Bomb fragment strikes truck outside Nellis

By Bruce Rolfsen - Staff writer Air Force Times
Posted : Thursday Oct 16, 2008 14:05:21 EDT

Yes, an Air Force bomb struck a truck Wednesday in Las Vegas.

An Air Force fighter, for reasons under investigation, released a 25-pound BDU-33 training bomb that hit the ground just inside the boundary of Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. The nonexplosive bomb broke apart and a “piece” of the bomb bounced into a truck traveling on Las Vegas Boulevard near the intersection of Beasley Boulevard, near the north side of the base.

No one was injured. There was no word from Nellis or police officials about damage to the truck.

It is not uncommon for practice bombs to fall off Air Force jets. In March, a BDU-33 fell from an F-16 over Tulsa, Okla., striking an apartment building. In January 2007, a training bomb flying on an A-10 fell into a South Korean factory. And in January 2004, a BDU-33 fell from an F-15E and into an English industrial area. No one was injured in the accidents.

Mistaken bomb drops typically are caused by malfunctioning bomb racks or incorrect installation of the bombs.

Suspected U.S. missile kills 1 in Pakistan

By Ishtiaq Mahsud - The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday Oct 16, 2008 7:20:01 EDT
DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan — A suspected U.S. missile strike hit a house in northwest Pakistan on Thursday, killing one purported foreign militant and injuring another, officials said.

The strike took place in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan’s wild border belt, considered a likely hiding place for al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri.

Two Pakistani intelligence officials said reports from informants and field agents suggested that one suspected foreign militant died in the attack and that another foreigner was injured.

Asked if any al-Qaida leaders had been hit, the officials said that while Arabs had been living in the house, the identities of the victims were not yet clear.

They said foreign and Pakistani militants had frequented the house in a remote, forested area since its owner fled the tribal region last year.

A local resident, Javed Mehsud, said he saw a number of unmanned planes in the sky before and after three explosions destroyed the house in the village of Tapargai.

U.S. military and CIA drones that patrol the frontier region are believed to have carried out at least a dozen missile strikes against suspected militant targets since August. The U.S. rarely confirms or denies involvement in the attacks.

All of those strikes, as well as a highly unusual raid by helicopter-borne commandos, have been in the regions of North and South Waziristan, key strongholds for Islamic militants fighting on both sides of the border.

Thursday’s strike was the first in over a year in the territory of Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan’s most prominent Taliban leader and the chief suspect in last year’s assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

NASA approves Hubble revival plan

MSNBC:

NASA approves Hubble revival plan.

Circuit switchover could get data flowing again by Friday, managers say.

NASA is going ahead with a plan to restart the flow of science data from the Hubble Space Telescope by routing around circuitry that failed a little more than two weeks ago, officials said Tuesday.

The unprecedented switchover is due to begin early Wednesday, and if all goes well, the telescope should be beaming imagery back down to Earth by Friday, said Art Whipple, manager of the Hubble Space Telescope Systems Management Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Last month's glitch forced the postponement of the shuttle Atlantis' servicing mission to the world's best-known space observatory. That mission had been due for launch on Tuesday, but it's now been put off until next February at the earliest. Whipple said the plan for that orbital service call was "still being hashed out

Washington Post: WH authorized water-boarding.

CIA Tactics Endorsed In Secret Memos
Waterboarding Got White House Nod

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 15, 2008; Page A01

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency's interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

The memos were the first -- and, for years, the only -- tangible expressions of the administration's consent for the CIA's use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002, several White House officials, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White House for "policy approval."

The repeated requests for a paper trail reflected growing worries within the CIA that the administration might later distance itself from key decisions about the handling of captured al-Qaeda leaders, former intelligence officials said. The concerns grew more pronounced after the revelations of mistreatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and further still as tensions grew between the administration and its intelligence advisers over the conduct of the Iraq war.

Read the entire story at: washingtonpost.com

No 2 Al Qaida In Iraq killed.

U.S.: No. 2 leader of al-Qaida in Iraq killed
The Associated Press
Posted : Wednesday Oct 15, 2008 8:20:11 EDT
BAGHDAD — The U.S. military says the No. 2 leader of al-Qaida in Iraq has been killed during an operation in the northern city of Mosul.

The military has identified the insurgent leader as a Moroccan known as Abu Qaswarah or Abu Sara.

Wednesday’s statement says he became the senior al-Qaida in Iraq emir of northern Iraq in June 2007 and had ties to senior al-Qaida leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It also says “he was al-Qaida in Iraq’s second-in-command” behind Abu Ayyub al-Masri, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir.