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The British government said on Wednesday it would commit to NATO's defense spending pledge of two percent of GDP for the next five years, a decision which will help ease U.S. fears about their future ability to rely on a close military ally.The United States immediately welcomed the pledge and urged all NATO members to do the same.Britain has reduced defense spending by about 8 percent in real terms since 2010 to help cut a record budget deficit, shrinking the size of the armed forces by around one sixth.

Several top U.S. military figures, including U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno, had also expressed concern about declining defense spending by Britain, which still spends more on defense than any other European NATO member.

Shares of BAE Systems, Britain's biggest defense contractor, traded up 3 percent on the day, making the company one of the top risers on Britain's bluechip index.

The elements presented during a Press conference in Moscow by General Viktor Bondarev, chief of staff of the Russian Air Force, leave no doubt – the Turkish aviation, which had been informed of the flight plan of the Russian Sukhoï, in accordance with the agreements on military co-ordination, had already recieved prior instructions to assume attack position. These elements invalidate the position of NATO.

For hours on a Friday, a staff sergeant using the fake name “Jinx” testified in open court about her yearlong work here at a prison for suspected terrorists once considered the CIA’s prized war-on-terror captives.

The few reporters who went to court or watched on video feeds from Guantánamo to Fort Meade, Maryland, as well as a dozen legal observers and the mother and sister of a man killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, heard her say all that in open court. But as far as the public court record is concerned, those things were never said.

In a first for the war court, intelligence agencies scrubbed those and other facts — including questions asked by the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl — from a 379-page transcript of the Oct. 30 pretrial hearing in the 9/11 death-penalty case. A Miami Herald examination counted more than 130 pages with blacked out public testimony. Of them, 37 pages are completely redacted in the latest challenge to the remote war court’s motto, “Fairness, Transparency, Justice.”　Typically the court releases the transcripts “word for word with no redactions,” chief prosecutor Brig. Gen. Mark Martins told reporters Saturday, defending the “rare” exception of “ex-post redactions” as a security necessity.“I have not encountered it actually thus far for a transcript to be redacted. But there is a rule that enables that,” he said. “The government is fully entitled to look and say in the aftermath … ‘It ought to be protected, it could be damaging.’”

Israel is trying to “suck America into” a war with Iran that could destabilize the Middle East and lead to a world war in much the way that the imperial rivalries in 1914 led to the First World War, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned in Washington last week. A war with Iran, he said, could “perhaps terminate the experiment that is Israel and do irreparable damage to the empire that America has become.” But Israeli leaders want a war, and they are pushing one with the support of their American political friends, including Democrats like Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, whose overheated rhetoric about Iran recalls Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, Wilkerson said. Another pro-war faction are “warmed-over neoconservatives” who got us into the Iraq war. “I’ve been there, done that; I don’t need the tour,” he said. Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who now teaches government at Washington-area universities, served Powell during the runup to the Iraq war. He spoke last Friday at the annual Israel lobby conference at the National Press Club, sponsored by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Institute for Research: Middle East Policy. The conference aired on C-SPAN. I have transcribed his speech below. Wilkerson’s remarks are important because his analysis of the tail wagging the dog is so cogent and frightening at a time when the premier Israel lobby group AIPAC is pushing for action against Iran in Syria. Also for Wilkerson’s respectful take on Vladimir Putin; for his unvarnished opinion of the Israel lobby, so different from the tame piece he published in The New York Times a month ago; and for his comments about Israel attacking the USS Liberty in 1967 and stealing US uranium to build a nuclear weapon with LBJ’s knowledge.

General Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the US Army, told BBC Radio 4 that he had spoken to senior Republican senators who had been briefed by the US president on Monday, and had been assured that Mr Obama planned to do significant damage to the forces of Bashar al-Assad. The Obama administration has previously said that military strikes would not be aimed at toppling Assad's government nor altering the balance of the conflict. Instead, the White House has suggested, they would be intended to punish Assad for the alleged gas attack in Damascus on Aug 21 and to reinstate Washington's "red line" against the use of chemical weapons. But Gen. Keane said he understood Mr Obama was planning a more substantial intervention in Syria than had previously been thought, with increased support for the opposition forces, including training from US troops. He said the plans could involve "much more substance than we were led to believe"

The United States has drawn up plans for enforcing a no-fly-zone over Syria and shared them with allied governments, in a move that parallels the stages of NATO intervention that ended with the overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi three years ago.   The US plans were mentioned in leaked tapes of a meeting in the Turkish foreign minister’s office on March 13. Ahmet Davutoglu is heard conferring on the matter with his Under-Secretary Feridun Sinirlioglu, Armed Forces’ Deputy Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Yasar Guler and the Director of the National Intelligence Organisation (Milli Istihbarat Teskilati (MIT)) Hakan Fidan.

President Obama has repeatedly declared there will be no combat troops on the ground in Iraq to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. But a Senate hearing Tuesday with top US military officials revealed that pronouncement is on very shaky ground—there is now no question ground troops are under active consideration at the highest levels of government. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in his opening remarks he isn’t ruling out asking Obama for ground troops. “To be clear, if we reach the point where I believe our advisers should accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against specific ISIL targets, I will recommend that to the president.” Dempsey also testified that the president asked him “to come back to him on a case-by-case basis” on the subject of ground troops.

But a Saudi government official told the BBC that in response to the Russian air strikes in Syria, it was stepping up its supply of weaponry to three anti-Assad rebel groups there.The official said the Free Syrian Army, Jaysh al-Fatah and Southern Front would get increased supplies of modern, high-powered weaponry, including guided anti-tank weapons.

The Russian air strikes had "weakened" IS, Syrian Army Chief of Staff Gen Ali Abdullah Ayoub said on Thursday, enabling the army to start a "big attack" to retake towns and villages.Heavy fighting was reported in areas of Idlib, Hama and Latakia provinces, where a coalition of rebels that includes the Nusra Front operates.Government-backed troops had moved into the key Ghab plain area, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.

“Last Wednesday, at a Deputies Committee meeting at the White House, officials from the State Department, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed limited military strikes against the (Assad) regime … One proposed way to get around the White House’s long-standing objection to striking the Assad regime without a U.N. Security Council resolution would be to carry out the strikes covertly and without public acknowledgment.” – Washington Post Call it stealth warfare, call it poking the bear, call it whatever you’d like. The fact is, the Syrian war has entered a new and more dangerous phase increasing the chances of a catastrophic confrontation between the US and Russia. This new chapter of the conflict is the brainchild of Pentagon warlord, Ash Carter, whose attack on a Syrian outpost at Deir Ezzor killed 62 Syrian regulars putting a swift end to the fragile ceasefire agreement. Carter and his generals opposed the Kerry-Lavrov ceasefire deal because it would have required “military and intelligence cooperation with the Russians”. In other words, the US would have had to get the greenlight from Moscow for its bombing targets which would have undermined its ability to assist its jihadist fighters on the ground. That was a real deal-breaker for the Pentagon. But bombing Deir Ezzor fixed all that. It got the Pentagon out of the jam it was in, it torpedoed the ceasefire, and it allowed Carter to launch his own private shooting match without presidential authorization. Mission accomplished.

orty-five years on, America is still grappling with the dark origins of the Drug War, launched in 1971 by President Richard Nixon – for political purposes. Nixon's domestic-policy adviser, John Ehrlichman, in an interview published posthumously in Harper's this year, revealed the true aim of the Drug War was to criminalize the administration's "two enemies: the anti-war left and black people." As Ehrlichman explained, "We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news." Nixon himself wove anti-Semitism into the mix. "Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish," Nixon groused to his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, in a conversation recorded in the Oval Office in May 1971. "What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob?" Nixon asked. "By God, we are going to hit the marijuana thing, and I want to hit it right square in the puss." More than $1 trillion later, Nixon's war has hollowed out urban black communities, visited death upon downtrodden whites in rural America and unleashed horrific violence from Bogotá to Ciudad Juarez. In Mexico, since 2007, as many as 80,000 civilians have been murdered in drug violence. Despite the carnage, prohibitionist policies enforced through military interdiction and domestic incarceration have done little to curb the American drug habit – which fuels $64 billion a year in cartel profits, according to an estimate by the Treasury Department.

John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman whose hacked emails have exposed countless Democratic secrets to the world, was warned in 2008 to start protecting sensitive documents “by at least encrypting them.” The warning came in an unencrypted email chain forwarded by Denis McDonough, then a top Obama campaign aide and currently the White House chief of staff, to Podesta, who at the time was running Obama’s transition team. McDonough initially sent the warning to Obama economic adviser Daniel Tarullo in an email on November 3, 2008, the day before President Obama’s election victory, presumably in response to a detailed November 2 memo Tarullo sent around about the upcoming G-20 meeting President Bush had called to discuss the ongoing financial crisis. McDonough wrote: I was struck by the memo partly because it was first I had heard of it but much more because it was a sensitive doc bumping around on public email addresses. There is a very real threat to the security of our documents (particularly sensitive ones like the one you worked up), and we need to protect them by at least encrypting them.

President Obama has authorized sending an additional 600 American troops to Iraq to assist Iraqi forces in the looming battle to take back the city of Mosul from the Islamic State, United States officials said on Wednesday.The announcement means that there will soon be 5,000 American troops in Iraq, seven years after the Obama administration withdrew all American troops from the country.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, traveling in New Mexico, said the additional troops would help with logistics as well as providing intelligence for Iraqi security forces in the fight for Mosul. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that Iraqi forces would be ready to retake the city by early October.“These are military forces that will be deployed to intensify the strategy that’s in place, to support Iraqi forces as they prepare for an offensive,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said Wednesday. Write A Comment Administration officials insisted that the deployment was consistent with Mr. Obama’s policy not to commit American ground forces again in Iraq.

Mrs. Clinton said at an NBC News forum on national security this month that she would not put ground troops in Iraq “ever again.” Mr. Trump said in March that he would deploy up to 30,000 American troops in the Middle East to defeat the Islamic State.

“This could have been an Israeli false flag operation,” he said. “You’ve got basically a geo-strategically, geo-political — if you will — inept regime in Tel Aviv right now.” Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell during the Bush administration, talks about how President Obama should handle early evidence that Syria may have used chemicals weapons.