We know the details on the jet but we won't tell, says US official

President Barack Obama (R) and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (L) leave after the family picture of the G20 Summit of Heads of State and Government in Los Cabos, Baja California, Mexico on June 18, 2012. 

U.S. officials know the details about a Turkish jet downed by Syria last month but have no intention of informing the press about them, according to U.S. Foreign Affairs officials.

"Those in the American government who need to know [details] know them," the prominent official told daily Hürriyet during an interview. "But we will make no statements about the topics in question."

Declining to explain why a Pentagon official leaked rumors to the Washington Post claiming that the jet was over Syrian waters when it was shot down, the unnamed official said the details mattered very little to the American government.

"Whether the jet was shot over Syrian territory or over international waters, or what it was shot with, what difference does it make? What matters to us is that it was downed,” the official said.

"Turkey thought the louder its statements were, the more believable they would be," the official said. "I guess that was why the prime minister made those statements. It's like an American shouting to someone who doesn't speak English. We, however, will not say anything on the matter."

Turkey and U.S. are "90 percent" on the same page on the crisis in Syria, the official said, citing Turkey's "more interventionist" attitude as a possible difference between the countries' views.

Several other NATO countries also have reservations about intervening, the official said without naming any specific members.

Why Obama never called

Some in Turkey have been debating the reason why U.S. President Barack Obama did not call Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan immediately following the downing of the jet even though the two leaders exchanged 13 phone calls in the last year.

Providing a possible reason for the lack of contact, the official said: “There are elections in the U.S. this year. And when foreign affairs are discussed during American elections, the only thing that matters is Israel's security. That should be taken into consideration in the progress of relations."

Differences in Syria may have also affected the situation.

"We clearly don't want to intervene in Syria," the official said. "But we cannot say that is a direct reason [for Obama not to call].”

America's Asia Pivot

Wounded sailor gets presidential invite

DES MOINES, Iowa — A wounded Iowa sailor received a surprise hospital visit from President Obama and an invitation to the White House.

The Des Moines Register reports that Taylor Morris, 23, of Cedar Falls and his girlfriend plan to attend dinner at the White House and watch fireworks Wednesday.

Morris was hurt May 3 in Afghanistan while working as a bomb disposal technician. Morris lost his left arm at the elbow, his right arm at the wrist, his left leg at mid-thigh and his right leg at the knee.

Obama visited Morris on Thursday at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He spent about five minutes in Morris’ room.

The White House says the president met with 52 wounded troops and awarded one Purple Heart.

US Lawmakers cut time off work for disabled vets

A House subcommittee has drastically scaled back legislation to protect the jobs of disabled veterans who need time off from work for service-connected medical treatment.

The House Veterans’ Affairs economic opportunity subcommittee on Thursday approved a bill, HR 3524, barring employers from discriminating against disabled veterans in terms of employment, seniority and benefits if they take time off for treatment of their military-related health issues.

However, it would not cover workers hired for brief periods if “there is no reasonable expectation” of permanent or extended employment. And an employer could still let a worker go if keeping the disabled veteran becomes “impossible or unreasonable.” Business with 11 or fewer employees would not have any obligations under the law.

As originally introduced by Rep. Bruce Braley of Iowa, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, the bill provided for veterans to be absent from work for a cumulative 12 weeks over a 12-month period without fear of losing their jobs, although an employer would not have to pay them for all of the time off.

The revised bill, which passed the subcommittee by voice vote, is far more limited. It provides no additional time off for anyone also covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act, which covers people working for businesses with 50 or more employees and gives them up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave.

Under the revised Disabled Veterans Employment Protection Act, those not covered by FMLA would be eligible for four weeks of unpaid leave without fear of losing a job if the business has at least 12 employees. Those covered by FMLA could take no more than the 12 weeks provided under that law.

Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., the economic opportunity panel chairman, said the revisions were done “to strike the proper balance between businesses and employees.”

Ryan Gallucci of Veterans of Foreign Wars, who last week warned that making employers provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave to disabled veterans could discourage companies from hiring the veterans, said modifications answer some of his concerns, but he still doesn’t think the bill addresses the issue of needing time off for medical treatment.

“The problem has to do with the VA’s limited appointments,” he said. “VA is basically telling people you have to take time off during a workday for an appointment, which is not good for the veteran or the employer. If they expanded their hours to evenings and weekends, it would be better for veterans trying to hold down a job and take care of their medical needs”.

VA care extended to Camp Lejeune water victims

Congressional negotiators have taken a big leap in expanding veterans’ health care by proposing Veterans Affairs Department treatment for veterans and dependents exposed to contaminated well water at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Up to 750,000 people — Navy and Marine Corps members and their families — may have been exposed to water found to be contaminated by carcinogens from the 1950s into the 1980s.

North Carolina lawmakers have been pushing for years for the federal government to cover health costs for people who were exposed, but there have been sharp disagreements about who should be responsible: the Defense Department, which owned the base, or VA, which covers service-connected illness, injury and disability.

This is a big step because VA provides very little health care for dependents, concentrating on veterans rather than their families. But it is not unprecedented.

Those covered must have lived or worked on Camp Lejeune for at least 30 days from Jan. 1, 1957 through Dec. 31, 1987.

VA ends up with responsibility under terms of a compromise reached June 21 between members of the House and Senate veterans’ affairs committees on a comprehensive veterans bill made up of provisions that have passed at least one of the committees over the past two years.

The compromise bill is expected to pass the Senate as early as next week and could be on its way to the White House by the Fourth of July, according to congressional staffers.

The agreement is a victory for Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., who has been pushing the veterans affairs committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee to get help for the former Lejuene residents.

“I am pleased this legislation has moved further than ever before, and I am hopeful it will receive the attention of the full Senate very soon,” Burr said. “The Marines, sailors, and their families who were affected by exposures to toxic water at Camp Lejeune deserve this care, and I hope this bill will finally pass so we can provide it for them.”

It’s also a victory Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee chairwoman, and for Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., her House counterpart, for reaching a compromise that sweeps up a large pack of abandoned legislation.

In a statement, Miller said the comprehensive bill, HR 1627, is the result of months of compromise.

“This bill includes nearly 50 provisions, which combines House-passed legislation and Senate Committee-reported bills,” he said, adding that veterans organizations also provided input.

He called it a “fiscally responsible” bill that “will not cost the taxpayer an extra dime.” Costs are covered by extensions of fees on veterans home loans and other adjustments. Full details were not yet available on offsets, but congressional aides who worked on the compromise said no benefits are cut and no services are canceled to pay for any of the provisions in the bill.

Among them:

• Allow waiver of copays for veterans receiving telehealth and telemedicine visits, a change aimed at encouraging veterans who live far from a VA clinic or hospital to use the service.

• Require comprehensive reporting and tracking of sexual assaults and safety problems, an idea taken from a bill sponsored in 2011 by Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle, R-N.Y., after unreported or underreported sexual assaults were discovered on VA property, including in hospitals.

• Allow service dogs, when trained by an accredited agency or organization, onto any VA-owned or -controlled property.

• Permanently authorize adjustable-rate mortgages and hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages under the VA home loan program, options that might be especially attractive to home buyers because of low mortgage interest rates.

• Make VA-backed loans available to some surviving spouses. This would apply to survivors of a totally disabled veteran who had been receiving disability compensation for at least 10 years or who died within five years of leaving active duty. It also would apply to survivors of former prisoners of war who had been totally disabled for at least one year prior to their deaths.

• Codify in law the prohibition against reserving gravesites at Arlington National Cemetery and prohibit more than one gravesite from being provided to a veteran or service member.

Lawmakers to Panetta: Stop AF attacks on faith

Sixty-six members of Congress sent a letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Friday urging him to issue guidance to counter an “alarming pattern of attacks on faith in the Air Force.”

In their letter, the lawmakers blame Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz for cultivating a crackdown on religion within the service.

The letter blasts the Air Force for removing Latin references to God in a unit patch, removing religious references in missile training, removing bibles from Air Force Inn checklists and barring commanders from telling airmen about Chaplain Corps programs.

“When our sons and daughters join the military, they are not signing away their First Amendment right to religious liberty,” the letter states. “Unfortunately it seems that some parts of the military are intent on prohibiting religious expressions rather than protecting it.”

The 66 signatures are led by a trio of lawmakers: Reps. Randy Forbes, R-Va.; Diane Black, R-Tenn.; and Todd Akin, R-Mo.

“The Air Force has repeatedly capitulated to demands from groups that seek to remove all traces of faith from the military and the public square. … Those who sacrifice so much for our nation must be assured that they need not leave their faith at home when they volunteer to serve,” Forbes said in a statement.

In the letter, the lawmakers say Schwartz is most responsible for what they say is a continuing pattern of anti-religious bias. They said a Sept. 1, 2011, memo issued by Schwartz imposed a “stringent policy with regards to religion”

“The memo stated that Gen. Schwartz expected ‘chaplains, not commanders, to notify Airmen of Chaplain Corps programs,’ suggesting that the mere mention of these programs is impermissible,” the congressmen’s letter stated.

“We believe this statement exemplifies the troubling ‘complete separation’ approach that is creating a chilling effect down the chain of command as airmen attempt to comply.”

Individual moves taken within Air Force circles since Schwartz’s guidance go beyond the requirements of the U.S. Constitution, lawmakers wrote. “The changes lend credence to the notion that the Air Force will remove any references to God or faith that an outside organization brings to its attention.”

Attempts to reach Schwartz’s office on Friday morning for comment were unsuccessful.

Report: U.S. considers more raids into Pakistan

WASHINGTON — Military and intelligence officials are so frustrated with Pakistan’s failure to stop local militant groups from attacking Americans in neighboring Afghanistan that they have considered launching secret joint U.S.-Afghan commando raids into Pakistan to hunt them down, officials told The Associated Press.

But the idea, which U.S. officials say comes up every couple of months, has been consistently rejected because the White House believes the chance of successfully rooting out the deadly Haqqani network would not be worth the intense diplomatic blowback from Pakistan that inevitably would ensue.

Members of the Haqqani tribe have been targeted by pilotless drones, but sending American and Afghan troops into Pakistan would be a serious escalation of the hunt for terrorists and could potentially be the final straw for Pakistan, which already is angered over what it sees as U.S. violations of its sovereignty.

The al-Qaida-allied Haqqani tribe runs a Mafia-like smuggling operation and occasionally turns to terrorism with the aim of controlling its territory in eastern Afghanistan. The Haqqanis use Pakistani towns to plan, train and arm themselves with guns and explosives, cross into Afghanistan to attack NATO and Afghan forces, then retreat back across the border to safety.

The latest round of debate over whether to launch clandestine special operations raids into Pakistan against the Haqqanis came after the June 1 car bombing of Forward Operating Base Salerno in eastern Afghanistan that injured up to 100 U.S. and Afghan soldiers, according to three current and two former U.S. officials who were briefed on the discussions. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the still-evolving debates.

The officials told AP that recent discussions of clandestine ground attacks have included Marine Gen. John Allen, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, as well as top CIA and special operations officials.

Allen’s spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, said Allen “has not and does not intend to push for a cross-border operation.”

The White House and the CIA declined to comment for this story.

Pentagon spokesman George Little said the U.S. was still focused on U.S.-Pakistan cooperation.

“The key is to work together with Pakistan to find ways of fighting terrorists who threaten both the United States and Pakistan, including along the Afghan-Pakistan border, where extremists continue to plot attacks against coalition forces and innocent civilians,” he said.

The U.S. relationship with Pakistan is arguably at its lowest point over the continuation of drone strikes to hit terror targets in Pakistan, the successful Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden that was carried out without a heads-up to the country’s leaders, and the U.S. refusal to apologize for a border skirmish in which the U.S. mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani troops. On Thursday, the State Department’s inspector general accused the Pakistani government of harassing U.S. Embassy personnel.

Pakistan has done little in response to repeated U.S. requests for a crackdown on the Haqqanis, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta surprisingly voiced that frustration in a visit to Kabul this month.

He said the U.S. was “reaching the limits” of its patience with Pakistan’s failure to tackle the tribe’s safe havens. He added that the U.S. was “extraordinarily dissatisfied with the effect that Pakistan has had on the Haqqanis.” He also made fun of Pakistan’s ignorance over the bin Laden raid at a speech in India, Pakistan’s archrival.

Pakistan’s army has attacked militant strongholds across the tribal areas, except for North Waziristan, where the Haqqanis hold sway and shelter both al-Qaida and Taliban militants. Pakistani officials say that they intend to hit North Waziristan but that their army is too overstretched to move as fast as the U.S. demands.

Pakistani officials have conceded privately, however, that they have been reluctant to take on the powerful tribe for fear of retaliatory strikes.

To make up for Pakistan’s inaction, the CIA’s covert drone program has targeted Haqqani leaders, safe houses, bomb factories and training camps inside Pakistan, and special operations raids have hit Haqqani targets on the Afghan side of the border, but that has failed to stop Haqqani attacks on U.S. and Afghan troops and civilian targets.

The officials say Allen expressed frustration that militants would attack and then flee across the border in Pakistan, immediately taking shelter in urban areas where attacking them by missile fire could kill civilians.

The officials say options that have been prepared for President Obama’s review included raids that could be carried out by U.S. special operations forces together with Afghan commandos, ranging from air assaults that drop raiders deep inside tribal areas to hit top leaders to shorter dashes only a few miles into Pakistan territory.

The shorter raids would not necessarily be covert, as they could be carried out following the U.S. military principle known as “hot pursuit” that military officials say entitles their forces to pursue a target that attacks them in Afghanistan up to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) inside a neighboring country’s territory.

The U.S. has staged two major raids and other minor forays into Pakistan’s tribal territory before during the George W. Bush administration; the most contentious was in September 2008 when Navy SEALs raided an al-Qaida compound. The operators killed their target, but the ensuing firefight triggered a diplomatic storm with Pakistan.

Rather than fly in, which U.S. military planners at the time feared would alert the Pakistanis, the SEALs marched across the mountainous border, arriving later than planned because of the harsh terrain and just as the fighters were waking for morning prayers, according to one current and one former U.S. official. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the clandestine operation.

Everyone inside the targeted compound opened fire on the SEALs, including the women, one of whom lightly wounded one of the American operators. The firefight also woke the entire village, which joined in the battle, so the SEALs had to call for strafing runs by Black Hawk helicopters to beat them back.

At least one woman and one child were among the many dead.