View Gallery

Vice President Joe Biden speaks during The American Legion's annual convention at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston on Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2013. Biden says there is no doubt that Syrian President Bashar Assad's government is responsible for the heinous use of chemical weapons. Biden's comments make him the highest-ranking U.S. official to say the Syrian regime is the culprit in a large-scale chemical weapons attack on Aug. 21. (AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, Johnny Hanson)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration tried to bolster its case Tuesday for possible military action against Syria within days, with intelligence agencies preparing to release intercepted communications aimed at proving Bashar Assad perpetrated a large-scale chemical weapons attack on civilians. "There's no doubt who is responsible for this heinous use of chemical weapons in Syria: the Syrian regime," Vice President Joe Biden said.

The U.S. and international partners were unlikely to undertake military action before Thursday. That's when British Prime Minister David Cameron will convene an emergency meeting of Parliament where lawmakers are expected to vote on a motion clearing the way for a British response to the alleged chemical weapons attack.

President Barack Obama and Cameron conferred on response plans Tuesday, their second known conversation in recent days.

Administration officials argued that Assad's actions posed a direct threat to U.S. national security, providing Obama with a potential legal justification for launching a strike without authorization from the United Nations or Congress. However, officials did not detail how the U.S. was directly threatened by an attack contained within Syria's borders. Nor did they present concrete proof that Assad was responsible.

"Allowing the use of chemical weapons on a significant scale to take place without a response would present a significant challenge to, threat to the United States' national security," White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

Assad has denied using chemical weapons, calling the allegations "preposterous."

Obama is weighing a response focused narrowly on punishing Assad for violating international agreements that ban the use of chemical weapons, an act the president repeatedly has said would cross a "red line." Officials said the goal was not to drive the Syrian leader from power or impact the broader trajectory of Syria's bloody civil war, which is now in its third year.

View gallery."

Vice President Joe Biden speaks during The American Legion's annual convention at the George R. Brow …

"The options we are considering are not about regime change," Carney told reporters.

According to U.S. officials, the most likely operation would be largely sea-based, with the strikes coming primarily from Navy warships in the Mediterranean Sea. Fighter jets often are deployed to monitor the area and protect the ships, but Syria's robust air defense system makes air strikes more difficult and risky.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said military forces stand ready to strike Syria immediately if the commander in chief gives the order. The Navy has four destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean within range of targets inside Syria and also has warplanes in the region.

"We are ready to go," Hagel said during a television interview while traveling in Asia.

Ahead of any strike, the U.S. also plans to release additional intelligence it says will directly link Assad to the Aug. 21 attack in the Damascus suburbs. Syrian activists say hundreds of people were killed in the attack. A U.S. official said the intelligence report is expected to include "signals intelligence" — information gathered from intercepted communications.

All of the officials insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the internal deliberations.

Even before releasing that information, U.S. officials said they had very little doubt that Assad was culpable in the attack based on witness reports, information on the number of victims and the symptoms of those killed or injured, and intelligence showing the Syrian government has not lost control of its chemical weapons stockpiles.

View gallery."

FILE - This Aug. 26, 2013 file photo shows Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel speaking in Jakarta, Indone …

Other administration officials echoed Biden's comments, which marked a subtle shift in the administration's rhetoric on who bears responsibility for the attack. Earlier in the week officials would say only that there was "very little doubt" Assad was responsible.

Obama, Biden and other senior administration officials have spent much of the week seeking to rally international support for an aggressive response to the chemical weapons attack. The president spoke Tuesday with Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, a NATO ally, and has also talked to French President Francois Hollande and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Along with Britain, France appears poised to back the U.S. response. In Paris, Hollande said Tuesday that France was "ready to punish those who took the heinous decision to gas innocents." The Arab League, a 22-member body dominated by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, also called for justice, laying blame for the attack on the Syrian government.

Italy, meanwhile, was insisting that any strike should be authorized by the U.N. Security Council.

The flurry of action was in stark contrast to Obama's previously restrained approach to Syria's civil war, which has left more than 100,000 people dead, according to U.N. estimates. He has resisted calls for a more robust U.S. response, underscoring the scant appetite among the American public for a long involvement in another Middle East war.

Even after the latest use of chemical weapons, the president has ruled out putting American troops on the ground in Syria and officials said they were not considering setting up a unilateral no-fly zone.

Instead, officials said it was likely missiles could be used to target weapons arsenals, command and control centers, radar and communications facilities, and other military headquarters. Less likely was a strike on a chemical weapons site because of the risk of releasing toxic gases.

View gallery."

Secretary of State John Kerry speaks at the State Department in Washington, Monday, Aug. 26, 2013, a …

Military experts and U.S. officials said the strikes probably would come during the night and target key military sites.

The Obama administration's desire to respond quickly to last week's attack likely puts the president in the position of taking military action without formal approval from the United Nations. Russia, which has helped prop up Assad throughout the civil war, is certain to block U.S. attempts to seek a resolution approving force at the U.N. Security Council.

It's unclear whether the president will seek some type of authorization from Congress, which is out of session until Sept. 9. Rep. Scott Rigell, R-Va., is asking colleagues to sign a letter to Obama that urges him to reconvene Congress and seek approval for any military action.

The 1973 War Powers Resolution reaffirmed Congress' constitutional responsibility to declare war and put a 60-day time limit on the president's ability to take unauthorized, emergency military action. Since then, commanders in chief of both political parties have maintained that the resolution is unconstitutional and have regularly disregarded it.

When the U.S. acted with allies against Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi two years ago, Obama maintained military operations for more than three months without congressional authorization. He said the U.S. wasn't violating the War Powers Resolution because Americans were supporting a NATO-led operation and weren't engaged in full-blown hostilities.

___

Burns reported from Bander Seri Begawan, Brunei. Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor, Matthew Lee and Bradley Klapper contributed to this report.

___

Follow Julie Pace on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC and Robert Burns at http://twitter.com/robertburnsAP

For all the grainy black-and-white television replays and the smoothed-by-time recollections of the living participants, the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington has inevitably taken on a sepia glow.

Unlike the quarter million justice-seeking Americans massed at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial on a warm August Wednesday in 1963, we know how the civil rights story of the 1960s played out. Both the legislative triumphs (public accommodations and voting rights) and the tears (assassination and riots) are etched in our collective memory.

But reading the contemporary newspaper coverage and the histories with half a century’s hindsight reminds us how much has changed about America. A mid-August Gallup Poll in 1963 found that only 23 percent of those who were familiar with the upcoming march had a favorable opinion of this form of protest.

The fear was omnipresent, even among white liberals who supported the goals of civil rights. John Kennedy had tried in vain to persuade the organizers of the march not to come to Washington. On that festive Wednesday in August, the Pentagon had nearly 20,000 soldiers on standby duty. Jerry Bruno, the best advanceman from the 1960 JFK campaign, was deployed to the Lincoln Memorial with instructions to pull the plug on the sound system if any speech turned incendiary.

Instead, the only people arrested were four segregationist protesters. The police blotter was instead filled with stories of briefly lost children and a woman from Newark, N.J., who tumbled into the shallow reflecting pool near the Lincoln Memorial and was instantly rescued from its 30-inch depths.

Even without the “I have a dream” speech, the March on Washington would still be commemorated as an epic milestone in the still incomplete quest for racial justice. But Martin Luther King’s oratory (the only King speech ever broadcast on television in its entirety in his lifetime) has made this 50th anniversary week an apt moment to gauge how far America has traveled toward fulfilling his dream.

Almost all questions about the arc of racial progress and social equity in the past half a century lend themselves to complicated answers that begin, “Yes, but on the other hand” and “The glass is half full.” In many ways, the elimination of all legal barriers to African-American achievement would have been uplifting to the original marchers. But the economic problems still afflicting many black Americans would seem all too familiar to the 1963 civil rights crusaders.

At the 1963 March on Washington, Jackie Robinson spoke and the first black airline stewardess was introduced. Now the “firsts” extend to the Oval Office. And for the ultimate white establishment posts of secretary of state and national security adviser to the president, we have reached our “seconds” for African-Americans.

Another lasting achievement over the past 50 years has been the forging of a vibrant black upper middle class, even though these numbers still lag behind whites. More than 10 percent of African-American familiesearned more than $100,000 in 2011. Today, nearly 40 percent of all black men and women between the ages of 18 and 24 are pursuing higher education.

View gallery."

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memor …

Social mores have dramatically changed. Overt bigotry is no longer tolerated in respectable settings. The racially tinged jokes that were a staple of white country club golf outings and blue-collar bowling leagues are fast vanishing. Every day another Archie Bunker dies and another white 18-year-old who has been schooled in tolerance since birth registers to vote.

Make no mistake — grave injustices still endure.

An African-American is three times more likely to live in poverty than his or her white counterpart. Segregated neighborhoods, failing inner city schools and a wildly disproportionate chance that a black male will wind up in prison all contribute to America’s lingering racial divide. In addition, the collapse of housing prices in the Great Recession particularly devastated black families who tend to have few assets beyond the value of their homes.

The sad reality is that the political system provides scant hope that these problems will be solved or ameliorated through governmental action. No economic catastrophe or years of stagnation can shake Republican faith that the free market is the only solution for life’s ills. And even the Democrats, since the early days of Bill Clinton, publicly obsess about the hard-working middle class — and not those mired in poverty.

Polling on racial issues is tricky since few white Americans are willing to admit their prejudices and small changes in question wording can yield far different answers. Still, according to a national survey this month by the Pew Research Center, it is telling that nearly 80 percent of white Americans admit that more has to be done to realize Dr. King’s dream of racial equality. Of course, there is little political consensus on how to get there. But, at least, the poll reflects awareness of America’s unfinished obligation to erase the lingering residues of segregation and slavery.

Fifty years ago, a primary goal of the March on Washington was safeguarding the voting rights of black Americans.

That is why one of the most heartening political statistics from the 2012 election is that, for the first time in history, African-Americans were more likely to cast a ballot than whites or Hispanics. That is also why one of the most depressing political stories of this year is that the Supreme Court in June eviscerated a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Equally worrisome is that in the past few years Republicans have been aggressive in imposing new barriers to voting, especially requiring photo identification. With scant evidence of fraud to justify these new state laws, the obvious consequence is to discourage impoverished voters (who tend to be disproportionately black) who lack middle-class ID documents such as driver’s licenses and passports.

In the old days under Jim Crow in the South, blacks were prevented from exercising their right to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment because of the color of their skin. Today’s voting gamesmanship is political rather than racial in origin. But for a black welfare mother turned away from the polls in Cleveland because she lacks a driver’s license, it is a distinction without a difference.

One hundred fifty years ago in 1863, the Civil War was raging, the graves were newly dug at Gettysburg and the Emancipation Proclamation was less than a year old. One hundred years ago in 1913, liberal Democratic President Woodrow Wilson presided over the segregation of the federal workforce in Washington. And 50 years ago, clergymen, labor leaders, folk singers and citizens of good will — black and white — made history with what was then probably the largest peaceful demonstration in American history.

Since colonial history and the arrival of the first slave ships from Africa, America has been riven by race. Freedom and slavery were the questions that defined the 19th century, and civil rights became the great moral struggle of the 20th century. The dream of the 21st century is that America will finally become the colorblind society defined by the words “all men are created equal.”

Has MLK's 'dream' quietly been deferred?

The economic problems many black Americans face today would seem familiar to 1963 civil rights crusaders.
Today's political gamesmanship

View Gallery

A man speaks on his mobile phone in front of the New York Times building in New York City May 21, 2009. REUTERS/Joel Boh

By Gerry Shih and Joseph Menn

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Media companies, including the New York Times, Twitter and the Huffington Post, lost control of some of their websites Tuesday after hackers supporting the Syrian government breached the Australian Internet company that manages many major site addresses.

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a hacker group that has attacked media organizations it considers hostile to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, claimed credit for the Twitter and Huffington Post hacks in a series of Twitter messages.

Security experts said electronic records showed that NYTimes.com, the only site with an hours-long outage, redirected visitors to a server controlled by the Syrian group before it went dark.

New York Times Co spokeswoman Eileen Murphy tweeted the "issue is most likely the result of a malicious external attack", based on an initial assessment.

The Huffington Post attack was limited to the blogging platform's British web address. Twitter said the hack led to availability issues for 90 minutes but that no user information was compromised.

The attacks came as the Obama administration considers taking military action against the Syrian government, engaged in a civil war against rebels for more than two years.

In August, hackers promoting the Syrian Electronic Army targeted websites belonging to CNN, Time and the Washington Post by breaching a third party service used by those sites.

The SEA managed to gain control of the sites by penetrating MelbourneIT, an Australian Internet service provider that sells and manages domain names including Twitter.com and NYTimes.

The New York Times, which identified MelbourneIT as its domain name registrar and the main hacking victim, told employees not to send sensitive emails from corporate accounts.

MelbourneIT tracked the breach to an Indian Internet service provider, saying two staff members from one of their resellers opened a fake email seeking login details.

"The SEA went after the company specifically to create a high-profile event," CEO Theo Hnarakis told Reuters. "This was quite a sophisticated attack."

One staff member was the direct manager of the NYTimes domain, along with other media companies and had the login and password information of the company in his email, which the hackers accessed.

Hnarakis confirmed that other media organizations were also attacked, but this proved unsuccessful as their customers used a secondary security measure known as a registry lock.

MelbourneIT said it restored the correct domain name settings, changed the password on the compromised account, and locked the records to prevent further alterations.

Twitter did not respond to requests for comment. In a blog post, the company said "it appears DNS (domain name system) records for various organizations were modified, including one of Twitter's domains used for image serving, Twimg.com. Viewing of images and photos was sporadically impacted."

HACKERS LIMITED TARGETS, SAY EXPERTS

Jaeson Schultz, a Cisco Systems researcher, said that in the authoritative records known as WHOIS the Syrian Electronic Army listed itself as the contact for all of Twitter.com, which would have given it the power to take the site offline or place its own content there.

"It seems that their message is redirecting people back to their own website for news about the SEA or about Syria," Schultz said. "They don't seem to be interested in infecting end users, which is a good thing."

Hackers who successfully break into MelbourneIT's systems could potentially redirect and intercept emails sent to addresses under certain domains, researchers said. And users of sites that do not begin with "https" could have been fooled into entering passwords that could have been captured, said Jaime Blasco, a researcher with security firm AlienVault.

Because MelbourneIT serves as the registrar for some of the best known domain names on the Internet, including Microsoft.com and Yahoo.com, Tuesday's breach could have had potentially catastrophic consequences.

"This could've been one of the biggest attacks we've ever seen, if they were more subtle and more efficient about it," said HD Moore, the chief research officer at Rapid7, a cyber security firm. "They changed just a few sites, but if they had actually gone all out, they could've had most of the Internet watching them run the show."

Media companies, largely ignored by hackers until 2011, have since been targeted by pranksters and suspected Chinese agents, as well as partisans in the Middle East.

(Additional reporting by Michael Sin in SYDNEY; Editing by Michael Perry, Eric Walsh and Ron Popeski)

NYT, other media outlets hit by hackers

Experts and records suggest that the Syrian Electronic Army is behind several of the cyberattacks.
'Media is going down'

BOSTON (AP) — Dramatic new photos show the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, his face bloodied, climbing out of a boat in a suburban backyard as heavily armed police officers wait for him to drop to the ground.

The images were among those a state police officer provided last month to Boston Magazine, which published some then and more on Tuesday.

Sgt. Sean Murphy took photos the April night police cornered Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in a dry-docked boat in Watertown, just outside Boston. He wasn't authorized to release the photos but said he was angry about a Rolling Stone magazine cover he felt glamorized Tsarnaev.

The new photos include more shots of Tsarnaev coming out of the boat, his head bloody and a red laser trained on his head. They also show him dropping to the ground, where officers and medical personnel rushed to treat him. Other photos show tense federal, state and local police officials meeting in a command center and SWAT teams gathering in the streets earlier in the day.

The surgeon who treated Tsarnaev after his capture said he had been shot through the face and had a fractured skull, among other injuries. Tsarnaev was wounded during a confrontation with police a day after authorities released photos of him and his older brother as suspects in the deadly April 15 marathon bombing.

Tsarnaev has pleaded not guilty to charges in the bombing, which killed three people and injured more than 260 others. His older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed following a gunbattle with police.

New images of Boston suspect's surrender

Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Ft. Hood, was unanimously sentenced to death today by a jury of military officers.

A sentence of death was all but inevitable for Hasan, a Muslim American who represented himself during the court martial and whose own standby lawyers accused him of cooperating with the prosecution to hasten his "martyrdom."

"He is a criminal. He is a cold-blooded murderer," prosecutor Col. Mike Mulligan said today, according to the Associated Press. "This is not his gift to God. This is his debt to society. This is the cost of his murderous rampage."

Last week, Hasan was found guilty on all counts, including 13 charges of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder.

In one of the few statements he made to the court, he described himself as a "mujahedeen," or Muslim holy warrior and never denied shooting unarmed soldiers and bystanders.

Following the 2009 attack, he attempted to plead guilty but the military insisted he go to trial in order to be eligible for the death penalty.

He never denied entering a medical building at the base on Nov. 5, 2009, and opening fire on soldiers preparing for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. He yelled "Allahu akbar," Arabic for "God is great" before training a pistol with a laser sight on his victims, 12 of whom were soldiers.

The military spent four years and $5 million to ensure Hasan would be convicted and be eligible for a death sentence.

Executions in the military are rare. All death sentences are subject to automatic appeal, a process that can take decades. There are currently five inmates on the military's death row, but an active serviceman has not been executed since 1961.

Over the course of the three week trial, the government called 89 witnesses, none of whom the major cross-examined. He called none of his own witnesses and immediately rested his case when he had the chance to defend himself.

Hasan was shot in the back when police officers responded. As a result, he is paralyzed and wheelchair bound.

Fort Hood shooter sentenced to death

Maj. Nidal Hasan was found guilty of the attack that killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 others.
Represented himself in trial