Cold War

Russia’s PM Dmitry Medvedev: We Are In “A New Cold War”

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Medvedev-Munich

– Russia’s Medvedev: We Are in ‘a New Cold War’:

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said his country is in a new Cold War with the U.S. and its allies, underscoring the tenuous level of trust that’s putting a day-old plan for a truce in Syria at risk.

The clash, with echoes of superpower rhetoric during the 20th century, played out at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday even as Russia, Europe and the U.S. say they’re seeking cooperation to end Syria’s civil war, resolve the armed standoff in eastern Ukraine and make progress toward lifting European economic sanctions against Russia.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: Cold War Renewed With A Vengeance While Washington Again Lies

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

– Cold War Renewed With A Vengeance While Washington Again Lies — Paul Craig Roberts (Paul Craig Roberts, June 28, 2014):

The Cold War made a lot of money for the military/security complex for four decades dating from Churchill’s March 5, 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri declaring a Soviet “Iron Curtain” until Reagan and Gorbachev ended the Cold War in the late 1980s. During the Cold War Americans heard endlessly about “the Captive Nations.” The Captive Nations were the Baltics and the Soviet bloc, usually summarized as “Eastern Europe.”

These nations were captive because their foreign policies were dictated by Moscow, just as these same Captive Nations, plus the UK, Western Europe, Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Georgia, and Ukraine, have their foreign policies dictated today by Washington. Washington intends to expand the Captive Nations to include Azerbaijan, former constituent parts of Soviet Central Asia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia.

Read moreDr. Paul Craig Roberts: Cold War Renewed With A Vengeance While Washington Again Lies

U.S. Special Forces Carried Miniature Nukes On Their Backs … For 25 Years

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The mushroom cloud from the atmospheric detonation of the 11 megaton Castle Romeo nuclear bomb
The mushroom cloud from the atmospheric detonation of the 11 megaton Castle Romeo nuclear bomb

– For 25 Years, U.S. Special Forces Carried Miniature Nukes on Their Backs (The Smithsonian, Feb 10, 2014):

The B-54 Special Atomic Demolition Munition was a nuclear bomb the size of a backpack

In the wake of World War II, and throughout the Cold War, the United States and its NATO allies were severely out manned and outgunned compared to the Soviets and their allies. To balance the scales, the United States wielded the will, or at least the bluster, to threaten mass nuclear retribution for any militaristic slight, says Foreign Policy:

Read moreU.S. Special Forces Carried Miniature Nukes On Their Backs … For 25 Years

Al Qaeda Doesn’t Exist or How The US Created Al Qaeda (Documentary)

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The truth is:

“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaeda. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the TV watcher to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US.”
– Robin Cook, Former British Foreign Secretary


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President Obama will keep millions of pages of military and intelligence documents scheduled to be declassified secret

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WASHINGTON (CNN) — Promising “a new era of openness in our country,” President Obama  …

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency,” Obama said. Source: CNN

So much for transparency!

change-we-can-believe-in

WASHINGTON – President Obama will maintain a lid of secrecy on millions of pages of military and intelligence documents that were scheduled to be declassified by the end of the year, according to administration officials.

The missed deadline spells trouble for the White House’s promises to introduce an era of government openness, say advocates, who believe that releasing historical information enforces a key check on government behavior. They cite as an example the abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, including domestic spying and assassinations of foreign officials, that were publicly outlined in a set of agency documents known as the “family jewels.’’

The documents in question – all more than 25 years old – were scheduled to be declassified on Dec. 31 under an order originally signed by President Bill Clinton and amended by President George W. Bush.

But now Obama finds himself in the awkward position of extending the secrecy, despite his repeated pledges of greater transparency, because his administration has been unable to prod spy agencies into conformance.

Some of the agencies have thrown up roadblocks to disclosure, engaged in turf battles over how documents should be evaluated, and have reviewed only a fraction of the material to determine whether releasing them would jeopardize national security.

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Cold War tension rises as Putin talks of Black Sea confrontation

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Russia has criticised the US for using naval ships to deliver aid to Georgia

A new Cold War between Russia and the West grew steadily closer yesterday after the Kremlin gave a warning about “direct confrontation” between American and Russian warships in the Black Sea.

Dmitri Peskov, a spokesman for Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, declared that Russia was taking “measures of precaution” against American and Nato naval ships. “Let’s hope we do not see any direct confrontation in that,” he said.

Any attempt by countries in the West to isolate Russia would “definitely harm the economic interests of those states”, he said.

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Russia may arm Baltic fleet with nuclear warheads, says report

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New Russian threat comes in response to war in Caucasus, US-Poland deal for missile defense shield in Europe. According to Sunday Times, nuclear warheads could be supplied to submarines, cruisers and fighter bombers of Russia’s Baltic fleet based between Poland and Lithuania

Cold War warming up? Russia is considering arming its Baltic fleet with nuclear warheads for the first time since the cold war, the London-based Sunday Times has reported, quoting senior military sources.

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Titanic search was cover for secret Cold War subs mission

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Actors Leonardo DiCaprio (L) and Kate Winslet (R) in a scene from the movie
Actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in a scene from the movie Titanic

The man who located the wreck of the Titanic has revealed that the discovery was a cover story to camouflage the real mission of inspecting the wrecks of two Cold War nuclear submarines.

When Bob Ballard led a team that pinpointed the wreckage of the liner in 1985 he had already completed his main task of finding out what happened to USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.

Both of the United States Navy vessels sank during the 1960s, killing more than 200 men and giving rise to fears that at least one of them, Scorpion, had been sunk by the USSR.

Dr Ballard, an oceanographer, has admitted that he located and inspected the wrecks for the US Navy in top secret missions before he was allowed to search for the Titanic.

Only once he had used his new underwater robot craft to map the submarine wreck sites was he able to use it to crisscross the North Atlantic seabed to pinpoint the last resting place of the luxury liner. It meant he had only 12 days to find the Titanic.

“I couldn’t tell anybody,” he said. “There was a lot of pressure on me. It was a secret mission. I felt it was a fair exchange for getting a chance to look for the Titanic.

“We handed the data to the experts. They never told us what they concluded – our job was to collect the data. I can only talk about it now because it has been declassified.”

Dr Ballard said what he had seen during the inspection of the wrecks gave him the idea of finding a trail of debris that would lead to the main sections of the Titanic. Thresher, had imploded deep beneath the surface and had broken up into thousands of pieces and Scorpion was almost as completely destroyed. “It was as though it had been put through a shredding machine. There was a long debris trail.” Dr Ballard developed a robotic submarine craft in the early 1980s and approached the US Navy in 1982 for funding to search for the Titanic, which sank in 1912 with the loss of 1,500 lives after hitting an iceberg.

He was told that the military were not willing to spend a fortune on locating the liner, but they did want to know what had happened to their submarines.The military were anxious to know how the nuclear reactors had been affected by being submerged for so long.

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