At the height of the Iraq war in 2004, veterans gave President George W. Bush a 16-percentage-point edge over his Democratic rival. Four years later, Barack Obama trailed among the former military members by 10 percentage points.

But Mr. Obama’s campaign said it thinks his three and a half years as commander in chief have turned the tables on the issue, giving him a good chance at winning the veteran vote this year.

One of Mr. Obama’s first campaign ads — released just this week — was aimed directly at war-weary service members and their families.

“It’s because of what they’ve done that we’ve been able to go after al-Qaeda and kill Bin Laden,” Mr. Obama says in the ad. “And when they come home we have a sacred trust to make sure that we are doing everything we can to heal all of their wounds, giving them the opportunities that they deserve to find a job and get the education that they need.”

The ad is part of Mr. Obama’s efforts to capitalize on a very different profile than is typical for a Democratic president.

Having come into the White House on an antiwar platform, Mr. Obama nonetheless increased American involvement in Afghanistan even as he began drawing down troops in Iraq. Now, both wars are winding down — a
relief to many military members and their families.

In addition, Mr. Obama has embraced the use of drones to assassinate terrorist leaders. And he authorized the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“President Obama is committed to ensuring that all of our men and women who’ve served in uniform can find work when they return home, receive the health care and benefits they’ve earned and have the chance to get a college education through the post-9/11 G.I. Bill,” said Clo Ewing, a campaign spokeswoman.

Working in Mr. Obama’s favor may be the changing face of the American military, which is becoming younger and more diverse. Advisers to the president note that he actually won in 2008 among veterans who were under 60 years old.

The military is also changing in its attitudes toward social issues, the Obama campaign believes. Mr. Obama’s decision to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays serving openly will be a benefit, they say.

There is little recent polling to suggest how the two candidates are faring among veterans. But advisers to Mr. Romney scoff at the idea that Mr. Obama will steal away a traditional Republican advantage come Election Day. They argue that the president’s economic policies have been especially detrimental to veterans and their families.

A unanimous Senate Armed Services Committee took a bipartisan shot at Pakistan on Thursday for the sentencing of the physician who helped catch Osama bin Laden, approving a $631.4 billion defense policy bill that withholds aid to the wavering ally until supply lines are open, support for terrorist networks ceases and the doctor, Shakil Afridi, is released.

The committee’s defense measure for the fiscal year that begins in October largely sticks to the budget caps agreed to last summer and is $4 billion below the version approved by the House on Friday. It leaves in place a delicate compromise on detainee policy from last year that some critics believe authorizes the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects apprehended on U.S. soil.

CHICAGO — President Obama and the leaders of America’s NATO allies on Monday agreed to end their guiding role in the decade-long war in Afghanistan next summer, saying it is time for the Afghan people to take responsibility for their own security and for the United States-led international troops to go home.

Declaring that “our forces broke the Taliban’s momentum,” Mr. Obama used the summit meeting of NATO leaders here in his adopted hometown to begin an exit from a conflict he embraced during his first campaign for president as America’s good war.

“We’re now unified behind a plan to responsibly wind down the war in Afghanistan,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference after the meeting. He called the decision a “major step” toward the end of the war.

But Mr. Obama acknowledged that “real challenges” remained in dealing with the problems across the border in Pakistan, and that the conference had not resolved the impasse over reopening supply lines or the other tensions about the fight against insurgents operating from safe havens there.

“We think that Pakistan has to be part of the solution in Afghanistan,” he said. “Neither country is going to have the kind of security, stability and prosperity that it needs unless they can resolve some of these outstanding issues.”

Pakistan closed supply lines to Afghanistan after an American airstrike in November that killed 24 Pakistani solders. Mr. Obama has refused to apologize for the strike, as Pakistan has demanded in negotiations with the Americans, and he pointedly exchanged only a few words with the country’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, during the two-day summit meeting — “very brief, as we were walking into the summit,” he said. The two men also stood and spoke briefly with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, before all three joined the other leaders for a group photograph.

The plans to withdraw from Afghanistan are “irreversible,” Mr. Obama and the world leaders said in their communiqué, a deliberate word choice that underscored the political reality in America and in Europe. After 10 years of war and with the global economy reeling, the nations of the West no longer want to pay, either in treasure or in lives, the costs of their efforts in a place that for centuries has resisted foreign attempts to tame it.

WASHINGTON — In the 1980s, the military had its infamous $800 toilet seat. Today, it has a $17,000 drip pan.

Thanks to a powerful Kentucky congressman who has steered tens of millions of federal dollars to his district, the Army has bought about $6.5 million worth of the “leakproof” drip pans in the last three years to catch transmission fluid on Black Hawk helicopters. And it might want more from the Kentucky company that makes the pans, even though a similar pan from another company costs a small fraction of the price: about $2,500.

The purchase shows the enduring power of earmarks, even though several scandals have prompted efforts in Congress to rein them in. And at a time when the Pentagon is facing billions of dollars in cutbacks — which include shrinking the Army, trimming back purchases of fighter jets and retiring warships — the eye-catching price tag for a small part has provoked sharp criticism.

The Kentucky company, Phoenix Products, got the job to produce the pans after Representative Harold Rogers, a Republican who is now the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, added an earmark to a 2009 spending bill. While the earmark came before restrictions were placed on such provisions for for-profit companies, its outlays have continued for the last three years.

The company’s owners are political contributors to the congressman, who has been called the “Prince of Pork” by The Lexington Herald-Leader for his history of delivering federal contracts to donors and others back home.

Military officials have said the pans work well, and Mr. Rogers defended them.

“It’s important that Congress do what it can to provide our military with the best resources to ensure their safety and advance our missions abroad, while also saving taxpayer dollars wherever possible,” Mr. Rogers said in a statement. “These dripping pans help accomplish both of these goals.”

But Bob Skillen, the chief engineer at a small manufacturer called VX Aerospace, which has a plant in North Carolina, said he was shocked to see what the Army was spending for the Black Hawk drip pans. He designs drip pans that his company sells to the military for a different helicopter, the UH-46, for about $2,500 per pan, or about one-eighth the price that his Kentucky competitor charges. The pans attach beneath the roof of the helicopter to catch leaking transmission fluid before it can seep into the cabin.

Then they asked each member of the group how they would handle the defence budget if they were a member of Congress. They found

Presented the base national defense budget for 2012 and given the opportunity to set a level for 2013, three quarters reduced it, including two thirds of Republicans and 9 in 10 Democrats. On average defense spending was lowered 23%. A majority lowered it at least 11%.

When participants were asked to get more specific and propose changes to the levels of spending in nine areas, a majority cut all nine. “All areas combined were cut 18% on average, with Republicans cutting 12% and Democrats 22%,” the study notes. Most participants were surprised by the level of America’s defence spending when it was held up against the rest of the discretionary budget, historical levels of spending, and the defence spending of other nations. A previous poll showed similar results—support for defence cuts—when participants were informed about the comparable size of the 31 largest categories in the federal discretionary budget.

The potential cuts to the Pentagon contained in last year’s budget deal are actually less than those proposed by the PPC study group on average. So it may seem odd that America’s politicians are now scrambling to avoid those reductions. Instead, Republicans have proposed cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, social services and other programmes for poor Americans, while Democrats have proposed raising taxes on the rich. Few have pushed back against the military spendthrifts, who argue that America would swiftly decline were it to return to the level of funding George Bush laboured under at the end of his peaceable presidency.

The United States is resuming sales of some weapons to Bahrain, but says it will not supply the Gulf state with any crowd control equipment.

The US State Department says the shipment will help Bahrain “maintain its external defence capabilities.”

Arms sales were frozen last year after the Bahraini government suppressed pro-democracy demonstrations.

Amnesty International says 60 people have been killed since the protests began in February 2011.

It is thought a frigate and other coast guard vessels will be supplied, along with upgraded engines for F-16 fighters.

The State Department says an order for Humvee all-terrain vehicles and a new type of wire-guided missile will not be included.

Bahrain is a key US ally in the Gulf, hosting the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

Officials in Washington say the Obama administration still has concerns about human rights in Bahrain.

But human rights campaigners have condemned this move, saying it is out of step with the United States’ commitment to reform in Bahrain.

Reports from the US say the would-be suicide attacker in a foiled “underwear bomb” plot was in fact a double agent.

US officials are quoted as saying that the person dispatched by Yemen-based al-Qaeda to attack a US-bound plane had infiltrated the group.

In an apparent intelligence coup, the agent left Yemen with the device and delivered it to the CIA.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon says it is sending military trainers back to Yemen to help counter al-Qaeda militants.

US intelligence learned last month that militants with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen planned to attack a plane with a more sophisticated version of a bomb hidden in a passenger’s underwear, similar to one used in a failed 2009 attempt, Associated Press news agency reported.

Officials told US media that the would-be bomber had been recruited by Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency and sent to Yemen where he infiltrated the militants’ cell.

The BBC’s Steve Kingstone in Washington says the double-agent was reportedly given an ambitious task by Saudi intelligence - to convince AQAP that he wanted to blow up himself and a US-bound aircraft.

The agent was given the device which he then delivered to the CIA and Saudi officials.

The New York Times reports that the double-agent is now safe in Saudi Arabia.

FBI analysts are now studying the device.

The upgraded underwear bomb is described by officials as a “custom-fit” device, that would have been difficult to detect even with careful security checks.

The House Budget Committee is set to meet today on a new GOP plan to stave off further cuts in military spending that are mandated by the Budget Control Act’s sequestration trigger. The Pentagon will be required to trim $55 billion from its budget next year and House Republicans think they’ve figured out a way to prevent that: cut programs for the poor, the AP reports:

The Republicans who control the House are using cuts to food aid, health care and social services like Meals on Wheels to protect the Pentagon from a wave of budget cuts come January. […]

Fully one-fourth of the House GOP spending cuts come from programs directly benefiting the poor, such as Medicaid, food stamps, the Social Services Block Grant, and a child tax credit claimed by working immigrants.

As CAP’s Melissa Boteach, Lawrence Korb and Max Hoffman noted in a report last month, with the cuts they are calling for, House Republicans will be protecting “largely useless” weapons systems, preserving funding for unnecessary programs like the V-22 Osprey, and adding two nuclear submarines to the U.S. military’s already “overwhelming preponderance of sea power.”

At the same time, the GOP plan would, for example, cut food stamps for 2 million people and reduce the same benefits for 44 million others. Nearly 300,000 school children would lose free school meals and hundreds of thousands could lose their Medicaid or CHIP coverage.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops last month criticized the GOP’s cuts to food stamps, tax credits for immigrant families, and other safety net programs as “unjustified and wrong.”

And while the AP notes that the GOP plan “will be dead on arrival” in the Democrat-controlled Senate, “they’re likely just a sample of what’s in store next year from Republicans if Mitt Romney wins the White House and the GOP takes back the Senate.”

An al-Qaeda leader in Yemen wanted in connection with the 2000 bombing of the American warship USS Cole has been killed in an air raid.

A tribal leader in the east of the country says Fahd al-Quso was killed by two missiles fired from a drone.

His death was confirmed by al-Qaeda and Yemen’s embassy in the US. At least one other man died in the strike.

The US had offered a $5m (£3.1m, 3.8m-euro) reward for information leading to his capture.

A US official welcomed the death of the “senior terrorist operative”. He told AFP news agency that al-Quso had been planning further attacks against the US and Yemen.

The USS Cole was attacked in October 2000 in the Yemeni port of Aden. Militants in a boat packed with explosives blew a hole in the destroyer’s side, killing 17 US sailors and wounding 40.

The US has never formally acknowledged the use of drones against Yemeni al-Qaeda suspects, but is thought to have carried out eight other attacks of this kind so far this year.

In April, The Washington Post newspaper said that the CIA was asking for authorisation to carry out more drone strikes in Yemen.

Defence lawyers for five men accused of plotting the 11 September 2001 attacks have challenged the fairness of the military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay.

The defendants, who include the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were formally charged with murder and other offences on Saturday.

None of the defendants has yet entered a formal plea, and during the hearing they mostly remained silent.

The men’s lawyers say the court is censoring evidence of torture.

The defence counsel at Guantanamo are a mix of military and civilian lawyers.

At a joint news conference they complained of what they called “assembly line justice” protected by a “veil of secrecy”.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was repeatedly water-boarded secret CIA prisons before being brought to Guantanamo.

His lawyer, David Nevin, said “everything is being done to prevent this [tribunal] from being fair”.

And so it came to pass that in 2012 — a year after the Arab awakening erupted — the United States made two financial commitments to the Arab world that each began with the numbers 1 and 3.

 It gave Egypt’s military $1.3 billion worth of tanks and fighter jets, and it gave Lebanese public-school students a $13.5 million merit-based college scholarship program that is currently putting 117 Lebanese kids through local American-style colleges that promote tolerance, gender and social equality, and critical thinking. I’ve recently been to Egypt, and I’ve just been to Lebanon, and I can safely report this: The $13.5 million in full scholarships has already bought America so much more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever will.

So how about we stop being stupid? How about we stop sending planes and tanks to a country where half the women and a quarter of the men can’t read, and start sending scholarships instead?

The Obama administration on Monday offered its first extensive explanation of how American officials decide when to use drones to kill suspected terrorists — a tactic that the government often treats as a classified secret even though it is widely known around the world.

“Yes, in full accordance with the law — and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives — the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific Al Qaeda terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones,” John O. Brennan , President Obama ’s top counterterrorism adviser, said before the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The use of armed drones to strike at suspected militants in places like Pakistan and Yemen has grown dramatically under the Obama administration, and the emergence of the new technology — which has sharply reduced the cost and risk of warfare to its operators, making it easier to engage in sporadic combat in far-flung regions — has led to growing concerns both about civilian casualties and about a future in which other countries also acquire drones.

The United States government has been reluctant to talk openly about its use of drones, apparently in part because foreign governments that granted permission for strikes did so on the condition that the deals would remain secret.

Defending drone strikes as “legal, ethical, and wise,” Mr. Brennan said the president had directed officials to be more open about how they “carefully, deliberately and responsibly” decide to kill terrorism suspects — including what he described as “the rigorous standards and process of review to which we hold ourselves today when considering and authorizing strikes against a specific member of Al Qaeda outside the ‘hot’ battlefield of Afghanistan.”

Merely being a member of Al Qaeda or one of its allies is not enough to be targeted, Mr. Brennan said, because that describes many thousands of people. Rather, policymakers approve the killing of only those who pose a particular threat, he said, like operational leaders who are planning attacks against United States interests, lower-level militants training for such an attack, and those who possess “unique operational skills that are being leveraged in a planned attack.”

Mr. Brennan also said the administration preferred capturing such suspects alive — usually by telling a foreign government where to arrest them — and would authorize a strike only if that was not feasible.

Mitt Romney hasn’t appreciated the fact that President Obama’s campaign released a new video pointing out that Romney said in 2007 that he would not order military action similar to the one Obama ordered that ended up killing Osama bin Laden.

Romney now says that “of course ” he would have done what Obama did. “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” he said yesterday. And this morning during an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS, Romney reiterated that sentiment. “Of course I would have,” he said, “any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing.”

Apparently some of Obama’s top advisers don’t fit into the “thinking American” category. Vice President Joe Biden said in January that he advised the president against the raid. “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there,’” Biden recalled. Biden added that “every single person in the room” expressed reservations about going forward with the raid, “except Leon Panetta.”

Obama’s top counterterror adviser John Brennen, in an interview to be aired this Sunday, confirmed Biden’s account . “It was a divided room as far as, you know, some of the principal sentiments on this issue were concerned,” he said.

The New Yorker reported last August that Obama’s “military advisers were divided” and “Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was one of the most outspoken opponents of a helicopter assault,” recalling President Carter’s failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980.

When Charlie Rose pointed this out to Romney this morning, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee stuck to his talking points:

ROMNEY: Well you can look at the different military options but clearly if you’ve identified where Osama bin Laden is , the United States of America is going to take action, capture him or kill him. And that was the right action to be taken, that was the right course to be taken. We haven’t heard all the different military options there were .

Watch the clip:

It seems that Romney hasn’t been paying much attention to reports on the bin Laden raid. In fact, U.S. intelligence had not “identified” bin Laden, as Romney claimed. “My worry was the level of uncertainty about whether bin Laden was even in the compound,” Gates said in an interview with 60 Minutes. “There wasn`t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial.”

Moreover, while it’s possible that “we haven’t heard all the different military options there were” for the bin Laden raid, as Romney also said, various reports have outlined a number of courses of action Obama could have taken. “Most were variations of either a JSOC raid or an airstrike. Some versions included cooperating with the Pakistani military; some did not,” the New Yorker reported .

US President Barack Obama has pledged to “finish the job” and end the Afghan war, addressing the US public live from a military base in Afghanistan.

Speaking on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death, he thanked US troops and hailed plans to combat operations.

Mr Obama arrived in Afghanistan on a surprise visit to sign an agreement on future Afghan-US ties with President Hamid Karzai, ahead of a Nato summit.

At the signing, Mr Obama said it was “a historic moment” for both nations.

Mr Obama’s address comes as correspondents say public patience with the war in Afghanistan is wearing thin.

In the prime-time speech beamed back to the US, the president said that at the upcoming Nato summit, to be held in Chicago, the alliance would “set a goal for Afghan forces to be in the lead for combat operations across the country next year”.

Documents from Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan are to go online later this week, a White House counter-terrorism official has said.

They were gathered by US Navy Seals during the raid on Bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad on 2 May 2011.

The papers are said to include communication between the al-Qaeda leader and his associates, and his hand-written diary.

The move comes on the week that marks a year since Bin Laden’s death.

The documents reveal that Bin Laden had considered changing al-Qaeda’s name because so many of its senior operatives had been killed.

In a speech to a Washington DC think tank, White House counter-terrorism chief John Brennan said the documents would be put online by the US Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center.

He told the Woodrow Wilson International Center: “With its most skilled and experienced commanders being lost so quickly, al-Qaeda has had trouble replacing them,” AFP news agency reports.

“For example, Bin Laden worried about, and I quote, ‘the rise of lower leaders who are not as experienced and this would lead to the repeat of mistakes,’” he reportedly added.

A US military judge has refused to dismiss the most serious charge against Private Bradley Manning, the alleged source of Wikileaks revelations.

The charge of aiding the enemy - one off 22 charges he faces - carries a life sentence in prison.

Col Denise Lind ruled against a defence argument that the government had not properly alleged that Pte Manning intended to help al-Qaeda.

Pte Manning’s court martial is set to begin on 21 September in Maryland.

In arguing the case for keeping the charge in place, prosecutors said Pte Manning knew the information would be seen by al-Qaeda, regardless of whether that was his main intention.

Col Lind eventually ruled that the charge must be proven during the court martial.

If prosecutors fail to prove Pte Manning knew he was giving information to the enemy, Col Lind said she would consider further motions from the defence.

A US Marine sergeant who criticised President Barack Obama on Facebook is to be discharged.

Sgt Gary Stein will receive an other-than-honourable discharge for violating a policy that limits speech of military service members, the Marine Corps said.

The action means Sgt Stein, who served nearly 10 years in the Marine Corps, will lose all benefits.

He had argued that his comments were covered by his constitutional right to freedom of speech.

Sgt Stein had put a disclaimer on Facebook that his opinions, which included calling President Obama an enemy, were his own.

He had put Mr Obama’s face on mocked-up film posters, including one for the movie Jackass.

A disciplinary board recommended earlier this month that he be given an “other-than-honourable” discharge.

The panel heard he had said he would not follow orders from the president if it involved violating the rights of US citizens.

Prosecutors said Sgt Stein repeatedly ignored warnings from superior officers, and that the postings were in breach of military regulations.

The US military has a long-standing policy of restricting the free speech of service members, including criticism of the president, who is commander-in-chief of America’s armed forces.

Sgt Stein’s supporters - who include two congressmen, and the American Civil Liberties Union - argued that the defence department’s regulations are vague, and that commanders do not understand them.

US and Afghan negotiators have finalised a partnership agreement for the US role in Afghanistan after its forces withdraw at the end of 2014.

The draft agreement on their long-term relationship was signed in the Afghan capital Kabul after months of talks.

No details were released, with the deal to be reviewed by both presidents.

There have been sharp disagreements over how much financial support the US and Nato will provide after foreign troops leave.

Last week the Afghan President Hamid Karzai called on the US to make a written commitment to pay a minimum of $2bn (£1.2bn) towards the maintenance of Afghan forces.

WASHINGTON — The nation’s spies and its military commanders are at odds over the future of America’s spy satellites, a divide that could determine whether the United States government will increasingly rely on its own eyes in the sky or on less costly commercial technology.

The fight is shaping up into the intelligence world’s version of the United States Postal Service versus FedEx — a traditional government institution that must provide comprehensive services versus a more nimble private sector that is cherry-picking the most lucrative business opportunities.

In recent years, advances in commercially available technology have allowed private companies to develop satellites carrying high-resolution sensors and perform many of the surveillance tasks that were once the sole preserve of classified satellites owned and operated by the intelligence community. Two private companies already provide some of America’s spy satellite imagery, at far lower costs than government-owned satellites, according to current and former government and industry officials and outside analysts.

But at the urging of senior intelligence officials, the Obama administration has proposed cutting the contracts for commercial satellite imagery in half next year — to about $250 million from $540 million — to help meet deficit reduction requirements, while bringing back more of the work inside the government, according to administration and Congressional officials and industry experts.

Both Republican and Democratic leaders on the Congressional intelligence committees are resisting the budget cuts and siding with the private companies and the military, which argues that it could not get as much imagery as it needs for combat operations without turning to the less expensive commercial technology.

“The debate is really between the military, which needs a lot of imagery but doesn’t need the highly classified imagery, and the intelligence community, which wants to keep the capability to produce its own imagery,” said Bill Wilt, a senior official with GeoEye, one of the private satellite companies.

The Department of Veterans Affairs will announce on Thursday that it plans to hire about 1,600 additional psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and other mental health clinicians in an effort to reduce long wait times for services at many veterans medical centers.

The hiring, which would be augmented by the addition of 300 clerical workers, would increase the department’s mental health staff by nearly 10 percent at a time when the veterans health system is being overwhelmed not just by veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also by aging veterans from the Vietnam era.

“History shows that the costs of war will continue to grow for a decade or more after the operational missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have ended,” Eric K. Shinseki, the secretary of veterans affairs, said in a statement to be released Thursday. “As more veterans return home, we must ensure that all veterans have access to quality mental health care.”

The announcement comes as the department is facing intensified criticism for delays in providing psychological services to veterans at some of its major medical centers.

The department’s own inspector general is expected to release a report as soon as next week asserting that wait times for mental health services are significantly longer than the department has been willing to acknowledge.

US President Barack Obama says American soldiers shown in photos apparently abusing Afghan corpses in 2010 should be held accountable, a spokesman said.

“The conduct depicted in those photos is reprehensible,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

The pictures, published in the Los Angeles Times, shows the soldiers posing with the mangled remains of suspected suicide bombers.

Mr Carney also expressed disappointment that the Times published the photos.

It comes at a particularly sensitive time for US-Afghan relations, after a series of incidents - including the murder of 17 Afghan civilians in March - stirred up anti-Western sentiment.

Nato combat troops aim to leave Afghanistan in 2014.

Mitt Romney has made Afghanistan a showcase for his attacks on President Obama’s foreign policy. He says Mr. Obama has undercut American interests by setting timetables for withdrawing troops, providing the Taliban — who displayed their resilience with attacks over the weekend — further reason to wait things out. He called Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta “misguided and so naïve” for announcing plans to hand over primary combat responsibilities to Afghan forces next year and leave American troops mainly in training and other roles.

But despite the tough critique, Mr. Romney has loosely embraced the main thrust of White House policy for troop levels after the election: a timetable for pulling out nearly all troops by the end of 2014.

Now that Mr. Romney has emerged as the likely Republican nominee and Afghanistan is again being tested by a Taliban offensive, his position on the war is likely to come under more scrutiny after a primary fight that gave him few opportunities to offer nuanced national security positions. Even so, analysts say he has reasons to be less than precise on Afghanistan: The war’s declining support among voters means there is little space for him to stake out a policy that provides both a sharp political contrast with Mr. Obama and keeps the war’s unpopularity at a distance.

“He doesn’t want to own this war in the event he gets elected, but by the same token he can’t look like he’s advocating a precipitous withdrawal for all sorts of reasons, including alienating the Republican base, and yet he cannot take the same position as the president,” said Stephen Biddle, a military expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s difficult to square the circle and meet all those constraints at the same time.”

And domestic politics are only one tricky element. There are serious doubts that the broadly hoped-for exit strategy of both parties — that Afghan forces can progress to where they can keep the Taliban at bay with limited assistance by 2014 — will materialize that quickly, if at all.

North Korea duly launched its satellite mission from the Sohae base on the Chinese border but soon had to admit the venture was a failure.

The nation’s own engineers will be trying to find out precisely what went wrong but so, also, will analysts from the international community, who will be keen to assess just how far Pyongyang has progressed in its efforts to master rocket technology.

The 30m(100ft)-long Unha-3 vehicle is said to have lifted off at 07:39 local time on Friday (22:39 GMT Thursday), and headed south out over the Yellow Sea.

The rocket’s trajectory, according to North Korea, was intended to take it and its Earth observation satellite payload towards a 500km-high polar orbit.

Within the hour, however, officials from Japan, South Korea and the US were briefing reporters that the mission had failed.

America in particular had a number of military systems in the region able to track the ascent.

The available information suggests the rocket disintegrated about 90 seconds into its flight, just before first-stage separation and ignition of the second stage.

One account talked of an unusually bright flaring coming from the vehicle.

All that fits with data indicating debris fell into the Yellow Sea about 165km (103 miles) west of Seoul, well short of the impact site where the North Koreans had planned to drop the first stage on a nominal flight.

North Korea has moved into place a long-range rocket for a controversial launch later this month - amid reports it is also planning a nuclear test.

Pyongyang says the Unha-3 rocket, which it plans to launch between 12 and 16 April, will put a satellite into orbit.

But opponents of the move fear it is a disguised long-range missile test.

Meanwhile, South Korean officials say new satellite images suggest the North is preparing to carry out a third nuclear test.

The images show piles of earth and sand at the entrance of a tunnel at the Punggye-ri site, where tests of a nuclear bomb were previously carried out in 2006 and 2009, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reports.

WASHINGTON — With a Republican opponent all but chosen and the general election campaign about to start, President Obama is preparing to emphasize an issue that few Democratic candidates have embraced in the past: national security, long the domain of the Republican Party.

At the same time, the Obama campaign is seeking to portray Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, as a national security neophyte whose best ideas are simply retreads of what the president is already doing, and whose worst instincts would take the country back to the days of President George W. Bush: cowboy diplomacy, the Iraq war and America’s lowest standing on the international stage.

In the coming weeks, Obama advisers plan to release a list of national security “surrogates” — high-profile Democrats like former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Wesley K. Clark, a retired general — who will write newspaper op-ed articles, give speeches and take Mr. Romney to task every time he opens his mouth about foreign policy, Obama advisers said.

The plan is to draw a contrast between Mr. Obama — who, his advisers say, kept his word on ending the Iraq war, going aggressively after Al Qaeda and restoring alliances around the world — and Mr. Romney, who will be portrayed as playing both sides of numerous issues.

“He was for and against the removal of Qaddafi, for and against setting a timetable to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan, for and against enforcing trade laws against China, and while he once said he would not move heaven and earth to get Osama bin Laden, he later claimed that any president would have authorized the mission to do so,” said Ben LaBolt, press secretary for the Obama campaign.

The more aggressive posture is a break from the past, when Democrats on the national stage battled against the perception that the party was not as committed as Republicans were to a strong defense and an aggressive response to terrorism. Mr. Obama himself, during the 2008 campaign, drew criticism from both Republicans and his primary opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for what they called his naïveté, particularly over his willingness to talk, without preconditions, to American foes like Iran.

The Defense Department has referred charges including terrorism, hijacking, murder and war crimes against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to a commission for trial by a military judge at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the Pentagon said on Wednesday. The five, who will be arraigned within 30 days, could be sentenced to death if convicted. Earlier proceedings against the men were suspended when the Obama administration proposed a civilian trial in New York. Congressional and local opposition stymied the move.

China and the US have agreed to co-ordinate their response to any “potential provocation” if North Korea goes ahead with a planned rocket launch, the White House says.

North Korea says the long-range rocket will carry a satellite. The US says any launch would violate UN resolutions and be a missile test.

US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao met on the margins of a nuclear summit in South Korea.

The launch is scheduled for April.

Its timing - between 12 and 16 April - is intended to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of North Korea’s late Great Leader Kim Il-sung.

WASHINGTON — The top allied commander in Afghanistan told Congress on Tuesday that he would not be recommending further American troop reductions until late this year, after the departure of the current “surge” forces and the end of the summer fighting season.

That timetable would defer one of the thorniest military decisions facing President Obama — the pace at which the United States removes its forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 — until after the November elections.

Gen. John R. Allen, a Marine four-star general who commands the American-led allied forces in Afghanistan, said that he remained optimistic about eventual success but that it was too early to begin shifting forces from battles in the south to the country’s turbulent eastern provinces.

He also acknowledged the deep sensitivities, especially given the current diplomatic crisis with Afghanistan, involved in handing over complete security control to Afghan forces, including over the commando night raids that American commanders say are critical to the war effort. These are the subject of intense negotiation, he testified.

General Allen said that only after reviewing the results of the next six months of fighting — at the end of which there will be 68,000 American troops remaining there — would he turn his attention to the pace of further reductions in the force.

But he repeatedly said that by the end of next year, Afghan forces would have taken over primary responsibility for operations across the country, allowing NATO’s combat role to be finished by the end of 2014, as currently scheduled.

WASHINGTON — A classified war simulation held this month to assess the repercussions of an Israeli attack on Iran forecasts that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead, according to American officials.

The officials said the so-called war game was not designed as a rehearsal for American military action — and they emphasized that the exercise’s results were not the only possible outcome of a real-world conflict.

But the game has raised fears among top American planners that it may be impossible to preclude American involvement in any escalating confrontation with Iran, the officials said. In the debate among policy makers over the consequences of any Israeli attack, that reaction may give stronger voice to those in the White House, Pentagon and intelligence community who have warned that a strike could prove perilous for the United States.

The results of the war game were particularly troubling to Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands all American forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, according to officials who either participated in the Central Command exercise or who were briefed on the results and spoke on condition of anonymity because of its classified nature. When the exercise had concluded earlier this month, according to the officials, General Mattis told aides that an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for United States forces there.

US President Barack Obama has warned North Korea that it will “achieve nothing by threats or by provocations”.

The warning comes as Pyongyang prepares to launch a long-range missile which it says will put a satellite in orbit.

Mr Obama was speaking after talks in Seoul with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, ahead of global summit on nuclear security.

The two leaders said North Korea risked further sanctions and isolation if it did not cancel its launch plans.

Mr Obama said Washington and Seoul were “absolutely united” that “bad behaviour” by North Korea would not be rewarded.

“North Korea knows its obligations and it must take irreversible steps to meet those obligations,” he said.

The launch will contravene an agreement Pyongyang reached last month which would have seen it receive food aid in exchange for a partial freeze on nuclear activities and an end to ballistics tests.

Mr Lee, who spoke alongside Mr Obama, said their countries had “agreed to respond sternly to any provocations and threats by the North and to continually enhance the firm South Korea-US defence readiness”.

But he said the international community stood ready to help North Korea improve the lives of its citizens if it chose a path of peace.

Mr Obama also criticised China, saying its refusal to challenge North Korea on the nuclear issue was not working as a policy.

In his latest book, Pakistan on the Brink, journalist Ahmed Rashid writes that he fears Pakistan “is on the brink of a meltdown.”

“I fear almost anything could [send it over the edge],” he tells Fresh Air ’s Terry Gross. “There could be a major terrorist attack in the U.S. or Europe which is traced back to Pakistan. … Then there’s a very, very critical economic crisis in the country. There’s no investment, no money, there’s no energy — I live in Lahore. We’ve had no gas for six months.”

On Tuesday’s Fresh Air, Rashid discusses the challenges facing Pakistan and Afghanistan in the post-Osama bin Laden era, as well as the complicated relationship the two countries have with the United States.

Last May, American forces stormed the compound in Pakistan where bin Laden was hiding for several years. Pakistan’s leaders have repeatedly said they didn’t know that bin Laden was living in a large house in Abbottabad, close to the nation’s capital of Islamabad.

“What happened after the killing of bin Laden was that the whole government and military spin machine put everything onto the Americans, saying, ‘This was an attack on Pakistan’s sovereignty,’ ” says Rashid. “Fair enough; it was an attack on Pakistan’s sovereignty because U.S. Special Forces entered Pakistan and killed him and then flew back. But what about this question that has been left hanging in the air, which is, ‘Are we to blame for not chasing him down? Or are we to blame that there were people involved looking after him?’ “

Since bin Laden’s death, he says, retired senior army officials have repeatedly gone on TV to detail conspiracy theories about the death of bin Laden and the attacks of Sept. 11.

“The main thrust is that everything that has gone wrong in Pakistan is due to the American presence in Afghanistan,” he says, adding that the Pakistani government hasn’t denied these claims. “And when these leading figures from past administrations [speak about these conspiracy theories] there’s no official denial.”

As tensions rise over Iran’s nuclear program, a majority of Americans want Israel and the U.S. to pursue diplomacy over military action.

President Obama insists “all options are on the table” to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. But Obama and American officials have cautioned Israel against a preemptive strike against Iran, urging diplomacy and sanctions instead. There is still a “window for diplomacy” to deter Iran’s nuclear development, Obama told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this month. Netanyahu insists that Israel reserves the right to secure its own national security.

But only one in four Americans favor Israel launching a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program, according to a new University of Maryland poll. Seven out of 10 respondents believe the U.S. and other world leaders should continue to pursue negotiations with Iran. President Obama called for continued diplomacy in a joint press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday. Cameron agreed.

Only one in five respondents believe a strike against Iran would delay its ability to develop a nuclear weapon for more than five years, according to the poll. And about half of Americans polled believe the conflict would go on for years.

Six in 10 respondents believe Iran is actively working to produce nuclear weapons. Nine in 10 believe Iran will eventually develop them. U.S. intelligence agencies continue to believe there is no evidence Iran has decided to build a bomb. The tensions over Iran’s nuclear program appear to be taking a toll. Last month, Iran topped Gallup’s “greatest enemy” list. Threatening Israel, announcements of its growing nuclear program and the possibility that Iran could disrupt the flow of oil all contributed to the antipathy, according to the poll.

Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States sought to defend President Hamid Karzai on Sunday after the Afghan president came under criticism for comparing the United States to a “demon.”

Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union with Candy Crowley,” the ambassador, Eklil Hakimi: said, “Our president is doing whatever any legitimate president would do. He is reflecting what our people are saying.”

But, he added, the people of Afghanistan were grateful to the American “taxpayers” for changes initiated since the American invasion in 2001, like greater freedom of the press, increased participation of women in politics and improvements in infrastructure.

Tensions between the United States and Afghanistan have been rising after a series of incidents, the killing of 16 Afghan villagers last week for which an American soldier has been arrested, the accidental burning of Korans in February, and the appearance in January of a video showing American troops urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban insurgents.

On Friday, as he met with the relatives of the victims of the killings, Mr. Karzai said, “Let’s pray for God to rescue us from these two demons,” referring to the United States and the Taliban. “There are two demons in our country now.”

A joint statement by the Afghan presidential palace and the country’s highest religious body also referred to the burnings of the Korans as “Satanic acts that will never be forgiven by apologies.”

Mr. Karzai has now called for NATO troops to be withdrawn from Afghan villages and confined to their bases, and the Taliban has said it was suspending peace talks with the United States.

The US soldier accused of shooting dead 16 Afghans had been injured twice while serving in Iraq and was not confident about his health, a lawyer has said.

John Henry Browne said the soldier - who has not been named - had already competed three tours in Iraq and was not fit for the Afghan tour.

He also said the accused had witnessed his friend’s leg blown off the day before the killings.

Sunday’s shootings have placed new strain on the US in Afghanistan.

The Taliban called off peace talks in the wake of the deadly rampage, in which men, women and children were shot and killed at close range.

However, the US later stressed it remained committed to Afghan reconciliation despite the move by the Taliban.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has also told the US that it must pull back its troops from village areas and allow Afghan security forces to take the lead in an effort to reduce civilian deaths.

An Iraqi militant group claims to have freed a US soldier it had been holding since last year.

The Promised Day Brigades, a Shia group loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, said in a news conference they would hand the soldier to the UN.

A video of the news conference shows a man in US military uniform telling the camera he was kidnapped in June.

The UN was unable to confirm the claims, and the US embassy said it was studying the video.

It was widely reported that only one US soldier, Ahmed Qusai al-Taie, was unaccounted for when the US pulled out of Iraq. But he was taken in 2006.

The BBC’s Rami Ruhayem in Baghdad, who has seen the video, says a spokeswoman names the soldier as Randy Michael, with a possible surname that is inaudible.

In the video, a person dressed in a US military uniform said he had been deployed to Iraq in 2003, and was abducted on 18 June last year.

He said had had been told that he was being freed for humanitarian reasons, and he went on to thank Mr Sadr.

The US soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians in a massacre that has undermined relations with Kabul has been named as Staff Sgt Robert Bales.

Officials confirmed the name of the suspect as he was heading back to the US to face charges, US media reported.

He is being flown to Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas, from Kuwait.

His lawyer, John Henry Browne, said on Thursday that the suspect was a 38-year-old man who had been injured twice while serving in Iraq.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has accused the US of not fully co-operating with a probe into the massacre of 16 civilians by an American serviceman.

The soldier accused of the killings is on his way to the US from Kuwait, where he was being held, and is expected to face a military tribunal there.

Afghan MPs had demanded the soldier be tried in public in Afghanistan.

Mr Karzai earlier met relatives of the dead, who demanded justice.

Men, women and children were shot and killed at close range as the US soldier apparently went on a rampage in villages close to a Nato base in the remote Panjwai district of southern Kandahar province.

President Karzai told reporters that the chief of the official investigation into those killings had not received the co-operation it expected from the US.

He also said the problem of civilian casualties at the hands of Nato forces had “gone on for too long”

“This is by all means the end of the rope here,” Mr Karzai said.

On Wednesday Mr Karzai told the US that it must pull back its troops from village areas and allow Afghan security forces to take the lead, in an effort to reduce such civilian deaths.

The Taliban also called off peace talks in the wake of the killings although they made no mention of the massacre in their statement.

Squads of disposable mini-satellites able to provide reconnaissance to soldiers at the “press of a button” are being considered by the US military.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) says the machines could provide tactical information at times when existing satellites were not in position.

Darpa has invited manufacturers to discuss the project .

It says the satellites should cost $500,000 (£318,500) apiece.

“We envision a constellation of small satellites, at a fraction of the cost of airborne systems, that would allow deployed warfighters to hit ‘see me’ on existing handheld devices and in less than 90 minutes receive a satellite image of their precise location to aid in mission planning,” the agency says in a statement.

It adds that each constellation should consist of about 24 satellites able to stay in low-Earth orbit for 60-90 days before burning up on re-entry.

The American soldier accused of killing 16 civilians in Afghanistan on Sunday has been flown out of the country.

Officials say legal proceedings against the unnamed staff sergeant will now be conducted in another country. It is not clear where he has been taken.

The victims were shot in their homes, causing outrage across Afghanistan.

The transfer coincides with a visit by US defence secretary Leon Panetta. His arrival in Afghanistan was marred by an incident involving a vehicle.

A stolen pick-up truck was driven at high speed onto the runway where Mr Panetta’s plane was intended to stop at the British base in Helmand province, Camp Bastion.

The vehicle ended crashing into a ditch and bursting into flames. The Afghan driver suffered burns and has been arrested.

A Nato serviceman was injured when the vehicle was stolen. Neither Mr Panetta nor anyone on board the plane was at risk at any time, officials said.

The case of an American soldier accused of killing Afghan civilians has roiled political support in Congress for the military campaign in Afghanistan, with a prominent Republican senator accusing his party’s candidates for president of undermining the nation’s military commanders.

“When Republican candidates for president, when Republican politicians talk about being for early withdrawal, it makes it harder for the general to do his job,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a senior member of the Armed Services Committee. “I want to be in a Republican Party that understands the strategic consequences of winning and losing in Afghanistan and will back up a general who deserves to be backed up.”

Both former Senator Rick Santorum and former Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested in the wake of the massacre that the country needed to reassess its military commitment to the conflict in Afghanistan.

“We have to either make the decision to make a full commitment, which this president has not done, or we have to decide to get out, and probably get out sooner,” Mr. Santorum said on Monday.

Appearing on CBS’s “Face The Nation” on Sunday, Mr. Gingrich said: “We need to understand that our being in the middle of countries like Afghanistan is probably counterproductive. We’re not prepared to be ruthless enough to force them to change. And yet we are clearly an alien presence.”

Such sentiment remains an outlier for the Republican Party, but more names are joining those counseling faster withdrawal. Two Republican senators, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah, joined 22 Democratic senators last week in a letter calling for a quicker end to the war.

Newt Gingrich has said that he fears the Afghanistan war may be a mission “that we’re going to discover is not doable.” Several of his rivals are moving in a similar direction.

Amid a series of bloody and troubling episodes in Afghanistan that have inflamed Afghan opinion against the United States, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are now calling for a reassessment of American policy there — suggesting that it may be time to withdraw troops sooner than the Obama administration has planned.

Their views echo recent polls that show public support for the Afghan war has fallen sharply among voters of all parties.

A US soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians in a night-time rampage acted alone, US officials say.

The Pentagon said in a media briefing that the killings, in the early hours of Sunday, were “tragic” but insisted it was an isolated incident.

The soldier has not been named, but he is reported to be in his 30s with three children.

Afghan MPs earlier passed a motion saying civilians have lost patience with foreign troops.

The incident has put more strain on relations between Afghans and foreign forces.

Anti-US sentiment is already high after soldiers burned some copies of the Koran at a Nato base in Kabul last month.

US officials have repeatedly apologised for the Koran incident, which sparked a series of protests and attacks that killed at least 30 people and six US troops.

The Taliban has promised revenge attacks for the latest killings, but a tribal elder told the BBC that they would not be calling for protests.

That reaction is among the reasons why the technicians at the Pentagon’s Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate consider the Active Denial System one of their most impressive weapons. But it’s a troubled system. Some of the Pain Ray’s woes are technical. Others are more fundamental.

Usually the Active Denial System is described as a “microwave” weapon. That’s not really correct. True, Pete and Ralph’s guts contain a gyrotron, the older brother of your microwave’s magnetron, through which energy passes through a magnetic field to become heat. But millimeter waves don’t penetrate nearly as deeply as microwaves — only 1/64th of an inch. Even though the weapon uses much, much more energy than a microwave, the Directorate has tried and failed to use it to cook a turkey.

That’s not all the Active Denial System has failed at.

The system’s gone through battery after battery of tests, including one that put an airman in the hospital . (The Directorate’s rejoinder: it’s tested the Pain Ray 11,000 times and only two people, including that airman, got hurt.) But its “attenuation” — that is, its potency — goes down when it’s raining, snowing or dusty, concedes one of its chief scientists, Diana Loree of the Air Force Research Laboratory, without specifying the degree of reduction. And that’s not its biggest design flaw.

Loree says the boot-up time on the Pain Ray is “sixteen hours.” So if the system is at a dead stop on a base and, say, the locals protest the burning of a Koran , guards at the entry points won’t be burning anyone. The Directorate says that in a realistic deployment, the Active Denial System will be kept in ready mode — that is, loudly humming as its fuel tanks power it, or hooked up to a base’s generator. But that makes it a gas guzzler, at a time when the military’s trying to reduce its expensive fuel costs.

“That’s something we’ve really got to look hard at, how do we make the system as efficient as possible,” says Marine Col. Tracy Tafolla, the head of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, “to make sure that we’re not running a lot of fuel.”

Another problem is less technological and more fundamental. In 2010, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, sent the Pain Ray back to the States after a deployment of mere weeks. His reasoning: it was too great a propaganda boon to the Taliban, who’d say the U.S. was microwaving Afghans, giving them cancer, making them sterile, and so forth.

Human rights lawyers are to sue Foreign Secretary William Hague over the alleged use of intelligence in assisting US drone attacks in Pakistan.

The case is being raised at the High Court in London on behalf of Noor Khan, whose father was killed in a US strike.

Lawyers from Leigh Day and Co say civilian intelligence officers who give information to the US may be liable as “secondary parties to murder”.

The Foreign Office said it did not comment on ongoing legal proceedings.

The lawyers, which include some from the international charity Reprieve, want to establish what official UK policy or guidance is with regard to assisting the US in such cases.

Leigh Day and Co says Mr Khan’s father Malik Daud was part of a council of elders holding a meeting in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, when a drone missile hit the group.

The firm said it had “credible, unchallenged” evidence Mr Hague oversaw a policy of passing British intelligence to US forces planning attacks against militants.

A US soldier in Afghanistan has killed at least 16 civilians and wounded five after entering their homes in Kandahar province, senior local officials say.

He left his military base in the early hours of the morning and opened fire in at least two homes; women and children were among the dead.

Nato said it was investigating the “deeply regrettable incident”.

Anti-US sentiment is already high in Afghanistan after US soldiers burnt copies of the Koran last month.

US officials have apologised repeatedly for the incident at a Nato base in Kabul, but they failed to quell a series of protests and attacks that killed at least 30 people and six US troops.

Local people have reportedly gathered near the base in Panjwai district to protest about Sunday’s killings, and the US embassy is advising against travel to the area.

Lt Gen Adrian Bradshaw, deputy commander of Nato-led forces, said he was unable to “explain the motivation behind such callous acts”, adding that “our thoughts and prayers are with those caught in this tragedy”.

China’s cyber warfare skills could pose a threat to the United States military in a conflict, said a report.

The report was released by a congressional panel, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

It said China’s military had focused increasingly on “information confrontation”.

It also highlighted China’s development of cyber tools and links to large telecommunications firms.

The 136-page report , prepared for the US Congress by defence contractor Northrop Grumman, said that Chinese commercial firms - some with foreign partners - were providing the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with advanced technology and research.

The PLA had ”embraced the idea that successful war-fighting is based on the ability to exert control over an adversary’s information and information systems”, the report said.

Using the scenario of a US defence of Taiwan as an example, the report said that China could hit US systems with “electronic countermeasures weapons and network attack and exploitation tools”.

The report also warned that the difficulty in identifying the party behind any cyber attack could delay the US response.

“Computer network operations (attack, defence and exploitation) have become fundamental to the PLA’s strategic campaign goals for seizing information dominance early and using it to enable and support other PLA operations throughout a conflict,” it concluded.

This report was a follow-up to a previous report that Northrop Grumman completed for the commission in 2009.

That report had warned that China was possibly carrying out ”a long-term, sophisticated, computer network exploitation campaign” against the US.

The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, created in 2000, is tasked with reporting on the national security implications of trade ties with China.

President Obama challenged his Republican critics to make a case to the American people for a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities if they really believe that is the right course to follow, throwing down an election-year challenge to the men who are vying to succeed him and who say that his Iran policy has been too weak.

“This is not a game,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference at the White House timed to coincide with Super Tuesday voting in the Republican primaries in a number of crucial states. Mr. Obama gave a staunch defense of his administration’s actions to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions and said that tough sanctions put in place by the United States and Europe were starting to work and were part of the reason Iran had returned to the negotiation table.

“The one thing we have not done is we have not launched a war,” Mr. Obama said. “If some of these folks think we should launch a war, let them say so, and explain to the American people.”

Mitt Romney criticized the Obama administration’s relations with Iran in a speech delivered via satellite to The American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington.
Former Gov. Mitt Romney vowed to “bring the current policy of procrastination toward Iran to an end” if elected president, telling a huge conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that he would impose “crippling sanctions,” station “carriers and warships at Iran’s door” and suspend all diplomatic relations.

“Hope is not a foreign policy,” he said. “I will make sure Iran knows of the very real peril that awaits if it becomes nuclear.

“I will be ready to engage diplomacy,” he added. “But I will be just as ready to engage our military might.”

Less than an hour after former Gov. Mitt Romney vowed to make Jerusalem his first foreign destination if elected president, one of his rivals for the Republican nomination, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich , went one better, promising to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on “Day 1” of his prospective presidency.

Mr. Gingrich, speaking by satellite to some 13,000 people at the conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, said that if elected, he would also immediately “initiate a strategy in the tradition of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II to undermine and replace the Iranian dictatorship by every popular method short of war.”

“In a Gingrich administration, we would not keep talking while the Iranians keep building,” he said to strong applause.

“The red line is not the morning the bomb goes off, the red line is not the morning our intelligence community tells us they’ve failed once again,” he added. “The red line is now.”

While Mr. Romney’s campaign distributed an advance text of his remarks, and former Senator Rick Santorum appeared live at the conference to give a full speech, Mr. Gingrich spoke for just a couple of minutes and then said he would take questions from a panel. But there was no panel assembled as there had been for Mr. Romney. (Among the questions: what he remembers most of his visits to Israel – Mr. Romney managed to parlay that into policy, saying it was the Jerusalem stone, which he described as a symbol of the importance of a united capital). So Mr. Gingrich waxed extemporaneously about the Middle East.

“There’s something profoundly wrong with our entire approach to the region and our entire strategy for dealing with radical Islam,” he said, condemning the Obama Administration for “failing intellectually.”

“We need to be clear that the teaching of hatred, the recruiting of martyrs” are not “compatible with a peace process and we will not tolerate engaging in a process with people who engage in those behaviors.”

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta pledged to an influential pro-Israel lobbying group on Tuesday that if the pressure of diplomacy and sanctions failed to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon, the United States was fully prepared to take military action as a last resort.

“Make no mistake: When all else fails, we will act,’’ Mr. Panetta told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Mr. Panetta’s remarks tracked closely with those of President Obama, who spoke to the same group on Sunday, and were meant to drive home the president’s message that Israel could trust the United States in the growing confrontation with Iran. Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Panetta said that United States “does not bluff’’ and “we will keep all options, including military action,’’ on the table.

The defense secretary also appeared to allude to the hard-hitting Iran talk coming from the Republican presidential candidates, who spoke by video feed to Aipac on Tuesday. “In this town, it’s easy to talk tough,’’ Mr. Panetta said. “Acting tough is a hell of a lot more important.’’

But he declared: “No greater threat exists to the security of Israel and to the entire region and indeed to the United States than a nuclear-armed Iran.”

Senator John McCain , a leader among Senate Republicans on military matters, called on Monday for the United States to lead airstrikes against Syria’s armed forces to protect the rebels and civilians there, much as it did in Libya last year.

He said the stakes were much higher in Syria, and that the United States should act without the approval of the United Nations, but with the support of Arab and other allies.

If the government of President Bashir al-Assad stays in power and continues the violent repression of dissent, “it would be a strategic and moral defeat for the United States,” Mr. McCain said on the Senate floor.

He said the crisis had reached “a decisive point” and made clear that the campaign he envisions would entail massive bombardment of the regime’s air defenses, which are extensive, even if its goal were limited to protecting the population from the army’s guns and providing some cover for humanitarian relief. He called as well for aiding the armed resistance militarily.

But he acknowledged that the United Nations Security Council , which authorized the Libya intervention, had been “shut down” by the opposition of China and Russia. “There will be no U.N. Security Council mandate,” he said, citing the 1999 intervention in Kosovo as a precedent for acting without the council’s formal approval. (The NATO allies acted then under cover of a previous resolution stemming from the breakup of Yugoslavia.)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told US President Barack Obama that Israel must always remain “master of its fate”.

Meeting the Israeli leader at the White House, Mr Obama said a nuclear Iran would be an “unacceptable” development.

On Sunday, Mr Obama told a pro-Israel conference in Washington there had been too much “loose talk” of war with Iran.

Israel fears Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons, although Tehran insists its nuclear plans are peaceful.

“The bond between our two countries is unbreakable,” Mr Obama said, as the two leaders sat side-by-side in the Oval Office.

The president emphasised: “We believe there is still a window that allows for a diplomatic resolution,” but added that the US would consider “all options” in dealing with Iran.

Meanwhile, Mr Netanyahu said Israel “must have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat”.

Benjamin Netanyahu: “My supreme responsibility… is to ensure that Israel remains the master of its fate”

I queried those agencies Tuesday and got an answer today. According to a Defense Department spokesman, the most recent operation that killed an Al Qaeda fighter was in April 2011—ten months ago. However, there was an “Al Qaeda foreign fighter” captured near Kabul in May 2011, and an “Al Qaeda facilitator” captured in the Paktiya province on January 30 of this year.

By comparison, there have been 466 coalition fatalities since April 2011.

Given Carney’s repeated insistence that the “number one” purpose of the American mission is to “disrupt, dismantle and ultimately defeat” Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and given the ongoing sacrifices the country is making to achieve that goal, it’s very important to keep these benchmarks in mind. It is surprising Carney wasn’t aware of them, or didn’t disclose them—though, perhaps it’s not.

This is a whole new way to use the term “deterrence”. Maybe you were under the impression that America already has a deterrent against an Iranian nuclear threat, namely our arsenal of over 5,000 strategic nuclear warheads. Think again! Mr Loyola wants to deter Iran from trying to build a nuclear warhead. But that’s not all: he wants to deter Iran from failing to convince the entire world that it has definitely given up any effort to build a nuclear warhead. To do that, we need to have a “clear deterrent threat of military action”. In other words, we need to set a deadline for an attack on Iran if it has not entirely convinced us that it has given up trying to develop the technology to build nuclear weapons.

This is sort of like me trying to deter you from failing to say “uncle” by putting you in a headlock and displaying a clear deterrent threat to break your arm. Or, to be more charitable, like Russia deterring Georgia from failing to recognise the independence of South Ossetia by massing tank columns on the Georgian border. It’s not the way I would normally use the term “deterrence”, and threatening to launch a first strike on Iran is not what I would normally think of as “prudence and precaution”. But it’s clearly one way war hawks are going to present the Iranian situation going forward, so keep an eye out for it.

A senior US military official has said that the issue of food aid for North Korea is now linked to political conditions.

Admiral Robert Willard, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, made the comments to a Senate committee on Tuesday.

He said conditions being discussed for food aid resumption included talks on ending North Korea’s nuclear programme

This contradicts official US policy, where the nuclear programme is separate from the provision of food aid.

North Korea relies on international aid to feed its people.

“There are conditions that are going along with the negotiations with regard to the extent of food aid,” Adm Willard told the US Senate Armed Forces Committee.

He said “preconditions” for assistance “now include discussions of cessation of nuclearisation and ballistic missile testing and the allowance of IAEA perhaps back into Yongbyon [reactor]”.

In 2009, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors were asked to leave Yongbyon as denuclearisation talks between North Korea and its dialogue partners - the US, China, Russia, South Korea and Japan - broke down.

North Korea has agreed to suspend uranium enrichment, as well as nuclear and long-range missile tests, following talks with the US.

The US State Department said Pyongyang had also agreed to allow UN inspectors to monitor its reactor in Yongbyon to verify compliance with the measures.

In return, the US is finalising 240,000 tonnes of food aid for the North.

The move comes two months after Kim Jong-un came to power following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il.

Correspondents say the move could pave the way for the resumption of six-party disarmament negotiations with Pyongyang, which last broke down in 2009.

`The Arab/Muslim awakening phase is over. Now we are deep into the counter-revolutionary phase, as the dead hands of the past try to strangle the future. I am ready to consider any ideas of how we in the West can help the forces of democracy and decency win. But, ultimately, this is their fight. They have to own it, and I just hope it doesn’t end — as it often does in the land of dragons — with extremists going all the way and the moderates just going away.

Amid heightened tensions with the West over its nuclear program , Iran on Tuesday called for negotiations on a treaty banning nuclear weapons and condemned their production or possession as “a great sin.”

There were two ways to engage with Iran on its nuclear program , engagement or confrontation, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said in a statement to the Conference on Disarmament here in Geneva. He said that Iran, “confident of the peaceful nature of its nuclear program, has always insisted on the first alternative.”

Mr. Salehi’s statement came only days after the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency expressed concern over the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program. The watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency , offered its assessment after a visit to Iran by its inspectors in which Iran denied them access to military facilities linked to the nuclear program.

The I.A.E.A. reported in November that it had “credible” information that the facilities at Parchin, south west of the capital, Tehran, included an explosives containment chamber used for experiments that were “strong indicators” of possible nuclear weapons development.

Echoing sentiments expressed in speeches by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mr. Salehi denied the nuclear program had a military purpose, saying Iran would be a stronger country without nuclear arms.

“We do not see any glory, pride or power in the nuclear weapons, quite the opposite,” he said, adding that on the basis of a religious decree issued by Ayatollah Khamenei, “the production possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons are illegitimate, futile, harmful, dangerous and prohibited as a great sin.”

He said the existence of nearly 23,000 nuclear weapons in the world posed “the gravest threat” to sustainable international security and that as long as they existed there would always be a risk of their use and proliferation.

The killing of two American servicemen and the eruption of deadly anti-American protests in Afghanistan confronts President Obama with a potential political weakness in a foreign policy that has so far offered few easy targets to Republican candidates eager for an opening.

But the White House and the Obama campaign believe that, if anything, the bloodshed in Afghanistan will reinforce the sentiments of a large majority of Americans who want to get the troops out of there as soon as possible. This, the president’s aides said, will constrain Mitt Romney or other Republicans seeking to benefit from a perception that Mr. Obama’s Afghan strategy has gone awry.

Still, the sudden flare-up in Afghanistan is a vivid reminder — like rising gasoline prices or tensions over Iran’s nuclear program — that Mr. Obama’s path to re-election is likely to be strewn with issues that have a momentum of their own, even as Democrats watch the bitter Republican presidential primary take a toll on the opposition.

“The lessons you take from all of this is that there are lots of things beyond our control,” a senior administration official said last week. “They keep all of us up at night all the time. We just got to do the things we can control.”

Mr. Romney did try to seize on the violence, which followed the burning of copies of the Koran by American personnel and prompted the United States to pull its advisers out of Afghan ministries. He called it an “extraordinary admission of failure” in Mr. Obama’s plan to wind down the war by 2014.

Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Romney repeated his charge that the president never should have announced a specific withdrawal date for troops because he said it emboldened the Taliban to “wait us out.” He added that Mr. Obama’s apology for the Koran burnings, in a letter to President Hamid Karzai, “sticks in the throats” of Americans after the sacrifices soldiers made to help the Afghan people.

On Monday, the White House defended the president’s apology, which it said encouraged Mr. Karzai to call for calm. The administration noted that former President George W. Bush apologized to Iraq in 2008 after a soldier used a copy of the Koran for target practice. And it said the attacks would not alter its timetable in Afghanistan, even though Mr. Obama recognizes that public support for the war is fraying.

Nato has withdrawn all its personnel from Afghan ministries after two senior US officers were shot dead in the interior ministry building in Kabul.

Nato said an “individual” had turned his gun on the officers, believed to be a colonel and major, and had not yet been identified or caught.

Nato commander Gen John Allen condemned the attack as “cowardly”.

The shootings come amid five days of deadly protests over the burning of copies of the Koran by US soldiers.

The Israeli Supreme Court has invalidated a law that exempted from military service ultra-Orthodox Jews engaged in religious studies, adding a new urgency to the government’s negotiations with religious parties over a more equitable distribution of the burdens of citizenship.

The 6-to-3 decision, handed down late Tuesday, declared the so-called Tal Law unconstitutional at a time of growing tension in Israel over the place of the ultra-Orthodox. The law, in effect since 2002, granted exemptions to tens of thousands of religious academy students. It was widely viewed as a failure, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had already said it would not be renewed when it expired this summer.

Still, the ruling will now force the government’s hand to come up with a new way forward, one that will be strongly resisted by religious party coalition members.

Political and religious conservatives like these GOP candidates rush to defend the culture wars from their faith perspectives, but when it comes to pursuing preemptive war against a country that has attacked us, they are silent on their faith, and on the explicit teaching of Jesus that peacemaking is blessed.

Why the faith silence when it comes to preemptive war? Could it be because their faiths don’t support attacking someone who has not attacked you?

The US Army private accused of leaking classified documents to Wikileaks is to be asked to enter a plea ahead of a full military court martial.

The 24-year-old, who faced 22 charges, is due to appear at a hearing at Fort Meade, Maryland.

If found guilty of leaking and “aiding the enemy” he could face a life term.

Pte Manning, who was first arrested in May 2010, appeared for a pre-trial hearing in December, following which a court martial was recommended.

Thursday’s arraignment hearing will offer the defendant his first opportunity to state his case personally.

During his pre-trial hearing in December, defence lawyers argued that Pte Manning was a troubled young man with gender identity issues.

They suggested he should not have been sent to Iraq, where he served as an intelligence analyst with access to classified material.

Pte Manning is alleged to have been the source of a series of high-profile security breaches that saw Wikileaks rise to global fame.

After a video showing US troops firing on Iraqis from a helicopter came caches of documents from both the Iraq and Afghan wars, and a huge haul of classified state department cables.

The federal government on Wednesday mounted a vigorous defense in the Supreme Court of the Stolen Valor Act, a 2005 federal law that makes it a crime to falsely say that one has ‘”been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the armed forces of the United States.”

The justices received briefs urging them to uphold the law from the American Legion , the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation , the Legion of Valor , the Veterans of Foreign Wars and other groups with strong military ties.

“Military honors play a vital role in inculcating and sustaining the core values of our nation’s armed forces,” said Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the solicitor general of the United States. “The military applies exacting criteria in awarding honors, and Congress has a long tradition of legislating to protect the integrity of the honor system.”

“The honor system is about identifying the attributes, the essence, of what we want in our service men and women — courage, sacrifice, love of country, willingness to put your life on the line for your comrades,” he said later. “It’s what George Washington said in 1782 when he set up the honor system. It’s designed to cherish a valorous ambition in soldiers and to encourage every species of military merit.”

Several justices echoed the sentiment, even as they debated whether the law could be reconciled with the First Amendment.

The case involved Xavier Alvarez, who had falsely claimed to have been awarded the Medal of Honor. His lawyer, Jonathan D. Libby, said there are sensible ways short of criminal prosecution to address such falsehoods.

“There is a significant difference,” Mr. Libby said, “between a criminal sanction that puts someone in prison versus simply exposing them for what they are, which is a liar.”

For much of the last year, the Republican candidates for president have hammered President Obama ‘s handling of the Middle East peace effort, hoping to drive a wedge between Mr. Obama and Jewish voters and other supporters of Israel over the issue of Israel’s security.

Now, the rising tensions over Iran’s nuclear ambitions — and the growing possibility of an Israeli-led strike on Iran’s facilities that could come as early as this summer — has once again brought the issue of Israel to the forefront of the presidential campaign.

The White House announced on Monday that Mr. Obama will host Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, at the White House early next month. The meeting comes amid reports that the United States is cautioning Israel against launching a strike.

A statement from the White House said the visit was “part of the continuous and intensive dialogue between the United States and Israel and reflects our unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.” Mr. Obama dispatched his national security adviser to Israel over the last several days to discuss the Iranian situation and other issues.

But Mr. Obama’s Republican rivals are likely to try to use the White House meeting on March 5 — which comes on the day before the Super Tuesday primaries — to renew their attacks on an administration they say has not done enough to help protect and support Israel.

The US Marine Corps has discharged the man convicted over the killing of Iraqi civilians in Haditha, a spokesman said.

Former Sgt Frank Wuterich, 31, was given a general discharge under honourable conditions and completed his service on Friday, he added.

Wuterich avoided imprisonment after reaching a plea deal, but had earlier faced several counts of manslaughter.

Twenty-four people died in the 2005 killings, including women and children, after a roadside bomb killed a Marine.

Wuterich was one of eight men charged in the case, but charges against six were dropped or dismissed and one was acquitted.

He faced a potential maximum sentence of three months, but the judge at Camp Pendleton, California, recommended that Wuterich should not be detained.

Wuterich admitted that he told his men to “shoot first, ask questions later”, in one of the worst incidents of violence against Iraqi civilians by US troops.

On Monday, bags of these books arrived at the Bagram Air Base in a dump truck escorted by a military vehicle. A number of Afghans working in the area rushed screaming at the two soldiers they saw throwing the bags into an incineration pit, and some workers reached into the fire to extract the volumes.

A NATO spokesman said the books had been gathered at a detention facility for suspected insurgents and inadvertently given to troops for incineration.

The NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen, issued a profuse apology “to the president of Afghanistan, the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and most importantly, to the noble people of Afghanistan,” that confirmed the episode, but portrayed it as absolutely unintentional.

With the Syrian government continuing its deadly crackdown on its citizens, two senior American senators who were on their way to the Middle East spoke out strongly on Sunday in favor of arming the Syrian opposition forces.

The senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both Republicans, laid out a series of diplomatic, humanitarian and military aid proposals that would put the United States squarely behind the effort to topple President Bashar al-Assad of Syria . The senators, both of whom are on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that rebel fighters deserved to be armed and that helping them take on the Syrian government would aid Washington’s effort to weaken Iran .

Syria relies on Iran for financial and military support, and the governments in Damascus and Tehran have sectarian ties as well: Iran has strongly backed the Syrian Shiite minority and the offshoot Alawite sect that makes up Syria’s ruling class.

“I believe there are ways to get weapons to the opposition without direct United States involvement,” Mr. McCain said. “The Iranians and the Russians are providing Bashar Assad with weapons . People that are being massacred deserve to have the ability to defend themselves.”

“So I am not only not opposed,” he said, “but I am in favor of weapons being obtained by the opposition.”

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea’s Workers’ Party will hold a conference in mid-April, the government announced Monday, affording its new leader, Kim Jong-un, the opportunity to inherit top party posts held by his late father.

Neither the meeting’s date nor the agenda was disclosed, but party conferences have in the past helped leaders bolster their authority. At the most recent conference in September 2010 — the first in 30 years — Mr. Kim made his debut as his father’s successor and was made vice chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission. At this one, he and his closest aides are expected to dole out important party posts among themselves and their trusted associates.

The Obama administration on Friday said it would not defend the constitutionality of statutes blocking same-sex military spouses from receiving marriage benefits — including rights to visitation in military hospitals, survivor benefits, and burial together in military cemeteries.

In a letter to the House speaker, John A. Boehner , Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that the Justice Department shared the view of plaintiffs in a lawsuit in Massachusetts that such laws — including a part of the Defense of Marriage Act, and statutes governing veterans’ benefits —are unconstitutional.

Mr. Holder announced nearly a year ago that the Obama administration would no longer defend a section of the Defense of Marriage Act that prevents federal recognition of same-sex marriages that are legal at the state level. In response, House Republicans hired a legal team to defend it in the other lawsuits..

Mr. Boehner and other Republicans have strongly criticized the move, saying the Justice Department has a duty to defend federal statutes. A spokesman for Mr. Boehner’s office referred questions to lawyers hired by the House, who did not respond to an e-mail.

As in the earlier case, the administration also said Friday that it would continue to enforce the statutes applying to same-sex military spouses unless Congress repealed them or a court ruling striking them down. In his letter on Friday, Mr. Holder invoked the same reasoning that he cited a year ago in the other cases: laws treating people in same-sex marriages differently from heterosexual relationships serve no compelling government interest and violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

“The legislative record of these provisions contains no rationale for providing veterans’ benefits to opposite-sex spouses of veterans but not to legally married same-sex spouses of veterans,” he wrote. “Neither the Department of Defense nor the Department of Veterans Affairs identified any justifications for that distinction that could warrant treating these provisions differently from” the marriage act.

The lawsuits that generated the administration’s decision a year ago involved civilian legal matters, such as the right of a surviving spouse not to pay estate taxes on inherited assets. The new lawsuit involves military-related matters.

Lawmakers introduced bills in both chambers Thursday intended to close a loophole that enables for-profit schools to take advantage of G.I. Bill aid to rake in federal money.

Two of the sponsors — Senator Tom R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware, and Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California and a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform — told reporters the law would focus on for-profit schools that accept federal funds to educate veterans but sometimes leave them unprepared to enter the civilian workforce.

“It is clear that the business model of some of these for-profit colleges is to become totally reliant on federal funds, making billions in the process and spending a paltry amount on actually educating the students they spend billions to entice,” Ms. Speier said.

In 1998, Congress instituted the so-called “90-10 rule,” requiring that for every nine dollars of tuition covered by federal aid, there should be at least one dollar coming from private funds.

The law would close a loophole that counts military education benefits differently from Department of Education aid, which allowed schools to circumvent the rule by designating veterans’ education benefits as if the money were not paid by the federal government.

Tunisia’s defense minister, Abdelkrim Zbidi, has called for increased cooperation with the United States to help guard his country’s borders. Mr. Zbidi spoke Wednesday after a meeting of a joint Tunisian-American military commission that discussed increased training and logistical support for the North African nation’s forces. Tunisian troops have recently clashed with fighters linked to militants in neighboring Libya. There also have been skirmishes with groups believed to have ties to fighters for Al Qaeda who are active in the desert south of Tunisia.

A moratorium on transferring detainees to some of the Afghan government’s detention facilities by NATO forces has been lifted and transfers have resumed, NATO officials said Wednesday.

Last fall, the transfers were suspended in the wake of a devastating report from the United Nations that found evidence of routine human rights abuses and torture at 16 detention facilities, including eight operated by the National Directorate of Security and eight operated by the police.

The United Nations report, which covered 47 detention facilities in 22 provinces, found that in some facilities detainees were beaten with rubber hoses and hung from hooks, and that they had their genitals twisted to extract confessions. The NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen, immediately halted detainee transfers to all Afghan facilities where the United Nations found abuses and put in place a remediation program.

Over the past four months NATO officials have made an assessment of each of the jails named in the report and instituted a retraining program for the Afghan leadership at those facilities, the interrogators and guards. The Ministry of Interior and the National Directorate of Security, which run Afghan detainee operations have cooperated, NATO officials said.

NATO said that it had now resumed transferring detainees to 12 of the 16 detention centers, but that for four of them it was conditional, meaning that NATO could reverse that decision after further checks. Four places, including three where detainees reported routine abuse and in some cases torture, have not yet been certified for transfers.

The United Nations Convention Against Torture prohibits the transfer of a detained person to the custody of a state where there are substantial grounds for believing that the detainee is at risk of torture. There is also a United States law that prohibits assistance or training to the security forces of a foreign country if there is evidence of torture. Financing and assistance can continue, however, if serious remedial action is taken.

Urging nations to draw “red lines against Iranian aggression,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that the arrest of Iranians in Bangkok after a suspicious explosion and bombing attempts on Israeli diplomatic personnel in India and Georgia have exposed Iran ’s “acts of terror” to the world.

“These days, Iran’s acts of terror are clear to everyone,” he told Parliament. “Iran is disrupting world stability and hurting innocent diplomats in many countries. Countries around the world must condemn Iran’s terror operations and draw red lines against Iranian aggression. If not stopped, this aggression will spread to many countries.”

Israel has blamed Iran for two car bomb attacks targeting its diplomats on Monday, one in New Delhi which seriously injured an Israeli woman and three other people, and the second in Tblisi, the capital of Georgia, which was defused by police there after a local Israeli Embassy employee reported a noise under his car.

An explosion in Bangkok on Tuesday led authorities there to two Iranians who were arrested on suspicion that they were on their way to try to attack Israeli diplomats. One of the men lost at least one leg from the explosion. Israeli officials said the explosive device in Thailand was similar to those used in India and Georgia.

Iranian officials have rejected those accusations, saying that Israel is trying to besmirch Tehran, and Thai officials said it was too early to link what they found to what had occurred elsewhere.

In Iran, state television reported advances in its nuclear program on Wednesday. Iran says the program is for civilian use. Israel and most of the West believes the goal is to build nuclear weapons and Israeli is especially worried. It has been pressing the world to make sure Iran does not build such a weapon, threatening a military strike if all else fails.

Civilian de-miners working in Libya have found another type of cluster bomb used last year during the war that overthrew Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, according to the United Nations and Mines Advisory Group, or MAG, a nongovernment organization helping to clean up areas littered with mines and unexploded ordnance.

The cluster munitions, known as PTAB-2.5M’s, were found last month scattered in the desert near the eastern city of Ajdabiya.

A product of the Soviet Union, PTAB’s were first designed and fielded during Stalin’s time, and they have been used in several wars in the decades since. Each is a narrow bomblet shaped roughly like an aerosol spray can equipped with stabilizing fins at the tail. Each holds a shaped explosive charge designed to penetrate armor.

About 30 of the submunitions were found, some exploded, others not, near the main road about 20 miles from the southern gate of Ajdjabiya, according to Ivica Stilin, MAG’s technical operations manager in Libya.

The de-mining agency also found what appeared to be the remains of an RBK-250, an air-dropped canister that can hold several types of Soviet-era submunitions, including PTAB’s.

Mr. Stilin said the suspected RBK-250 was found near the scattered bomblets, suggesting that the bomb did not “have a chance to deploy properly, or it could be they were dropped from low altitude.”

The area where the bomblets and the canister were found was where journalists witnessed low-elevation airstrikes by Libyan government aircraft early in 2011, often against convoys and concentrations of anti-Qaddafi fighters who roamed the highway between Ajabiya and Ras Lanuf. The airstrikes occurred before foreign forces intervened in the conflict, effectively grounding Libya’s attack-aircraft fleet.

Omar Mohammed hunts terrorists in Baghdad. Hunts them and kills them. A few months ago, he killed two big guys in Al Qaeda — Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the two most-wanted terrorists in all of Iraq. But when you hunt Al Qaeda, they also hunt you. The more you kill them, the more they want to kill you. They’ve shot Omar, blown him up, and killed dozens of his men.

After Rick Santorum said that women should not serve in combat, citing “emotions,” critics were furious, saying he had insulted women by suggesting that they were too emotional to be depended upon in life-and-death situations.

But Mr. Santorum said Friday that he was actually referring to the emotions of men, not women, saying that men might be distracted from their mission by their “natural instinct” to protect women.

The Pentagon announced Thursday that it intended to allow female service members to serve in dangerous jobs closer to the front lines, like medics and radio operators, but it stopped short of saying officially that they could serve in combat. Many women already serve in such jobs, and the new rules formalize these arrangements.

Mr. Santorum, who won three states on Tuesday in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination and has been garnering more news media attention since, was asked Thursday by CNN for his views on the Pentagon’s decision.

“I think that could be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved,” he said.

He referred to camaraderie of men in combat and said the presence of women was “not in the best interest of men, women or the mission.”

He did not elaborate on what he meant by “other types of emotions,” but he drew swift criticism from some who said he was suggesting women might be too emotional.

A US Marine scout sniper unit in Afghanistan posed for a photo in front of a flag resembling the logo of the Nazi SS, the Marine Corps says.

In a statement, a Marine spokesman said use of the SS symbol was not acceptable, and that the Corps had now addressed the issue.

On investigation, use of the flag was not thought to be racially motivated.

Marines in the September 2010 photo, taken in Sangin, Afghanistan, are no longer in that unit, he added.

The photo was brought to the attention of a Marine inspector general in November 2011.

The US and Japan have resurrected a controversial deal to move thousands of Marines from the island of Okinawa.

The deal to move the Marines, signed in 2006, had depended on the closure of a US airbase on the island. But Japan has been unable to relocate the base.

However, both sides have now agreed to “de-link” the two issues, paving the way for the Marines’ redeployment.

The US has recently overhauled its policy in the Pacific, announcing a series of changes to its deployments.

The Futenma base, near Okinawa’s capital Naha, has long proved controversial.

Locals say having a military base so near the city is dangerous and noisy, and want it removed from the island altogether.

The US has some 18,000 Marines on Okinawa out of a total military deployment of about 50,000 in Japan.

The website of a law firm that represented a US Marine accused of leading a massacre that killed 24 Iraqi civilians remained inaccessible on Monday, three days after hackers with Anonymous took credit for an attack that compromised the site and exposed almost 3GB of confidential e-mails.

The breach of Puckett & Faraj came to light on Friday when Russian news site RT.com reported it was defaced to protest the firm’s successful defense of Marine Sgt. Frank Wuterich. He was recently convicted on reduced charges of dereliction of duty in what was once a manslaughter case involving the death of 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq.

“As part of our ongoing efforts to expose the corruption of the court systems and the brutality of US imperialism, we want to bring attention to USMC Sgt. Frank Wuterich who along with his squad murdered dozens of unarmed civilians during the Iraqi Occupation,” a message left on the firm’s vandalized homepage read. “Can you believe this scumbag had his charges reduced to involuntary manslaughter and got away with only a pay cut?”

Anonymous members claimed to have retrieved gigabytes worth of confidential e-mails sent by the firm’s employees, and as proof, they posted messages online that purportedly came from employees responding to their discovery of the breach.

“This may completely destroy the Law Firm,” an employee named Marcy Atwood wrote in an email.

It has been a busy few days for hackers affiliated with Anonymous. Recently, hundreds of law enforcement officers in Texas saw their names and addresses published. And websites for police in Salt Lake City and Boston have been defaced. A conference call between FBI agents and their counterparts in the UK was also leaked late last week .