Pentagon calls mystery missile ‘unexplained,’ cannot rule out threat

Source: NYPOST

The Pentagon said Tuesday that a missile launch off the southern coast of California remained “unexplained” and that its mysterious origins meant that it was not possible to rule out any threat to the homeland, Fox News Channel reported.

Earlier Tuesday, NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) and NORTHCOM (United States Northern Command) officials told Fox there was no threat, but Pentagon Spokesman Col. Dave Lapan would not confirm that because the military does not know what the missile was or where it came from.

Lapan added that the incident did not appear to be a regularly scheduled test, as no warnings to mariners or airmen appeared to be issued ahead of its launch.

The contrail was caught on camera by a KCBS news helicopter at around sunset Monday evening, approximately 35 miles out to sea and west of Los Angeles.

The missile appeared to be launched from the water, and not from US soil, Lapan added.

The military was trying to solve the mystery using the video from KCBS as there was no indication that NORAD and NORTHCOM were able to detect it independently.

According to Fox News, NORAD and NORTHCOM would only say they were aware of the launch.

However one unnamed senior defense official added: “There was no threat to the homeland.”

A navy spokesperson previously told KCBS that no navy activity was reported in the region.

A sergeant at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County said a Delta II rocket was launched from the base last Friday, but insisted there were no launches since then.

On viewing the footage, former deputy defense secretary Robert Ellsworth speculated on KCBS that the launch could be a show of military muscle.

“It could be a test-firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile from a submarine … to demonstrate, mainly to Asia, that we can do that,” Ellsworth said.

 

Homeless Heroes: US war vets ‘forgotten & abandoned’

Homeless Heroes: US war vets 'forgotten & abandoned'

Arab sources: A major military surprise is close. Galant scandal a smokescreen

Source: Debka

War preparations are reported by debkafile’s military sources in Tehran and Damascus.
In Tehran, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards announced Friday, Aug. 20: “IRGC is in full readiness to encounter firmly with the stupidity of the US and the Zionist regime.”

In Damascus, Syrian prime minister Naji al-Otari gathered his ministers and heads of security and emergency services Thursday and ordered them to place all their services on immediate war readiness.
And sources close to the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas quoted him as saying that direct talks with Israel were not in the offing because “a big military surprise awaits the Middle East.”
On Thursday, too, Tehran pitched its threat level high by warning that any attack on Iran’s nuclear sites would be met by the IRGC “targeting the interests of the enemies in any part of the world.”
Some Iranian sources have suggested that Israel’s obsessive preoccupation with the Galant scandal (over a forged document designed to influence the choice of the next Israeli chief of staff) is a smokescreen for masking preparations for an imminent attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In the United States, respected commentators this week talked and wrote openly about a possible war over Iran’s progress toward a nuclear bomb capability.
Former US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, who has excellent connections in Washington and Jerusalem, wrote: “The United States is more likely than Israel to launch an attack on Iran.”
Lawrence Eagleburger, former US Secretary of State, had this to say about the activation of Iran’s first reactor at Bushehr Saturday, Aug. 21: “The world’s going to war over this. If Iran gets the weapon it’s going to use it.”

He urged an attack on Iran before it obtained a bomb.
Some other US experts suggest the world powers would wait longer than 11 months before weighing an attack, whereas informed American sources are talking for the first time in 14 months about a possible US-led multilateral Western attack on Iran which, according to debkafile’s military sources, would be in conjunction with Germany, Britain and France.
In the first week of June, 2009, those sources note, US, UK and French forces carried out a joint exercise at the French Canjuers training facility near Toulon, simulating a marine attack with close air support on Iranian ground targets
British planes took off for the exercise from airbases in the UK, while US warplanes flew in from the USS Harry S. Truman and French jets from their carrier, the Charles de Gaulle. It was their first display of strength, in which the German frigate FGS Hessen also took part, for a combined air-sea-ground war offensive.
The Truman and the Hessen are currently stationed in the Gulf of Oman opposite the strategic Straits of Hormuz.
In an apparent bid to calm the rising war fever in America, the New York Times Friday reported that the Washington has assured Israel that an Iranian threat was not imminent but had been delayed for a year by problems in enriching uranium and divisions within the regime over how far to push their nuclear program But the NYT added suspicions in Israel that the enrichment problems may be a pretext to conceal a secret enrichment site yet to be discovered in tunnels being dug across the country, including some near Natanz. Tehran may then take everyone by surprise and jump up with a nuclear bomb – in the same way as it caught the world napping with a banned uranium enrichment industry turning out fuel for a bomb unhindered.

Simon Henderson, an eminent American expert on Iran, published an article Thursday on the imminent inauguration of the Bushehr reactor in which he stressed that the fuel rods it uses could produce enough plutonium-rich residue for building at least one nuclear bomb a year.
The plant will moreover provide cover for training an entire generation of Iranian nuclear scientists and technicians for its weapons industry.  After all, the regime’s nuclear and missile programs involved “evasion” and “an array of deceptive practices.”

Yet not a word was heard in Israel – either from official sources or by media commentators – in advance of the ceremony inaugurating the Russian-built Bushehr reactor Saturday. All their efforts were bent on untangling the Galant affair and coping with its fallout. No wonder Iran, Syria, Hizballah and the Palestinians refused to believe this obsession could be so all-consuming and treated it as a red herring for deceiving them.