Breaking: Senate Foreign Relations Committee passes resolution to strike Syria

WP: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed a resolution Wednesday granting President Obama limited authority to launch a military strike on Syria in response to its reported use of chemical weapons against civilians.

Acting hours after Obama, during a visit to Sweden, said the credibility of Congress and the international community was also at stake, the committee voted 10 to 7, with one member voting “present,” to authorize the use of force against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.


The panel acted after top administration officials pressed their case Wednesday for congressional approval of a U.S. military strike, even if lawmakers would support only a more limited authorization than the administration originally wanted.

In a news conference in Stockholm, the first leg of a trip that will take him to Russia for a Group of 20 summit, Obama made the case for a U.S. strike on Syria “limited in time and in scope” to degrade Assad’s military capabilities and deter him from resorting to chemical weapons again in his 2 1/2-year war with rebels seeking his ouster.

“I didn’t set a red line,” Obama said in response to a question. “The world set a red line” when it declared chemical weapons “abhorrent” and passed a treaty forbidding them. “Congress set a red line when it ratified that treaty.”

After classified, closed-doors hearings Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began debating a new draft of a resolution on the use of force in Syria in response to a reportedchemical weapons attack last month that killed more than 1,400 people.

But the hearing to mark up the resolution was delayed for more than two hours amid disagreements among senators over its wording. Among those opposed to the Senate committee’s draft was Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a leading GOP voice on national security issues, who wants broader U.S. action against Syria, the Associated Press reported.

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Obama's push to punish Syria gaining ground in Congress

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After the meeting, the top two Republicans in the House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor and top Democrat Nancy Pelosi said they would back military action against Syria.

"Only the United States has the capability and the capacity to stop Assad and to warn others around the world that this type of behavior is not going to be tolerated," Boehner told reporters. "I believe that my colleagues should support this call for action."

The support came as Obama ramped up his lobbying effort for military action in response to what Washington says was a sarin gas attack by the Syrian government that killed more than 1,400 people, hundreds of them children, near Damascus on Aug. 21


The White House’s aggressive push for Congressional approval of an attack on Syria appeared to have won the tentative support of one of President Obama’s most hawkish critics, Senator John McCain, who said Monday that he would back a limited strike if the president did more to arm the Syrian rebels and the attack was punishing enough to weaken the Syrian military.

In an hourlong meeting at the White House, said Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, Mr. Obama gave general support to doing more for the Syrian rebels, although no specifics were agreed upon. Officials said that in the same conversation, which included Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, Mr. Obama indicated that a covert effort by the United States to arm and train Syrian rebels was beginning to yield results: the first 50-man cell of fighters, who have been trained by the C.I.A., was beginning to sneak into Syria.

There appeared to be broad agreement with the president, Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham said, that any attack on Syria should be to “degrade” the Syrian government’s delivery systems. Such a strike could include aircraft, artillery and the kind of rockets that the Obama administration says the forces of President Bashar al-Assad used to carry out an Aug. 21 sarin attack in the Damascus suburbs that killed more than 1,400 people.

Aviation photo of the day - Texas Doll

(C) Steve Douglass 

Marines forward deployed to support Obama's possible strike at Syria

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Marines in the Middle East, Africa and Europe are poised to reach Syria within hours should President Obama order a strike on the country as officials work to determine whether the government there was involved in a chemical weapons attack against its own people.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told BBC television Tuesday that the Defense Department has “moved assets in place to be able to fulfill and comply with whatever option the president wishes to take.”

NAVY TIMES: The Marine Corps has units forward-deployed to the region to deal specifically with crisis response missions, said Capt. Eric Flanagan, a Marine spokesman at the Pentagon. But so far, none have been directed to prepare for a specific mission or deployment, he said.

The various units are there for this type of reason, Flanagan added, and they include the following capabilities:

■ 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit. MEUs typically number about 2,200 Marines and sailors. They operate at sea from Navy amphibious ships and carry infantry, aviation and logistics capabilities. The 26th MEU is distributed among the amphibious assault ship Kearsarge, the amphibious transport dock San Antonio and the amphibious dock landing ship Carter Hall. The Kearsarge is in the United Arab Emirates, southeast of Syria. The Carter Hall was in the Seychelles, off the coast of Africa. And the San Antonio, is in the Gulf of Aden, just south of Syria.

■ Special-Purpose Marine air-ground task force Crisis Response. The Corps’ newest type of unit, the Special-Purpose MAGTF operates like a smaller-sized MEU, but is based on land and operates largely independent of the Navy. The Crisis Response Force deployed to the region is made up of about 550 Marines. Most of the Marines are at Morón Air Base in Spain. A small detachment is based at Naval Air Station Sigonella in Italy. The force is built around a reinforced rifle company and is supported by six MV-22B Ospreys and two KC-130J aerial refuelers.

■ Fleet Anti-terrorism Security Teams. The Marine Corps has four FAST teams deployed to the region — two in U.S. Africa Command and two in Europe Command, Flanagan said. Typically used to respond to threats to embassy security, FAST teams are made up of about 50 Marines who can be called up by combatant commanders in the region to protect vital naval and national assets.

■ 13th MEU. Marines and sailors with the 13th MEU departed from California on Friday. They are headed to the Middle East and North Africa for a six month deployment.

Also in the region are members of Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron 234. Members of VMGR-234 deployed to Naval Air Station Sigonella, Italy, in June. The Marines have been tasked with refueling not only U.S. aircraft, but also aircraft from allied countries, according to a Marine Corps news release. The squadron recently took part in aerial refueling missions to provide fuel in the air for the Moroccan air force.

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Snowden leaks $53B Black Budget details

ABC: Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents providing the most detail yet about how the vast U.S. intelligence community uses its nearly $53 billion so-called "black budget," according to a report by The Washington Post.

Today the Post published several stories and statistics based on the U.S. intelligence agencies' 2013 Congressional Budget Justification, a classified document that breaks down how much money goes to which agency and, to a certain extent, what those agencies do with the funds. The newspaper reported Snowden was the source of the document. Prior to the leak, only the total budget was public knowledge.

Though the newspaper published graphs and pie charts tracking the spending of each of the intelligence community's 16 agencies, it said withheld "some information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods."

READ: U.S. Spy Network's Successes, Failures and Objectives Detailed in 'Black Budget' Summary (WaPo)

According to the Post, the budget document reveals that the CIA receives the most funding of any intelligence agency with a proposed $14.7 billion for 2013 -- $11.5 billion on data collection expenses, $1.8 billion on management, facilities and support, $1.1 billion on data analysis and $387.3 million on data processing and exploitation.

Next up is the National Security Agency, for whom Snowden worked as a contractor, which spends almost as much on management, facilities and support -- $5.2 billion -- as it does on collecting, processing and analyzing data -- $5.6 billion.

Together the documents reportedly reveal NSA and CIA have launched aggressive "offensive cyber operations" to steal information from foreign computer networks or disrupt enemy systems.

But of all the broad missions the intelligence community undertakes, the one that is the most costly -- more than counter-terrorism or combating weapons proliferation -- is that of providing strategic intelligence and warning for major world events including a region or state's "economic instability, state failure, societal unrest and emergence of regional powers."

Another highlight from the documents, according to the Post, is that the U.S. intelligence community considers Israel a "priority target" along with China, Russia, Iran and Cuba.

The documents also filled in some details about the May 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The Post reported the raid was assisted by a "fleet of satellites" which collected signals intelligence over Pakistan as the mission was ongoing. The documents also say the U.S. got a DNA confirmation that the man they had killed was bin Laden just eight hours after the raid concluded.

Snowden, the source behind the most massive intelligence leak in U.S. history, is in Russia three months after the 30-year-old fled Hawaii for Hong Kong with a trove of secrets he allegedly stole from the NSA and turned over to several journalists including one from The Washington Post.

Ever since there has been a steady stream of reporting on activities the U.S. government would prefer to keep secret, including details of its vast foreign and domestic surveillance programs, the role that major telecommunications companies play in the programs, the CIA's penchant for spying on government officials from foreign nations and, most recently, just how much this is all costing American taxpayers.

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