U.S. Army Gen. John F. Campbell, commander of U.S and NATO troops in Afghanistan, hailed the presidential power-sharing agreement announced Sunday as a major step toward clearing the way for a continued presence of U.S. and allied forces next year.

In a statement, Campbell congratulated Afghan President-elect Ashraf Ghani Ammadzai and rival Abdullah Abdullah on the deal to form a National Unity Government. Both candidates have committed to keeping coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Campbell also praised the Afghan National Security Forces for remaining neutral during the long and bitter dispute over the presidential election results.

"Their achievements, through two elections and protracted political uncertainty, are enormous," Campbell said in an email to Military.com. "We remain committed to assisting the Afghan National Security Forces as they continue to serve and secure the Afghan people."

Following announcement of the agreement, retired Adm. James Stavridis, the former NATO commander, tweeted that the pledges of Ghani and Abdullah to work together would translate into "a Bilateral Security Agreement to keep a residual force and avoid the mistakes of Iraq."

In a statement, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen urged Ghani and Abdullah to come to "the conclusion of the necessary security agreements with the United States and NATO as soon as possible."

For more than a year, the allies have been pressing for a Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) with the U.S. to keep troops in Afghanistan past the end of this year and a similar agreement with NATO, but current President Hamid Karzai refused to sign. Karzai has been in power since shortly after the U.S. invasion in 2001.

New intelligence has emerged warning Washington that its upcoming confrontation with the Islamic State may leave it blind to a more sinister and direct threat from a much lesser known terrorist group that has arisen from the ashes of the Syrian war.

Very little information is being released at the moment by anyone within American intelligence circles, but the group calling itself Khorasan is said by officials to have concrete plans for striking targets in the United States and Europe as a chosen modus operandi - more so than the Islamic State (IS), formerly known as ISIS.

David Copperfield is a CIA Contractor?

The crisis involving the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a Godsend to politicians, which is probably why the threat actually posed by the group is being hyped as it is while the White House and Pentagon continue to change the meaning of commonly used English expressions to enable the attacking of just about anyone anywhere. We are told that the United States will have a free hand in bombing Syria, an independent nation with which Washington is not at war. The Administration has warned that if Damascus attempts to defend itself from the air armada there will be consequences in the form of "retaliation," suggesting that the US would be striking back after being attacked. Oddly enough, my dictionary suggests that it would be the Syrians who would be retaliating, but one supposes that in the Emerald City everything is not as it seems and certain words have little or no meaning.

The welcome distraction afforded by ISIS means that the issue of Gaza, which was recently devastated by the Israelis, has largely disappeared from the mainstream media, enabling Benjamin Netanyahu to steal still more land on the West Bank for new settlements. And remember MH-17? Still a whodunit and nobody cares anymore.


Back here at home, the dispute over the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture, a hot button issue earlier this year, has also benefited, largely disappearing from sight. The meticulously researched Senate report, covering 6000 pages and including 35,000 footnotes, apparently concluded that torturing terrorist suspects was not only illegal under the United Nations Convention on Torture, to which Washington is a signatory, it was also ineffective, producing no intelligence that was otherwise unobtainable.

Since a "forgive and forget" forward-looking White House has already indicated that no one will ever be punished for illegal actions undertaken in the wake of 9/11, why is the torture issue important beyond the prima facie case that a war crime that was authorized by the highest levels of the federal government? It is important because of its constitutional implications and its impact on rule of law in the United States, which is again being flouted by the Administration in its rush to "destroy" ISIS, which is little more than a terrorist group du jour being exploited to terrify the American public. The constitutional issue, in its simplest terms, is that the CIA works for the president and when it operates without legally mandated oversight by the executive branch and judiciary it does so in defiance of separation of powers, making the Agency little better than a secret army run by POTUS.

A preliminary report into the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 includes a chilling transcript of communication between flight controllers as they realised MH17 had vanished from their instruments.

After the final communication from the plane (a simple acknowledgement of "Romeo November Delta, Malaysian one seven"), a few minutes later flight controllers in Dnipro and Rostov talk on the phone trying to locate the flight.

"Do you observe the Malaysian," Dnipro asks.

"No, it seems that its target started falling apart," Rostov responds.

"It's not responding for our calls too," Dnipro says. "It's disappeared."

Moments earlier, the report finds, a large number of high-energy objects smashed through flight MH17, causing it to break up in mid-air and crash in eastern Ukraine.

Israel's military said it shot down a Syrian warplane over the Golan Heights on Tuesday, in the first such incident in three decades.

"It was a Russian-made Sukhoi," a military spokesman said.

Israeli military sources said the plane apparently crossed by accident into Israeli-controlled airspace over the Golan Heights - where fighting from Syria's civil war has spilled over occasionally - and was not on a mission to attack Israeli targets.


The aircraft was intercepted by a U.S.-manufactured Patriot missile, the spokesman said.

Israel Radio said the warplane was apparently carrying out a mission against Syrian rebels battling the forces of President Bashar al-Assad. Israel's military said it shot down a Syrian drone over the Golan Heights on Aug. 31.

Late Monday evening, September 22, the United States began the first of its airstrikes inside Syria.

Although details are still murky about where the attacks took place and what targets were actually hit, the Pentagon has acknowledged responsibility for the bombings.

According to USA Today, Rear Admiral John Kirby stated that "I can confirm that U.S. military and partner nation forces are undertaking military action against ISIL terrorists in Syria using a mix of fighter, bomber and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles. Given that these operations are ongoing, we are not in a position to provide additional details at this time."

USA Today reports that the strikes were carried out both by bomber jets and by ships firing cruise missiles. It is said that the strikes have hit about 20 ISIS targets, including what is being called "headquarters buildings" for "militants who have based their movement in Syria."

The attacks were not carried out with the coordination and cooperation of the Syrian government. Nor were they carried out with Syrian government permission.

While Syria has already stated that any airstrikes conducted over Syrian airspace would be considered an act of war and that Syria might very well shoot down any American planes conducting those strikes, it is as of yet unclear as to how the Syrian government will respond.

The former oil tycoon and adversary of president Vladimir Putin has launched a pro-European political platform from exile

The former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in jail after challenging the Kremlin, says he would be ready to lead Russia if called upon.

Khodorkovsky's statement, at the launch of an online movement called Open Russia, appears to break his promise to steer clear of politics, which he made after being pardoned by president Vladimir Putin in December.

"I would not be interested in the idea of becoming president of Russia at a time when the country would be developing normally," he was quoted as saying by Le Monde newspaper.


"But if it appeared necessary to overcome the crisis and to carry out constitutional reform, the essence of which would be to redistribute presidential powers in favour of the judiciary, parliament and civil society, then I would be ready to take on this part of the task."

Open Russia is intended to unite pro-European Russians in a bid to challenge Putin's grip on power.

"A minority will be influential if it is organised," Khodorkovsky said during a ceremony broadcast online from Paris.

Khodorkovsky and his allies said political change could come quickly and insisted the time had come to think of Russia's future after Putin.

He stressed that his project - named after his charity that was shut down after his imprisonment - would be an online "platform" for like-minded people, not a political party.

But he did not anticipate Putin would approve.

As the US and Europe prepare another round of sanctions against Russia over the ongoing Ukrainian conflict, the third round of such sanctions since the conflict began shortly after the Euromaidan unrest resulted in the installation of a NATO-backed regime in Kiev, a curious and inexplicable oversight appears to have been made.

While wild accusations have been leveled against Russia over its involvement over the violence in Ukraine, claims ranging from covert support up to and including unsubstantiated claims of a "full scale invasion," prominent media organizations across the Western world have for years reported a flow of cash, weapons, equipment and fighters from America's allies in the Persian Gulf as well as from nations like NATO member Turkey, and into the conflict raging within Syria's borders.

While baseless claims leveled against Russia have served as ample justification for the West to continue leveling sanctions against Moscow, no sanctions have as of yet been leveled against the overt sponsors of militancy and, in fact, terrorism in Syria. So widespread has state-sponsored terrorism become in the Middle East that what began as a limited proxy war against Syria has transformed into an immense regional army with tens of thousands of paid soldiers requiring millions of dollars a day to operate across multiple borders and confounding the forces of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon combined.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel, says that society would be far better off if people quit trying to live past age 75. His new article entitled "Why I Hope To Die At 75" has the following very creepy subtitle: "An argument that society and families - and you - will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly". In the article, Emanuel forcefully argues that the quality of life for most people is significantly diminished past the age of 75 and that once we get to that age we should refuse any more medical care that will extend our lifespans.

This is quite chilling to read, considering the fact that this is coming from one of the key architects of Obamacare. Of course he never uses the term "death panels" in his article, but that is obviously what Emanuel would want in a perfect world. To Emanuel, it is inefficient to waste medical resources on those that do not have a high "quality of life". So he says that "75 is a pretty good age to aim to stop".

The suppression of gold prices is essential at all costs to the Anglo-American banking interests. The saber rattling and attempts to lure Russia and China into military conflict are about who controls the financial world.

Russia and China keep accumulating the eternal currency - gold. The American Empire and their EU disciples continue to accumulate debt and print fiat currencies. Has fiat paper ever won out over gold in the long-run? Change is coming. Revolution is in the air. You can sense the desperation of the ruling oligarchs. Their fiat world is beginning to crumble. But they will not go without a bloody fight.