A team of amateur sky watchers has pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the debut flight of the nation’s first robotic spaceplane, finding clues that suggest the military craft is engaged in the development of spy satellites rather than space weapons, which some experts have suspected but the Pentagon strongly denies.

Last month, the unmanned successor to the space shuttle blasted off from Florida on its debut mission but attracted little public notice because no one knew where it was going or what it was doing. The spaceship, known as the X-37B, was shrouded in operational secrecy, even as civilian specialists reported that it might go on mysterious errands for as long as nine months before zooming back to earth and touching down on a California runway.

In interviews and statements, Pentagon leaders strongly denied that the winged plane had anything to do with space weapons, even while conceding that its ultimate goal was to aid terrestrial war fighters with a variety of ancillary missions.

The secretive effort seeks “no offensive capabilities,” Gary E. Payton, under secretary of the Air Force for space programs, emphasized on Friday. “The program supports technology risk reduction, experimentation and operational concept development.”

The secretive flight, civilian specialists said in recent weeks, probably centers at least partly on testing powerful sensors for a new generation of spy satellites.

Now, the amateur sky watchers have succeeded in tracking the stealthy object for the first time and uncovering clues that could back up the surveillance theory. Ted Molczan, a team member in Toronto, said the military spacecraft was passing over the same region on the ground once every four days, a pattern he called “a common feature of U.S. imaging reconnaissance satellites.”

In six sightings, the team has found that the craft orbits as far north as 40 degrees latitude, just below New York City. In theory, on a clear night, an observer in the suburbs might see the X-37B as a bright star moving across the southern sky.

“This looks very, very good,” Mr. Molczan said of the identification. “We got it.”

In moving from as far as 40 degrees north latitude to 40 degrees south latitude, the military spacecraft passes over many global trouble spots, including Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea.

Mr. Molczan said team members in Canada and South Africa made independent observations of the X-37B on Thursday and, as it turned out, caught an earlier glimpse of the orbiting spaceship late last month from the United States. Weeks of sky surveys paid off when the team members Kevin Fetter and Greg Roberts managed to observe the craft from Brockville, Ontario, and Cape Town.

Mr. Molczan said the X-37B was orbiting about 255 miles up — standard for a space shuttle — and circling the planet once every 90 minutes or so.

A fair amount is known publicly about the features of the X-37B because it began life 11 years ago as a project of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which operates the nation’s space shuttles. The Air Force took over the program in 2006, during the Bush administration, and hung a cloak of secrecy over its budget and missions.

The X-37B has a wingspan of just over 14 feet and is 29 feet long. It looks something like a space shuttle, although about a quarter of the length. The craft’s payload bay is the size of a pickup truck bed, suggesting that it can not only expose experiments to the void of outer space but also deploy and retrieve small satellites. The X-37B can stay aloft for as long as nine months because it deploys solar panels for power, unlike the space shuttle.

Brian Weedon, a former Air Force officer now with the Secure World Foundation, a private group based in Superior, Colo., said the duration of the X-37B’s initial flight would probably depend on “how well it performs in orbit.”

The Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office leads the X-37B program for what it calls the “development and fielding of select Defense Department combat support and weapons systems.”

Mr. Payton, a former astronaut and senior NASA official, has acknowledged that the spacecraft is ultimately meant to give the United States new advantages on terrestrial battlefields, but denies that it represents any kind of space weaponization.

On April 20, two days before the mission’s start, he told reporters that the spacecraft, if successful, would “push us in the vector of being able to react to war-fighter needs more quickly.” And, while offering no specifics, he added that its response to an “urgent war-fighter need” might even pre-empt the launching of other missions on expendable rockets.

But he emphasized the spacecraft’s advantages as an orbiting laboratory, saying it could expose new technology to space for a long time and then “bring it back” for inspection.

Mission control for the X-37B, Mr. Payton said, is located at the Air Force Space Command’s Third Space Experimentation Squadron, based at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. He added that the Air Force was building another of the winged spaceships and hopes to launch it next year.

The current mission began on April 22, when an Atlas 5 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida fired the 5.5-ton spacecraft into orbit.

Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks rocket launchings and space activity, said the secrecy surrounding the X-37B even extended to the whereabouts of the rocket’s upper stage, which was sent into an unknown orbit around the sun. In one of his regular Internet postings, he said that appeared to be the first time the United States had put a space vehicle into a solar orbit that is “officially secret.”

David C. Wright, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge, Mass., said many aerospace experts questioned whether the mission benefits of the X-37B outweighed its costs and argued that expendable rockets could achieve similar results.

“Sure it’s nice to have,” he said. “But is it really worth the expense?”

Mr. Weedon of the Secure World Foundation argued that the X-37B could prove valuable for quick reconnaissance missions. He said ground crews might rapidly reconfigure its payload — either optical or radar — and have it shot into space on short notice for battlefield surveillance, letting the sensors zoom in on specific conflicts beyond the reach of the nation’s fleet of regular spy satellites.

But he questioned the current mission’s secrecy.

“I don’t think this has anything to do with weapons,” Mr. Weedon said. “But because of the classification, and the refusal to talk, the door opens to all that. So, from a U.S. perspective, that’s counterproductive.”

He also questioned whether the Pentagon’s secrecy about the spacecraft’s orbit had any practical consequences other than keeping the public in the dark.

“If a bunch of amateurs can find it,” Mr. Weedon said, “so can our adversaries.”

Hizbullah guerrillas are promoting themselves to the folks at home, and winning credibility and legitimacy in the process, with weekly tours of southern Lebanon in what the group is calling “Jihad Tourism.” The tours were created to mark the 10th anniversary of Israel’s pullout from the area.

After 22 years of Israel’s having maintained its security buffer zone, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak abruptly made the decision in May 2000 to withdraw all IDF troops. The vacuum left in the region was quickly filled with Hizbullah terrorists, who honeycombed the area with tunnels and concrete bunkers. Their kidnapping of Israeli soldiers caused the 2006 Lebanon War.

The bunkers, packed with weapons, ammunition, food and other supplies, eventually became the backbone of the Hizbullah war effort against Israel in the hard-fought 2006 Second Lebanon War. Since that time, Hizbullah has acquired more than 60,000 missiles of varying sizes and ranges, including, according to IDF military intelligence, long-range Scud missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv and beyond.

A “tourist jihad center,” a new war museum and a parade of ordnance accompanied by strutting terrorists are part of what one commentator called the “Disneyland,of  Islamic Terror” show for tours of hundreds of university students. Wide-eyed, the students hear a first-hand, Hizbullah version of of the guerrillas’ battlefield experiences against the Israeli army.

Another special spot on the Jihad Tour is found in the woods on the hills of Sojod, just north of the area evacuated by Barak. This is the spot where Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s son Hadi died while leading a raid against Israel in 1997, explains a Hizbullah tour guide. “This is the spot where he was martyred,” the guide says, indicating a blue prayer mat laid out among the trees. As students snap photos, the guerrilla fighters make themselves available for the shots, but ask that their faces not be seen.

Nasrallah himself has come to understand the importance of tourism and of positioning his group politically. Hizbullah now has representatives in the Lebanese government, although Nasrallah himself is in hiding.   “Everywhere you go there is a Holocaust museum, regardless of authenticity, accuracy or magnitude,” he told an Associated Press reporter, missing the irony in the comparison.

“This is an excellent, very well-organized trip,” a 19-year-old university student commented on the tour. “I think it’s very important to get a first-hand look at Hizbullah because there are a lot of prejudices out there.”

And indeed, the Hizbullah war museum in Mlita, some 60,000 square meters large, includes a gallery, caves and a 250-meter-long simulated terrain with replicas of a Hizbullah-IDF battlefield scene.

At its opening this past Friday, Lebanon’s president and prime minister both sent representatives. Noam Chomsky, an American Jew who is pro Hizballah and Iran but a damaging, fierce critic of Israel, was present as well.

Explains Jihad Hammoud, one of the tour organizers, “We are bringing students to the area previously occupied by Israel, to show them how the resistance, with its meager capabilities, was able to defeat the strongest army in the world.”

As the Obama administration continues to pursue a diplomatic solution for Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Israel in recent years has extended the range of its bombers, launched sophisticated spy satellites and developed a more accurate ordnance-dropping system.

The reasons are clear: Israel is now in a position to send scores of F-16Is and F-15Is on the 1,000-mile penetration of Iranian airspace to try to disable the regime’s far-flung network of nuclear research and uranium-enrichment facilities.

But a U.S. air-war planner in the Persian Gulf War tells The Washington Times he does not think Israel’s relatively small air force — compared with the United States huge bomber and cruise-missile fleet — has the firepower to properly hit all the necessary Iranian targets.

The only real way to stop Iran’s atomic bomb, said retired Air Force Col. John Warden, is for the U.S. to shut down Iran’s electric generation for the foreseeable future — a strategy not currently on the Pentagon’s table.

That Israel is now ready to make war with Iran, whose radical Islamic rulers have threatened to destroy the Jewish state, was announced earlier this month. Speaking to an air and space institute audience, Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon bluntly spelled out the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) milestone.

“This capability can be used for a war on terror in Gaza, for a war in the face of rockets from Lebanon, for war on the conventional Syrian army, and also for war on a peripheral state like Iran,” said Mr. Yaalon, who was Israel’s top uniformed officer during the buildup.

Israel’s improved air-war prowess centers on three major achievements:

• Long-range bombers. Israel has purchased premier U.S. fighters especially configured for the buyer’s specific threats — read, Iran. The more than 100 F-15I Ra’ams and F-16I Sufas are equipped with special extended-range fuel tanks. Augmenting the supersonic strike jets is Israel’s perfection of aerial refueling from B-707 tankers.

• Armaments. Israel’s innovative avionics industry is fitting the jets with a new bomb-guidance system that can find intended targets easier. The defense force now owns scores of BLUs — the military acronym for “bomb, live unit,” which is also known as powerful “bunker buster” bombs capable of penetrating underground or hardened facilities.

• Intelligence. Israel now has in orbit a fleet of super-spy satellites, such as the Ofek-7 launched in 2007, that can regularly capture images of Iran’s nuclear and defense sites for the air force’s target list. With such constant satellite coverage, it is a safe assumption that war planners have studied Iran’s high-value facilities and have a tactic for how to strike each one. Israel has added expertise in analyzing such sites since it produces atomic weapons.

But Israel likely would face stiff challenges. There are at least two-dozen prime nuclear sites in Iran, some that would require multiple strikes, a feat Israel’s limited bomber fleet might not be able to achieve. It is one thing to take out Iraq’s nearby nuclear reactor — as Israel’s F-16s did in 1981. It is another to launch a much more massive campaign against fortified, dispersed targets more than 1,000 miles away.

“Given they can fly more airplanes longer distances, fine,” said Col. Warden, who worked with a team of air-war specialists to develop the unprecedented precision strikes on Iraq in 1991.

“It seems to me the real issue is, what are they going to do when they get there?” he said. “When they did that against Iraq, the Iraqis had focused a pretty significant part of their research program in that one place outside of Baghdad. So the targeting was fairly straightforward. You get a handful of airplanes there, and you have a pretty good chance of doing some work.”

“The Iranians have not been ignorant of that particular operation or what was done to Iraq in two wars,” he said. “It’s just inconceivable they would not have put all that stuff in fairly well-protected places, deep underground, a lot of dispersal. The ability of the Israelis, and us for that matter, to find that stuff and to hit it all with sufficient numbers of things to actually to bring it to a halt strikes me as an extraordinary challenge.”

Israel took out Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. In a mini-display of what it might do over the skies of Iran, the Israeli air force on Sept. 6, 2007, bombed an under-construction nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert, 60 miles from the Iraq border.

Israeli news reports at the time said the IDF dispatched eight F-15Is and F-16s. It also sent an aircraft designed to detect nuclear activity and electronic jammers to foil Syrian radars. Subsequent satellite photographs showed the target destroyed. The CIA thinks the Syrians planned to produce plutonium for atomic weapons, all with North Korean assistance.

The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff has debated what to do about Iran’s atomic ambitions, but no member has endorsed a bombing campaign, according to a former senior official. The official said the dovish U.S. approach is based on two principal reasons: U.S. intelligence agencies do not know the degree to which Iran has buried some of its facilities and thus lack enough knowledge to target them, and the political fallout might resort in a wider war in the Middle East, as the Pentagon is already tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We might be able to do it with 20 B-2s with 200 bombs apiece. Four thousand bombs,” said Col. Warden. “Maybe that would do it. I don’t know. If you could get to them, how deep are they buried and whether you know where the darn things are.”

The only sure way to stop it is draconian. In the Iraq air war, planners took pains not to bring down the entire power-generation system so Baghdad could get electricity back postwar.

With Iran, if the United States wanted to absolutely ensure the Iranians could not build a nuclear arsenal, planners might opt to shut down all sources of power generation.

“Iran cannot sustain a nuclear research program if they don’t have electricity and oil and a bunch of other things like that,” Col. Warden said. “But that is a pretty draconian solution. We have the capability to do that. We could do that in 24 hours if we wanted to. But nobody else in the world is remotely close to being able to do it. And we wouldn’t.”

John Pike, a longtime analyst of the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, has a different view on Israel’s capability. He says the overt side of Iran’s program — facilities at Esfahan, Natanz and Qom, for example — represents the bulk of its atomic work, which includes enriching uranium and creating components for the actual bomb.

“Iran requires 100 percent of its program in order to build a bomb,” said Mr. Pike, founder and director of GlobalSecurity.org. “There do not seem to be any ‘spare’ or duplicate facilities. Israel does not need to destroy 100 percent of Iran’s infrastructure to disable the program. Israel only needs to disable a big chunk of the program, which would render the remainder worthless. The major facilities are isolated, so there is not much danger of significant civilian casualties.”

Mr. Pike said Israel might be considering another target: the nuclear workers and scientists themselves.

“Most of the people who work at these facilities live in housing that is more or less co-located with the facility,” he said. “This makes for a short commute, and facilitates physical and operational security. Bomb the housing, and you destroy the program for a generation.”

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has all but ruled out military action, but has said that all options are on the table for dealing with the problem.

U.S. intelligence analysts have said Iran could build its first bomb by 2012.

* Israel arms may not be enough to stop nukes Strategist suggests cutting Iran’s power

* Assad: Peace for Golan Heights In interview, Syrian president discusses Hizbullah, US influence.

* Surveillance Suspected as Spacecraft’s Main Role A team of amateur sky watchers has pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the debut flight of the nation’s first robotic spaceplane.

* At West Point, Obama offers new security strategy President Obama on Saturday offered a glimpse of a new national security doctrine that distances his administration from George W. Bush’s policy of preemptive war.

* Obama Advisor: Warm Words for Saudi Arabia, Hizbullah, Al-Quds John Brennan, Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security, called Jerusalem “Al-Quds,” praised Saudi Arabian religious tolerance, and is encouraging of Hizbullah.

* Hizbullah Hypes New Jihad Tourist Center Hizbullah guerrillas are promoting themselves to the folks at home, and winning credibility and legitimacy in the process, with weekly tours of southern Lebanon in what the group is calling “Jihad Tourism.”

* Well-Bred Muslim Urges More Fort Hood-Style Murders A U.S.-born Muslim cleric urges Muslims in the United States Army to kill their comrades in arms before they take part in military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

* Lebanese PM to discuss Mideast tension with Obama Hariri’s Washington visit comes amid Israeli claims Hizbullah has acquired Scud missiles from Syria

* Netanyahu: The PA is Hurting Its Own People Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned Monday that the Palestinian Authority’s boycott of Judea and Samaria products and its attempts to keep Israel out of the OECD are steps that will harm PA Arabs, not Israelis.

* US urges action to contain ‘precarious’ Korea situation The US secretary of state says her country is working hard to avoid an escalation after a report blamed North Korea for the sinking of a South Korean warship.

Ramat Shlomo, in the news because of Israel’s now-suspended plans to expand it, is one of several new neighborhoods in the historic Jewish capital. Though international elements speak glibly of “Arab east Jerusalem,” close to a quarter of a million Jews live in the parts of Jerusalem liberated by Israel during the Six Day War of 1967. 

Jerusalem was named Israel’s capital, as it had been during King David’s time, after the War of Independence in 1948-9. During and prior to the war, there had been talk of internationalizing the Old City and environs, but the plan was never implemented due to opposition from both the Jewish and Arab parties.

Alongside Israel’s capital in the western half of the city was eastern Jerusalem, annexed by Jordan in 1950; a wall and barbed wire divided the city in two. By 1967, the population of Jewish Jerusalem had grown to 260,000. Among its most famous neighborhoods were then Me’ah She’arim, Rehavia, Emek Refaim/German Colony, Geulah, Givat Sha’ul, Beit HaKerem, Kiryat Moshe and Talpiyot.

Other notable neighborhoods include Ein Kerem, Katamon, Yemin Moshe, Nahlaot, Romema and Machaneh Yehuda, and the newer Har Nof and Bayit V’gan.

The Six Day War in 1967 marked Israel’s successful military response to the deployment of several Arab national military forces threatening to “drive the Jews into the sea.” The war saw the Old City of Jerusalem come under Jewish control for the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple 1,900 years earlier. Together with the Old City, Israel regained all of the area west of the Jordan River, known as Judea and Samaria.

Israel then expanded the borders of its historic capital, and built in its old-new areas the following neighborhoods. (link to  map is at end of article):

* Ramat Eshkol (the first to be built), French Hill, and Sanhedria Murchevet, all not far from the center of town and contiguous with it except for topographical limitations  (white areas on the map, meanwhile);

* Ramot, sometimes called Ramot Alon (population: approximately 40,000) and Ramat Shlomo (18,000), planned to be contiguous with Sanhedria Murchevet and Ramat Eshkol, N’vei Yaakov (a recreation of the neighborhood that existed there before 1948; 20,000 people), Pisgat Ze’ev (42,000) which is contiguous with Neve Yaakov, and the Atarot industrial zone in the north;

* Gilo (population: 40,000), East Talpiyot (15,000), contiguous except for topographical considerations (white on map) and Har Homa (11,000)  in the southeast;

* Mt. Scopus, Mt. of Olives, the former a Jewish enclave before 1948 and the latter the location of a historic Jewish cemetery, and, most recently, Nof Tzion to the east.

Within 13 years after the Six Day War, the population of Jerusalem had increased by well over 55%, growing to nearly 410,000. It continued growing at a fast clip: In 1990, there were over 524,000 people, and 657,000 in the year 2000. The current population is close to 780,000.

The newly-approved 1,600 units to be built in Ramat Shlomo are slated to fill some of the area between Ramot Alon, Ramat Shlomo and Ramat Eshkol/Sanhedria, making them contiguous with the pre 1967 city.