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Last spring, we launched the first version of Just Security’s guide to the 2016 presidential candidates’ positions on national security matters. We’re relaunching that guide below with interactive features designed to make it easier use. For this version of the guide, we’re focusing on candidates who, according to Five Thirty-Eight’s forecasts, have a better than 10 percent chance of winning a primary. As a result, this version includes Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump. As the field shifts over the coming weeks, we may add or remove candidates from this list. We’ll also be periodically updating the information about the candidates’ positions as they wind their way through primary season and move into the general election. This guide features sources for each summary and, whenever possible, cites official government websites or the candidates’ websites. In our research, we relied on their own statements and records rather than commentary on the candidates’ positions.

Donald Trump has become the first Republican presidential candidate to top 30% support in the race for the Republican nomination, according to a new CNN/ORC Poll, which finds the businessman pulling well away from the rest of the GOP field. Trump gained 8 points since August to land at 32% support, and has nearly tripled his support since just after he launched his campaign in June. The new poll finds former neurosurgeon Ben Carson rising 10 points to land in second place with 19%. Together, these two non-politicians now hold the support of a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, and separately, both are significantly ahead of all other competitors.

Trump's gains come most notably among two groups that had proven challenging for him in the early stages of his campaign -- women and those with college degrees. While he gained just 4 points among men in the last month (from 27% in August to 31% now), he's up 13 points among women, rising from 20% in August to 33% now. Trump has also boosted his share of the vote among college graduates, increasing his support among those with degrees from 16% in August to 28% now. Among those without degrees, he stands at 33%, just slightly higher than the 28% support he had in August.

Trump has also catapulted ahead of the rest of the field among Republicans who back the tea party movement, from 27% support in August to 41% now. Among that group in the new poll, Carson follows with 21%, and Cruz, another candidate with an anti-Washington message, holds third with 11%. No other candidate tops 5% among tea partiers.

Lincoln Chafee, the former Rhode Island governor and senator, says the Democratic Party needs a presidential candidate who will champion Americans’ constitutional rights and scorn unnecessary wars – and that he may be the right person for the job. Chafee unexpectedly launched a presidential exploratory committee Thursday and tells U.S. News he intends to make civil liberties a major part of his likely campaign, with an anti-mass surveillance message similar to those trumpeted by Republican candidates Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. The National Security Agency’s dragnet collection of phone records violates Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, Chafee says, offering a sharp contrast to the difficult-to-discern and vague positions of other prospective Democratic candidates. “The words of the Fourth Amendment are very clear: You need a warrant. That’s strict language, and ‘no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,’” he says. “It’s not complicated.”

If he jumps into the race, Chafee says he will seek to pressure front-runner Hillary Clinton – expected to announce her candidacy on Sunday – to bend toward pro-civil liberties positions, though he says he wants to be fair and credits Clinton for previously opposing immunity for companies who allegedly complied with government surveillance. Chafee, from a prominent political family, was a liberal Republican in the U.S. Senate from 1999 to 2007. He was elected Rhode Island governor in 2010 as an independent and became a Democrat in 2013. He did not seek a second term and left office in January. As a senator, Chafee voted for the USA Patriot Act in 2001 (as did Clinton) and to renew expiring provisions of the act in 2006. He says he, like Patriot Act author Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., was shocked to learn from whistleblower Edward Snowden that the executive branch interpreted the law as allowing the bulk collection of U.S. phone records. “I don't believe it granted any power to tap phones or any other surveillance without a warrant. That’s a definite stretch,” he says.

Chafee says he plans to announce a position on pardoning Snowden in the near future and says he’s also considering his position on marijuana legalization. Most Americans favor legalization, polls show, but few mainstream politicians do. “That’s another issue that will evolve during the campaign,” he says.

There's a lot to rebel against, to want to throw off. If they want to make a serious economic and political critique, they should make the one Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner make in "Reckless Endangerment": that real elites in Washington rigged the system for themselves and their friends, became rich and powerful, caused the great catering, and then "slipped quietly from the scene."

It began in the early 1990s, in the Clinton administration, and continued under the Bush administration, with the help of an entrenched Congress that wanted only two things: to receive campaign contributions and to be re-elected.

There's a good reason so many GOP candidates seem to be well-prepared yet uncannily in sync when it comes to foreign policy: Most of them have tapped the same group of experts for guidance, a shadow foreign policy campaign infrastructure just waiting for a nominee to emerge.Ever since Mitt Romney lost the race in 2012, his foreign policy team has been working to remain intact, become a resource for as many primary candidates as possible, and position itself to influence the next president, if he or she is a Republican. For candidates who haven't the time or resources to build their own foreign policy staffs at this stage, the project, called the John Hay Initiative, is a handy tool to get smart fast on complicated subjects and even hand off some heavy lifting on national security issues.For the party itself, the group's omnipresence behind the scenes is shaping a hawkish, right-of-Hillary-Clinton foreign policy agenda that is quickly becoming the established position of the party hopefuls going into 2016.

The United States government has already declared that in regards to what it alleges to be a Russian cyberattack against the U.S. Democratic Party, the U.S. reserves the right to go to war against Russia. NATO has accordingly changed its policy so as to assert that a cyberattack (in this case actually cyber-espionage, such as the U.S. government itself perpetrates against even its own allies such as Angela Merkel by tapping her phone) constitutes an act of war by the alleged cyberattacker, and so requires all NATO member nations to join any cyberattacked NATO nation in war against its alleged (cyber)attacker, if the cyberattacked member declares war against its alleged cyberattacker. Excuses are being sought for a war against Russia; and expanding the definition of “invasion,” to include mere espionage, is one such excuse. But it’s not the only one that the Obama Administration has cooked up. U.S. Senator Mike Lee has asserted that President Barack Obama must obtain a declaration of war against Syria — which is allied with and defended by Russia — before invading Syria. Syria has, for the past few years, already been invaded by tens of thousands of foreign jihadists (financed mainly by the royal Sauds and Qataris, and armed mainly with U.S. weaponry) who are trying to overthrow and replace the Syrian government so that pipelines can be built through Syria into Europe to transport Saudi oil and Qatari gas into the EU, the world’s biggest energy-market, which now is dominated by Russia’s oil and gas. Since Syria is already being defended by Russia (those royals’ major competitor in the oil and gas markets), America’s invasion of Syria would necessarily place U.S. and Russia into an air-war against each other (for the benefit of those royal Arabs — who finance jihadist groups, as even Hillary Clinton acknowledges): Syria would thus become a battleground in a broader war against Russia. So: declaring war against Syria would be a second excuse for World War III, and one which would especially serve the desires not only of U.S. ‘defense’ firms but of the U.S. aristocracy’s royal Arabic allies, who buy much of those ‘defense’ firms’ exports (weaponry), and also U.S. oilfield services firms such as pipelines by Halliburton. (It’s good business for them, no one else. Taxpayers and war-victims pay, but those corporations — and royal families — would profit.)

The U.S. government also declares that Russia ‘conquered’ Crimea in 2014 and that Russia must restore it to Ukraine. The U.S. government wants Ukraine to be accepted into NATO, so that all NATO nations will be at war against Russia if Russia doesn’t return Crimea to Ukraine, of which Crimea had only briefly (1954-2014) been a part, until Crimeans voted on 16 March 2014 to rejoin Russia. This Crimean issue is already the basis for America’s economic sanctions against Russia, and thus Russia’s continuing refusal to coerce Crimeans to accept again being part of Ukraine would be yet a third excuse for WW III.

Hillary Clinton says “As President, I will make it clear, that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack.” She alleges that when information was unauthorizedly made public from Democratic National Committee computers, the cyberattacker was Russia. She can be counted as a strong proponent of that excuse for WW3. She’s with Barack Obama and the other neocons on that. She has furthermore said that the U.S. should shoot down any Russian and Syrian bombers in Syria — the phrase for that proposed U.S. policy is to “establish a no-fly zone” there. She makes clear: “I am advocating the no-fly zone.” It would be war against not only Syria, but Russia. (After all: a no-fly zone in which the U.S. is shooting down the government’s planes and Russia’s planes, would be war by the U.S. against both Syria and Russia, but that’s what she wants to do.) She can thus be counted as a strong proponent of those two excuses for WW3.

The FBI doesn’t know exactly how accurate its facial recognition technology is, new watchdog report finds. The bureau's Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System, a database including more than 30 million photos of criminals, lets law enforcement match a surveillance camera photo to that of a known criminal by narrowing their identity to between two and 50 possible candidates. But the FBI hasn't ensured its facial recognition technology doesn’t “unnecessarily include photos of innocent people as investigative leads,” according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. The NGI-IPS and the FBI’s "Facial Analysis, Comparison and Evaluation Services," or FACE, which accesses databases from other federal, state and local groups, were the subject of a recent audit.  Most photos in NGI-IPS are submitted from 18,000 external groups among federal, state and local law enforcement -- about 70 percent are criminal mugshots. It’s the same technology that helped the FBI and a state track down a sex offender who had been on the run for 20 years. The FBI has spent about $55 million on facial recognition over the last six years.

FBI officials haven’t tested the detection rate -- how often a match is generated against a submitted photo -- for lists less than 50 candidates, according to GAO. Law enforcement may request a specific number of candidates for any search, though the default is 20. Verifying that NGI-IPS is accurate for all candidate list sizes would provide more assurance that the system helps to “enhance, rather than hinder, criminal investigations,” the GAO report said. <a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?sz=300x300&c=801138892&iu=%2F617%2Fnextgov.com%2Fsection_emergingtech%2Fcontent%2Fpid_129155&t=noscript%3Dtrue%26referring_domain%3DTyped%252FBookmarked%26pos%3Dinjector%26level%3D0"> <img src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?sz=300x300&c=801138892&iu=%2F617%2Fnextgov.com%2Fsection_emergingtech%2Fcontent%2Fpid_129155&t=noscript%3Dtrue%26referring_domain%3DTyped%252FBookmarked%26pos%3Dinjector%26level%3D0"/> </a> The FBI also hasn’t assessed how often errors occur in facial matching. These can be caused both by lower-quality technology, but also by low-quality photos, the report said. The detection- and the false-positive rate are key data points that will help the bureau and the public understand these risks before the technology is deployed, the report said. GAO also found FBI hadn’t determined whether the facial recognition technology its federal, state and local partners use is accurate enough to support its own investigations. These oversights could impinge on citizen's privacy and civil liberties, the report noted. In 2012, the advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggested facial recognition systems could allow “covert, remote, and mass capture and identification of images.”

In criminal cases, a false positive might force a defendant to prove he or she isn’t who the facial recognition system thought he was -- such a scenario might “alter the traditional presumption of innocence,” an EFF statement said. The FBI has also been slow in publishing its privacy protocol, the report found. The Justice Department hadn’t updated a key “Privacy Impact Assessment” between 2008 and 2015; and though NGI-IPS has existed since 2011, the FBI also didn’t publish the requisite System of Records Notice, explaining how the technology is used, until May 2016. Publishing these notices more promptly would reassure the public “the FBI is evaluating risks to privacy,” the report said.  The GAO review comes shortly after DOJ published a notice arguing its massive biometric database should be excluded from the Privacy Act, which requires the federal government to disclose, upon inquiry from the subject, the information it collects on the public. The system includes finger and palm prints, iris and facial scans, images of tattoos, from criminals, suspects, detainees and anyone undergoing background checks, security clearances and other government assessments.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's standing is falling among Democrats, and voters view her as less decisive and inspiring than when she launched her presidential campaign just three months ago, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll. The survey offers a series of warning signs for the leading Democratic candidate. Most troubling, perhaps, for her prospects are questions about her compassion for average Americans, a quality that fueled President Barack Obama's two White House victories. Just 39 percent of all Americans have a favorable view of Clinton, compared to nearly half who say they have a negative opinion of her. That's an eight-point increase in her unfavorable rating from an AP-GfK poll conducted at the end of April. The drop in Clinton's numbers extends into the Democratic Party. Seven in 10 Democrats gave Clinton positive marks, an 11-point drop from the April survey. Nearly a quarter of Democrats now say they see Clinton in an unfavorable light.

While Clinton has spent decades in the public eye, she's focused in recent months on creating a more relatable — and empathetic — image. In public events, she frequently talks about her new granddaughter, Charlotte, and references her early career as a legal advocate for impoverished children. The survey suggests that voters aren't sold on her reinvention: Only 4 in 10 voters say they view Clinton as "compassionate." Just 3 in 10 said the word "honest" described her either very or somewhat well.

The percentage of respondents calling Clinton at least somewhat inspiring also slipped from 44 percent to 37 percent. Even the number of voters saying Clinton is at least somewhat decisive, previously a strong point for the former New York senator, fell from 56 percent in April to 47 percent in the new poll.

New Zealand launched a covert surveillance operation targeting candidates vying to be director general of the World Trade Organization, a top-secret document reveals. In the period leading up to the May 2013 appointment, the country’s electronic eavesdropping agency programmed an Internet spying system to intercept emails about a list of high-profile candidates from Brazil, Costa Rica, Ghana, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Mexico and South Korea. New Zealand’s trade minister, Tim Groser, was one of nine candidates in contention for the position at the WTO, a powerful international organization based in Geneva, Switzerland that negotiates trade agreements between nations. The surveillance operation, carried out by Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB, appears to have been part of a secret effort to help Groser win the job. Groser ultimately failed to get the position.

An even bigger disjunction represented by the Republican Party is between the economic interests of a wealthy elite and the fears, xenophobia, and social-issue fixations of the hoi polloi whose votes the elite relies on to put its preferred economic policies in place. Not only is there no logical, substantive connection between these two aspects of what has come to be the Republican agenda; the economic policies are contrary to the interests of most of the ordinary citizens who are casting the votes.

A mostly neoconservative group of national-security analysts have published perhaps the first comprehensive outline of what they believe a Republican foreign policy should look like as of Inauguration Day 2017. It’s titled “Choosing to Lead: American Foreign Policy for a Disordered World.” Although it concedes that “there are limitations on American power,” according to the book’s “Forward” by former George W. Bush speechwriter, Peter Wehner, all of the contributors …understand, too, that with the right leadership and policies in place, the United States can once again be a guarantor of global order and peace, a champion of human rights, and a beacon of economic growth and human flourishing. There is no reason the 21st century cannot be the next American Century. …Choosing to Lead offers perspectives and recommendations on how to make the next American Century happen. In doing so, we believe it will serve the world as well as the United States of America.[Emphasis added.] If you sense a rebirth of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), you’re probably not far off, although Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol, who co-founded PNAC, are not among the large number of contributors. PNAC published two volumes, Present Dangers and Rebuilding American Defenses, that together formed a neocon manifesto for the Republican presidential candidate in the 2000 election in which the organization initially backed John McCain.

The new compilation is the product of the John Hay Initiative, named after Theodore Roosevelt’s chief diplomat, and brings together many of the foreign-policy advisers to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. The Initiative is co-chaired by Eliot Cohen (a charter member of PNAC), former Romney adviser Brian Hook, and Eric Edelman (who succeeded Doug Feith as undersecretary of defense under George W. Bush and has since served as co-founder and director—with Kagan and Kristol—of PNAC’s lineal descendant, the Foreign Policy Initiative). The 200 “experts” connected to the Initiative have reportedly advised almost all of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates. The Initiative has made no secret of its hope that a successful Republican presidential candidate will appoint many of its members to senior policy-making positions (much as PNAC’s charter members, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Elliott Abrams, were all rewarded with senior posts under George W. Bush. Cohen positioned himself for an appointment in that administration by writing the perfectly timed book, Supreme Command, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion about how the best wartime presidents ignored the more cautious advice of their generals. A faithful signer of PNAC’s letters, Cohen was named counsel to Condoleezza Rice in Bush’s second term.

(Reuters) - Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said he replaced ten cabinet ministers, half of his total roster, after three ministers resigned over a high-level graft inquiry on Wednesday. The replaced ministers included EU Minister Egemen Bagis, who was allegedly named in the corruption probe but had not resigned yet, and key positions such as the Economy and justice ministers.

When it comes to Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy, start first by disentangling the nonsense about Benghazi—a nonexistent scandal if ever there was one—from the broader palette of Clinton’s own, relatively hawkish views. As she consolidates her position as the expected nominee in 2016, with wide leads over all the likely GOP challengers, it ought to worry progressives that the next president of the United States is likely to be much more hawkish than the current one. Expect to be deluged, in the next few weeks, with news about Hard Choices, the memoir of her years as secretary of state under President Obama, to be released June 10. But we don’t need a memoir to know that, comparatively speaking, two things can be said about her tenure at the State Department: first, that in fact she accomplished very little; and second, that both before her appointment and during her service, she consistently came down on the hawkish side of debates inside the administration, from Afghanistan to Libya and Syria. She’s also taken a more hawkish line than Obama on Ukraine and the confrontation with Russia.

Commentators were observing that in an administration where all power and decision making were gravitating toward the White House, Clinton and I represented the only independent “power center”, not least because…we were both seen as “unfire-able.” [page 289] Gates confirms that he and Clinton lined up with the hawks against the doves on Afghanistan

In the brief excerpt that’s been released by her publisher, Clinton notes that as secretary of state she “ended up visiting 112 countries and traveling nearly one million miles.” But what, if anything, did she accomplish with all that to-ing and fro-ing? Not a lot. She largely avoided the Israel-Palestine tangle, perhaps because she didn’t want to risk crossing the Israel lobby at home, and it’s hard to see what she actually did, other than to promote the education and empowerment of girls and women in places where they are severely beaten down. And, while it’s wrong (and really silly) to call Clinton a neoconservative, she’s more of—how to put it?—a “right-wing realist” on foreign policy, who often backed military intervention as a first or second resort, while others in the White House—especially Obama’s national security staff and Vice President Biden’s own aides, were far more reluctant to employ the troops. In that vein, it’s useful to explore the memoirs of Robert Gates, who was secretary of defense under George W. Bush and then, inexplicably, under President Obama, too. In Duty: Memoir of a Secretary at War (which could also be the subtitle of Clinton’s own memoir), Gates says several times that he and Clinton saw eye to eye. (This has also been extensively documented by Bob Woodward, if more narrowly focused, in his 2010 book, Obama’s Wars.) In Duty, Gates says that he formed an alliance with Clinton because both he and her had independent power bases and were, in his words, “un-fireable”

A new report from the Congressional Research Service considers: “What would happen in 2016 if a candidate for President or Vice President were to die or leave the ticket any time between the national party conventions and the November 8 election day? What would happen if this occurred during presidential transition, either between election day and the December 19, 2016, meeting of the electoral college; or between December 19 and the inauguration of the President and Vice President on January 20, 2017?” See Presidential Elections: Vacancies in Major-Party Candidacies and the Position of President-Elect, October 6, 2016.

This is the way the multi-trillion dollar Global War on Terror (GWOT) ends: not with a bang, but with a bigger bang. The GWOT, since its conceptualization 13 years ago, in the aftermath of 9/11, is the gift that keeps on giving. And no gift is bigger than a Transformer Al-Qaeda on steroids – bigger, brasher, and wealthier than anything Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri had ever dreamt of; the IS (Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS) of Caliph Ibrahim, former Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. US President Barack Obama, before deploying his golf holidays in Martha’s Vineyard, casually dropped that bombing the Caliph’s goons in Iraq will take months. One may interpret it as another layer of the Obama administration’s self-avowed “Don't Do Stupid Stuff” foreign policy doctrine, not so subtly mocked by prospective presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Shock and Awe in 2003 destroyed the whole of Baghdad’s infrastructure in only a few hours. Obama also confirmed the US was showering Iraq again with humanitarian bombing “to protect American interests” (first and foremost) and, as an afterthought, “human rights in Iraq.” One could not possibly expect Obama to declare the US would now bomb “our” allies the House of Saud, who have supported/financed/weaponized IS, in Syria and Iraq. The same erstwhile ISIS that thoroughly enjoyed the marvels of US military training in a secret base in Jordan.

Obama also could not possibly explain why the US always supported ISIS in Syria and now decides to bomb them in Iraq. Oh, the perils of ‘Don’t Do Stupid Stuff’. So a quick translation applies.

Obama’s bombing of the Caliph’s goons has absolutely nothing to do with US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power’s much beloved R2P (‘responsibility to protect’) doctrine – as in the responsibility to protect up to 150,000 Yazidis, not to mention Kurds and remaining Christians, from a ‘potential’ genocide carried out by the Caliph’s goons. The whole fighter jets + drones bombing exercise, lasting ‘months’, has to do with the Benghazi syndrome. The Caliph’s goons were dead set on conquering Irbil - the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is led by the wily Massoud Barzani – a long-time US client/vassal. The US maintains a consulate in Irbil. Crammed with CIA types. Or, as the New York Times so lovingly puts it, “thousands of Americans.” Enter Benghazi. This is an electoral year. Obama is absolutely terrified of another Benghazi – which Republicans have been trying non-stop to blame on his administration’s incompetence. The last thing Obama needs is the Caliph’s goons killing ‘diplomats’ in Erbil. That would certainly raise a tsunami of questions all over again about the shady CIA weapon-smuggling racket – as in arming Syrian ‘rebels’ with weapons from Libya - at the time Benghazi took place. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, of course, also knew about it all. But then, and especially now, no one should know that the CIA was weaponizing the bulk of the future Caliph’s forces.

The National Prayer Breakfast appearance by the President drew the usual rounds of pans and praise this week. (Just as a side note, it’s not really the best forum for stand up comedy and Schwarzenegger jokes.) One item which cropped up and drew a lot of media fire was President Trump’s renewed pledge to do away with the Johnson Amendment. As you will recall, that’s the 1954 law which restricts churches and other tax exempt, non-profit organizations from certain political activities. (NPR actually has a pretty good rundown of it here.) Most specifically in this case – and what most of the debate centers on – is the restriction on preachers who wish to tell their flocks who to vote for from the pulpit. Doing so theoretically places their tax exempt status in jeopardy. That’s the part that the President seems to want to see discarded. (WaPo)

This is one of those areas where I once again fall outside much of the conservative mainstream and my inner libertarian hackles are raised. The Johnson Amendment is a relatively toothless artifact of an earlier era and removing it would have almost zero real world impact for the most part, but it at least represents some lip service to a worthwhile principle in government. The amendment itself is really not the issue here. It’s almost entirely symbolic in terms of its effect on the day to day life of Americans. As a previous report indicated, since 2008 (when churches began seriously challenging the law) there has been only one example of a church being investigated on such charges and none have been punished. It’s extremely difficult to enforce and doing so would be met with huge resistance in some quarters. (No politician or law enforcement officer wants to be enshrined in the front page photo of a preacher being hauled off to jail.) So why support the amendment at all? Because we leave decisions about voting to the individual in the United States and, as with many other social and professional interactions, we protect the individual from undue influence by those who hold power over them. I wrote about this exact subject last summer when Trump was first talking about it. Here’s the key portion of the argument.

Preaching politics from the pulpit and using that platform to encourage the election of any candidate from either party is simply wrong. We give churches tax exempt status for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that they are outside of the political and governmental body of the nation. Further, a preacher telling you to vote for Candidate A over Candidate B isn’t just appealing to your intelligence and general sensibilities. They are speaking with the authority of the Almighty and providing you with guidance as to the maintenance of your immortal soul. This provides them with a position of vastly undue influence over your choices. It’s a parallel to the reason we don’t allow doctors to engage in sexual relations with their patients… they simply hold too much influence over them from positions of assumed trust.

A bombshell White House memo has revealed for the first time details of the ‘deal in blood’ forged by George Bush and Tony Blair over the Iraq War.The damning memo, from secretary of state Colin Powell to president George Bush, was written on March 28, 2002, a week before Bush’s famous summit with Blair at his Crawford ranch in Texas.The Powell document, headed ‘Secret... Memorandum for the President’, lifts the lid on how Blair and Bush secretly plotted the war behind closed doors at Crawford. In it, Powell tells Bush that Blair ‘will be with us’ on military action. Powell assures the president: ‘The UK will follow our lead’.The classified document also discloses that Blair agreed to act as a glorified spin doctor for the president by presenting ‘public affairs lines’ to convince a skeptical public that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction - when none existed.In return, the president would flatter Blair’s ego and give the impression that Britain was not America’s poodle but an equal partner in the ‘special relationship’. 

The sensational leak shows that Blair had given an unqualified pledge to sign up to the conflict a year before the invasion started.It flies in the face of the UK Prime Minister’s public claims at the time that he was seeking a diplomatic solution to the crisis.He told voters: ‘We’re not proposing military action’ - in direct contrast to what the secret email now reveals. 

The disclosure is certain to lead for calls for Sir John Chilcot to reopen his inquiry into the Iraq War if, as is believed, he has not seen the Powell memo.A second explosive memo from the same cache also reveals how Bush used ‘spies’ in the Labour Party to help him to manipulate British public opinion in favor of the war.The documents, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, are part of a batch of secret emails held on the private server of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton which U.S. courts have forced her to reveal.Former UK Conservative shadow home secretary David Davis said: ‘The memos prove in explicit terms what many of us have believed all along: Tony Blair effectively agreed to act as a frontman for American foreign policy in advance of any decision by the House of Commons or the British Cabinet.