Breaking News: Iran: "US Fighter Forced To Land" US Denies

(CNN) — U.S. military officials disputed Iranian media reports on Tuesday that Iranian fighter jets intercepted a U.S. military plane after it violated Iranian airspace.

Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency reported that the “Falcon fighter” was forced to land at an Iranian airport after entering the country’s airspace from Turkey at low altitude to evade radar.

Two top U.S. military officials told CNN’s Barbara Starr that no U.S. military aircraft has been forced down. But U.S. officials noted that the aircraft may have belonged to another government agency or perhaps the Iraqi government.

Update:

By Sky News SkyNews - 46 mins ago
A US fighter jet has been forced to land in Iran after violating the country's territory, according to an Iranian news agency.

The agency added that the incursion was unintentional, and those on board were questioned and released.

It said five senior US military officials were interrogated at an Iranian airport, but allowed to leave the following day after it became clear the incursion had been a mistake.

However, a Pentagon spokesman said it was unaware of any US warplanes being forced to land in Iran.

All US aircraft in the region have been accounted for.

Editor's note: No U.S. fighter aircraft seats 5.

Maybe the aircraft was a Dassault Falcon executive jet?

-Steve Douglass


Update:

The Pentagon has denied Iranian reports that a US military aircraft violated its territory and was forced to land in the country.

"All aircraft in the region are accounted for and we have no reports of any aircraft landing in Iran," Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Ryder said.

"I haven't heard anything like that," said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.

The semi-official Fars News Agency said five senior US military officials had been interrogated at an Iranian airport and released a day later after it became clear the US plane had not entered intentionally.

"After it became clear that they unintentionally entered Iran's air space and their destination was Afghanistan, they were allowed to leave Iran for Afghanistan," Fars said.

It did not say when the incident happened.

In an initial report, Fars described the aircraft as a warplane. But later called it a "Falcon", giving no further details.

Some US officials speculated the craft may have been a civilian plane because of the number of people reported to be on board, but they said they had no information about the incident.

Update: Iranian news reports claimed Tuesday that Iran forced down a Western aircraft that accidentally entered its airspace, then allowed the plane to continue to Afghanistan after questioning its passengers.

The state-owned Al-Alam, Iran's official Arabic-language television station, quoted an unidentified senior Iranian military official as saying the plane belonged either to a British or Hungarian relief agency. It said Iran forced the aircraft to land on Sunday and then permitted the passengers and crew to leave the following day.

White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, "We're looking into the various and conflicting reports coming from the Iranian `news' agencies, but do not have any information at this time that would lead us to believe they are correct."

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hasan Qashqavi said he had no information about the case. Other Iranian officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

The official quoted by Al-Alam said the plane "lost its way" and violated Iranian air space. He said the passengers _ who he said included American military personnel _ were questioned and that the plane was allowed to continue to Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, officials with the U.S. military, the American Embassy and the British Embassy said they had no information about a plane being forced down in Iran.

Initially, the semiofficial Fars news agency said the plane was American. Fars reported that the plane was carrying five military officials and three civilians from Turkey to Afghanistan when it "unintentionally" entered Iranian airspace.

According to the Fars report, Iranian fighters guided the plane to an Iranian airport, the passengers were questioned and a day later were released and allowed to continue to their destination.

Fars said the plane was a Falcon, apparently referring to a passenger aircraft manufactured by the French firm Dassault and primarily used by business executives. Dassault Falcon produces five jets with ranges from about 3,250 nautical to more than 4,000 nautical miles, with cabins that typically carry about six passengers and two crew members.

Asteroid To Hit Earth Monday/Not A Threat Scientists Say

(CNN) -- A meteor, or shooting star, is usually the size of a pebble, or even a grain of sand, burning up in the atmosphere.


An asteroid like the meteor shown here should be visible Monday night over northeastern Africa.

On Monday night, an asteroid that may be the size of a car will likely burn up in the atmosphere over northeastern Africa, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

But the planet is not in peril. The asteroid, spotted by an Arizona observatory only Monday afternoon, will burn up in the upper atmosphere at about 10:46 p.m. ET (2:46 a.m. GMT).

It will not pose a threat to aircraft or people on the ground, but it may put on a show.

Called an asteroid while in space, astronomers refer to it as a meteor once it interacts with the atmosphere and begins to heat and glow. While the meteor will burn up over Egypt and the Sudan, traveling from the southwest to the northeast, it could be visible from much of southern Europe, northeastern Africa, and the Middle East, according to Christine Pulliam of the Harvard center.

She said the meteor could appear, cloud-cover permitting, as bright as a full moon, and may produce a loud boom or popping noise. Italy's University of Pisa calculated the odds are between 99.8 percent and 100 percent that the object, traveling at 28,800 mph, will encounter the Earth's atmosphere.

"We want to stress that this object is not a threat," said Dr. Timothy Spahr, director of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. "We're excited since this is the first time we have issued a prediction that an object will enter Earth's atmosphere."

"We're eager for observations from astronomers near the asteroid's approach path," said Gareth Williams of the Minor Planet Center. "We really hope that someone will manage to photograph it."

The Minor Planet Center, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is a worldwide clearinghouse for asteroid and comet observations. It collects and disseminates observations and calculates orbits.

Chinese Chips In Our Military Computers Causing Crashes

Ars Technica:

Over the past year, US citizens have become increasingly aware of the substandard consumer-level goods flowing out of China, but new reports indicate that the counterfeit products and dubious quality controls are not confined to the consumer sector. An increasingly large number of supposedly military-grade electronic components are turning out to be counterfeit commercial-grade hardware that, in some cases, is decades older than the manufacturing label indicates.

The problem, to be sure, is not entirely China's fault. Back in 1994 and 1996, the Clinton Administration passed two bills, the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act (1994), and the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 (PDF, originally known as the Information Technology Management Reform Act). Collectively, these two bills were designed to streamline and simplify federal purchasing procedures, as well as allow for the use of commercial off-the-shelf hardware in certain areas. The concepts were sold to the public and Congress as a way to save a tremendous amount of money—rather than designing and implementing its own, custom products at tremendous manufacturing and R&D costs, the government would instead use (or modify) products that were readily available on today's market. That was the idea, anyway, but new reporting from BusinessWeek highlights how these two laws have had long-term unintended consequences.

One of the unintended consequences of both cutting the Pentagon's budget and encouraging low-cost, off-the-shelf procurement, has been a dramatic decline in the use of authorized resellers and/or parts purchased directly from the manufacturer. Under the new rules, government contractors were explicitly discouraged from designing systems that required the use of expensive, proprietary electronics or processors that would never be widely produced. This left the Pentagon largely unable to fund inefficient, small-scale production runs, and gave electronics manufacturers little reason to produce them.

Moving the acquisition and sourcing for these parts to China has opened security holes that haven't gone entirely unnoticed. As we covered earlier this year, the Department of Defense is aware that the processors it's acquiring are vulnerable to tampering, since some of them are complex enough to easily conceal trojan horses or backdoor circuitry installed by parties unknown. The DoD plans to launch a program designed to evaluate the best ways to detect circuit-level and chip-level tampering, but results are still years away.

Keeping China from advancing too far, meanwhile, is still a major concern of the United States. Intel is building a fab plant in Shanghai, but the new facility won't come online with anything like the cutting-edge technology the chip giant deploys in its other facilities. Even allowing Intel to build a facility in Shanghai at all is something of a bend in historical US policy. Current Chinese fabrication technology lags the US by multiple generations, and it's not in our best interest to hand a potential enemy the tools with which we build our own leading-edge equipment.

The bad parts flowing into the military's hands now aren't being modified in clean rooms; rather, they're being stripped off old boards in China's back alleys, doctored cosmetically, and passed off as new, military-grade components. The difference between true military-grade parts and the commercial-grade chips that are actually shipping out is non-trivial. In many cases, military-grade components are exposed to prolonged environmental stressors that commercial components are not designed to deal with, including extreme fluctuations in temperature and humidity. It's absolutely critical that components remain durable and functional under such conditions, as having the radar on one's F-15 suddenly fail is considered slightly more hazardous than, say, the failure of one's cellular phone.

Component failure reports from defense contractors worldwide, including Boeing, Raytheon, BAE, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed, however, suggest that sufficient verification of part authenticity is no longer taking place, and investigations have turned up a significant number of counterfeit parts, sometimes installed in mission-critical systems. The culprit, in this case, is price. In the name of cost-cutting, the federal government has stripped away many of the authorization and authentication procedures that once defined federal purchasing and replaced them with a system that rewards the penny-pincher who can find the cheapest products.

ARS TECHNICA: Bill allows spying on Americans

An appropriations bill signed by President Bush last week allows the controversial National Applications Office to begin operating a stringently limited version of a program that would turn military spy satellites on the US, sharing imagery with other federal, state, and local government agencies. The government's own watchdog agency, the Government Accountability Office, has warned in an unpublished report that the more expansive program in the offing lacks adequate safeguards to protect privacy and civil liberties.

For now, the law restricts the NAO to "activities substantially similar" to those carried out by the Civil Applications Committee, an interagency coordinating body formed in 1976 to give civilian agencies access to military satellites for scientific and disaster preparedness purposes, such as "monitoring volcanic activity, environmental and geological changes, hurricanes, and floods." But as a draft charter for the Office makes clear, officials at the Department of Homeland Security hope to branch out from these traditional applications, providing assistance and information to domestic law enforcement agencies.

That doesn't sit well with some members of Congess, who in a sharply worded letter earlier this year expressed concerns that the NAO "raises major issues under the Posse Comitatus Act" barring the military from performing law enforcement duties, and worried the program could be used to "gather domestic intelligence outside the rigorous protections of the law—and, ultimately, to share this intelligence with local law enforcement outside of constitutional parameters."

And as the Wall Street Journal reported last week, the Government Accountability Office appears to share those concerns. In an unpublished analysis—a public version of which may be released in coming weeks—the GAO found that there did not seem to be adequate "assurance that NAO operations will comply with applicable laws and privacy and civil liberties standards," nor sufficient checks and oversight procedures to prevent the misuse of satellite imagery.

The existence of the NAO was first publicly disclosed in press reports last summer, several months after its creation at the behest of the Director of National Intelligence. Following hearings held by the House Committee on Homeland Security, Congress blocked funding for the NAO, pressing DHS for more information about the legal basis for the progam—as well as the privacy safeguard to be put in place. The current appropriations bill permits the NAO to be funded only for the purpose of carrying out the old Civil Applications Committee's functions, pending a certification by the Secretary of Homeland Security that the Office's compliance with the law has been vetted, and provision to the Appropriations Committee of details of how funds will be spent. The bill also directs the Inspector General to provide regular reports—somewhat oddly, to the Appropriations Committee—on the data collected by NAO.

Among the questions raised about the proposed program is whether it runs afoul of the Reconstruction Era statute that makes it a crime to use the armed forces to "execute the laws" within US borders. Tim Sparapani, senior legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, believes the new initiative to be "a prima facie violation of the Posse Comitatus Act—this is about using a military asset to do domestic law enforcement." If law enforcement or immigration agencies need spy satellites, he argues, they should ask Congress to buy them some, rather than using the powerful eyes in the sky operated by the National Reconaissance Office for foreign-intelligence agencies not bound by domestic privacy constraints. "The military should never be used against the citizenry," he argues. "Even if we're talking about shooting pictures of people instead of shooting people, the principle remains the same."

But Gene Healy, an attorney and scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, is not so sure. At least since the 70s, says Healy, courts have tended to read the prohibition on using the military to "execute the laws" only as a barrier to "hands-on policing," such as conducting arrests or doing crowd control. That means sending soldiers to physically search a criminal suspects home is out, but loaning expertise or equipment and sharing information may be allowed. During the 2002 hunt for the "DC sniper," he notes, Army aircraft were used in the effort to hunt down the serial killer. "That doesn't mean it's a good policy," says Healy, "I can think of a lot of reasons it's a really bad idea to let soldiers train narcotics officers too, but that doesn't mean either is illegal under the current statute."

And what of Fourth Amendment concerns? Here, Sparapani says, the program enters "uncharted waters." In a pair of 1986 decisions, the Supreme Court ruled that aerial observation by surveillance planes did not count as a Fourth Amendment "search." If you grew your marijuana out in the open, the justices essentially concluded, you could not claim a "reasonable expectation of privacy" even if the crop wasn't visible from the ground. But the court left open the question of whether the same logic would apply in the case of technology more esoteric than an airplane. And in 2001, the court concluded that a search warrant was needed to use infrared scanners to detect the heat signature from an indoor dope-growing operation.

Presumably intelligence satellites have a range of sophisticated scanning equipment that would fall under the latter rule. But even in the case of ordinary image capturing, the high degree of precision of the satellite cameras—by some accounts good enough to read a page of text in a subject's hand—may make spying from space qualitatively different from a plane flyover.

Whatever the courts decide, Sparapani argues that Congress should press DHS to be more forthcoming about how it plans to use the orbiting eyes. "Given this administration," he says, "'trust us' just doesn't work anymore."

Taliban against the ropes/brokering peace?

The Taliban have been engaged in secret talks about ending the conflict in Afghanistan in a wide-ranging 'peace process' sponsored by Saudi Arabia and supported by Britain, The Observer can reveal.

The unprecedented negotiations involve a senior former member of the hardline Islamist movement travelling between Kabul, the bases of the Taliban senior leadership in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and European capitals. Britain has provided logistic and diplomatic support for the talks - despite official statements that negotiations can be held only with Taliban who are ready to renounce, or have renounced, violence.

Sources in Afghanistan confirmed the controversial talks, though they said that in recent weeks they had 'lost momentum'. According to Afghan government officials in Kabul, the intensity of the fighting this summer has been one factor. Another is the inconsistency of the Taliban's demands.

'They keep changing what they are asking for. One day it is one thing, the next another,' one Afghan government adviser with knowledge of the negotiations said. One aim of the initiative is to drive a wedge between Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Last week the French Prime Minister, François Fillon, referred indirectly to the talks during a parliamentary debate on Afghanistan. 'We must explore ways of separating the international jihadists from those who are acting more for nationalist or tribal motives. Efforts in this direction are being led by Sunni [Muslim] countries such as Saudi Arabia,' he said.

This summer's fighting season in Afghanistan has been the most violent since the invasion of 2001. The deterioration of the situation has provoked a major review of strategy among the 40-nation international coalition pitted against an increasingly confident and effective insurgency.

Although there have been low-level contacts with individual Taliban commanders at district level before, the Saudi initiative is the first attempt to talk to the Taliban leadership council based in or around the south-west Pakistan city of Quetta, known as the 'Quetta Shura'.

The talks started in the summer and have been brokered by Saudi Arabia at the invitation of the Afghan government. The go-between has spent weeks ferrying lists of demands and counter-demands between the Afghan capital, Riyadh and Quetta. He has also visited London to speak to Foreign Office and MI6 personnel. A delegation from Saudi intelligence has also visited Kabul.

The Taliban are understood to have submitted a list of 11 conditions for ending hostilities, which include demands to be allowed to run key ministries and a programmed withdrawal of western troops.

In Kabul, President Hamid Karzai's national security adviser, Zalmay Rasul, has been in charge of the negotiations. It is understood that Karzai has yet to make a formal response to the demands, leading to frustration among some western officials.

The Observer has also learnt of a separate exchange of letters in the summer between Karzai and the Taliban ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The dialogue proved fruitless.

Late last year Karzai said he would welcome the chance to speak directly to Hekmatyar and to Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's leader and one of the most wanted men in the world, promising that if the Taliban demanded a 'department in this or in that ministry or ... a position as deputy minister' in exchange for ending violence, he would give them the posts.

Previously Taliban spokesmen have said that only the departure of foreign troops, the institution of a fiercely rigorous interpretation of sharia law and a share of government would be acceptable to them as the basis for any deal.

A Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday that he had no knowledge of the 'Saudi initiative', as it is known in diplomatic circles, but that the British government 'actively supported the Afghan government's reconciliation process', which was 'part and parcel of the counter-insurgency campaign'.

In another development, The Observer has learnt that the British government is considering increasing the length of tours served by troops in Afghanistan. The Ministry of Defence confirmed last week that tours for senior soldiers in key command positions are set to be extended from six months to a year.

'We are looking at increasing tour lengths for a small number of headquarters posts ... with the aim of creating greater continuity in key positions,' an MoD spokesman said.

Although the MoD denied any plans to extend other service personnel's combat tours in Afghanistan, the idea of troops deployed to the area serving nine months was raised recently by the army's director of infantry, Brigadier Richard Dennis, in a speech to senior commanders.

Washington is putting pressure on Nato allies such as Britain to match American troop increases.