman Eileen Murphy tweeted the "issue is most likely the result of a malicious external attack", based on an initial assessment.

The Huffington Post attack was limited to the blogging platform's British web address. Twitter said the hack led to availability issues for 90 minutes but that no user information was compromised.

The attacks came as the Obama administration considers taking military action against the Syrian government, engaged in a civil war against rebels for more than two years.

In August, hackers promoting the Syrian Electronic Army targeted websites belonging to CNN, Time and the Washington Post by breaching a third party service used by those sites.

The SEA managed to gain control of the sites by penetrating MelbourneIT, an Australian Internet service provider that sells and manages domain names including Twitter.com and NYTimes.

The New York Times, which identified MelbourneIT as its domain name registrar and the main hacking victim, told employees not to send sensitive emails from corporate accounts.

MelbourneIT tracked the breach to an Indian Internet service provider, saying two staff members from one of their resellers opened a fake email seeking login details.

"The SEA went after the company specifically to create a high-profile event," CEO Theo Hnarakis told Reuters. "This was quite a sophisticated attack."

One staff member was the direct manager of the NYTimes domain, along with other media companies and had the login and password information of the company in his email, which the hackers accessed.

Hnarakis confirmed that other media organizations were also attacked, but this proved unsuccessful as their customers used a secondary security measure known as a registry lock.

MelbourneIT said it restored the correct domain name settings, changed the password on the compromised account, and locked the records to prevent further alterations.

Twitter did not respond to requests for comment. In a blog post, the company said "it appears DNS (domain name system) records for various organizations were modified, including one of Twitter's domains used for image serving, Twimg.com. Viewing of images and photos was sporadically impacted.

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U.S. war machine cranking up in response to Syria's gas attacks - Syria warns US

CBS NEWS: U.S. naval forces are moving closer to Syria as President Obama considers military options for responding to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad government.

The president emphasized that a quick intervention in the Syrian civil war was problematic, given the international considerations that should precede a military strike.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel declined to discuss any specific force movements while saying that Mr. Obama had asked the Pentagon to prepare military options for Syria.

The Pentagon has dispatched into the eastern Mediterranean a fourth warship armed with ballistic missiles capable of striking Syrian targets.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reported Friday that the Pentagon is making the initial preparations for a cruise-missile attack on Syrian government forces. Such an attack wouldn't happen until the president gives the green light, and it was clear during an interview on CNN Friday that he is not there yet.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey is expected to present options for a strike at a White House meeting on Saturday, Martin reported.

On Saturday, a White House official said Mr. Obama would "make an informed decision" about the U.S. response to Wednesday's attack "once we ascertain the facts."

The official referred to the president directing the U.S. intelligence community Thursday to investigate the attack because of the alleged use of chemical weapons.

"We have a range of options available, and we are going to act very deliberately so that we're making decisions consistent with our national interest as well as our assessment of what can advance our objectives in Syria," the official said Saturday.

U.S. Navy ships are capable of a variety of military action, including launching Tomahawk cruise missiles, as they did against Libya in 2011 as part of an international action that led to the overthrow of the Libyan government.

"The Defense Department has a responsibility to provide the president with options for contingencies, and that requires positioning our forces, positioning our assets, to be able to carry out different options — whatever options the president might choose," Hagel told reporters traveling with him to Asia.

Hagel said the U.S. is coordinating with the international community to determine "what exactly did happen" near Damascus earlier this week. According to reports, a chemical attack in a suburb of the capital killed at least 1,000 people. It would be the most heinous use of chemical weapons since Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein gassed thousands of Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1988.

ABC NEWS: SYRIA WARNS US

The Syrian government accused rebels of using chemical weapons Saturday and warned the United States not to launch any military action against Damascus over an alleged chemical attack last week, saying such a move would set the Middle East ablaze.

The accusations by the regime of President Bashar Assad against opposition forces came as an international aid group said it has tallied 355 deaths from a purported chemical weapons attack on Wednesday in a suburb of the Syrian capital known as Ghouta.

Syria is intertwined in alliances with Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas and Palestinian militant groups. The country also borders its longtime foe and U.S. ally Israel, making the fallout from military action unpredictable.


Violence in Syria has already spilled over the past year to Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Battle-hardened Hezbollah fighters have joined the combat alongside Assad's forces.


Meanwhile, U.S. naval units are moving closer to Syria as President Barack Obama considers a military response to the alleged use of chemical weapons by Assad's government.


U.S. defense officials told The Associated Press that the Navy had sent a fourth warship armed with ballistic missiles into the eastern Mediterranean Sea but without immediate orders for any missile launch into Syria. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss ship movements publicly.


Obama emphasized that a quick intervention in the Syrian civil war was problematic, given the international considerations that should precede a military strike.


After Obama met with his national security team Saturday, the White House said U.S. intelligence officials are still trying to determine whether Assad's government unleashed the chemical weapons attack earlier this week.


The White House statement said Obama received a detailed review of the range of options he has requested for the U.S. and the international community to respond if it is determined that Assad has engaged in deadly chemical warfare.


Syria's Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi dismissed the possibility of an American attack, warning that such a move would risk triggering more violence in the region.


"The basic repercussion would be a ball of fire that would burn not only Syria but the whole Middle East," al-Zoubi said in an interview with Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen TV. "An attack on Syria would be no easy trip."


In Tehran, Iran's Foreign Ministry Spokesman, Abbas Arakji, warned that an American military intervention in Syria will "complicate matters."


"Sending warships will not solve the problems but will worsen the situation," Arakji said in comments carried by Iran's Arabic-language TV Al-Alam. He added that any such U.S. move does not have international backing and that Iran "rejects military solutions."


In France, Doctors Without Borders said three hospitals it supports in the eastern Damascus region reported receiving roughly 3,600 patients with "neurotoxic symptoms" over less than three hours on Wednesday morning, when the attack in the eastern Ghouta area took place.


Of those, 355 died, the Paris-based group said.


The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Saturday that its estimated death toll from the alleged chemical attack had reached 322, including 54 children, 82 women and dozens of fighters. It said the dead included 16 people who have not been identified.

Ellsworth B-1Bs cleared to fly - airspace over crash site still restricted

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Flights were resuming out of Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota on Thursday, three days after a B-1B bomber crashed in a remote area of southeastern Montana, an Air Force official said.

Two pilots and two weapons system officers safely ejected Monday morning before the South Dakota-based bomber crashed near Broadus, in southeastern Montana.Col. Brooks McFarland, commander of the 28th Maintenance Group, said the cause of the crash remains under investigation. He said crews at Ellsworth have carefully inspected all of the B-1Bs for airworthiness before releasing them to fly.

Col. Kevin Kennedy, commander of the 28th Bomb Wing, said the base temporarily shut down flights until maintenance and operations group commanders could ensure Kennedy that it was safe to resume normal flying operations. Kennedy said he made the decision Thursday that flights would recommence that day.

“B-1s have continued their missions elsewhere, and I have been in contact with the maintenance leadership of those units,” McFarland said in a statement. “With no evidence of fleet-wide problems, it is important that we resume flying and keep proficient at our primary mission.”

The last time a B-1B was destroyed in a crash was on Dec. 12, 2001, when a bomber involved in the war in Afghanistan slammed into the Indian Ocean near the island of Diego Garcia. In April 2008, an Ellsworth B-1B bomber caught fire after landing at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

Aerial photos of Monday’s crash site show a massive charred area of prairie land void of recognizable aircraft parts. Some people who live near the remote locale say the plane broke apart in midair, scattering debris over several miles.

The crew members were taken to Rapid City-area hospitals. They are instructor pilot Maj. Frank Biancardi ll, of Methuen, Mass.; instructor pilot Capt. Curtis Michael, of Albion, Neb.; instructor weapons systems officer Capt. Brandon Packard, of Ashland, Ky.; and instructor weapons systems officer Capt. Chad Nishizuka, of Kailua, Hawaii.

Five days later the airspace over the crash area (encompassing a 240 mile area) is still under DOD restrioctions. View the TFR here.