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Will US start a war with Russia?

In the spirit of transparency, President Dmitry Medvedev has reiterated Moscow’s need for written guarantees that the US missile defense shield in Europe would not be targeted at Russian territory.
Medvedev was meeting with US President Obama on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in Honolulu, Hawaii.
On his way back from the summit, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke more about the situation. "It was said: if we are heard – and President Medvedev made a clear statement to Obama – we want to have some clear guarantees on paper.”
The Foreign Minister mentioned “problems with the Congress” as the reason for Washington’s foot-dragging on what should be a mere bureaucratic formality.
“If there are some problems with the Congress, as we are told – no one has ever tried to give us the guarantees," he said.
Although the Democrats have their man in the Oval Office, the Republicans continue to enjoy an unprecedented amount of influence in the Washington decision-making process.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, who began his Washington career back in 1975 as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, almost singlehandedly defeated Obama’s efforts to shutter Guantanamo Bay detention facility, a task that the president had promised to complete once in office. Four years on, the facility branded ‘the GULAG of our times’ by Amnesty International is still open for business.
Now, with the Democrats and Republicans hitting the trenches for next year’s presidential elections, Obama will be wary of giving the opposition any extra ammunition in what promises to be a political mud-fest.
Meanwhile, Medvedev, noting the mixed signals he is getting from Washington, announced that he would make a decisive statement on the issue soon.
"It is unclear to us what our partners are offering, and I think we will in the near future determine what we should do with the European missile defensive system," Medvedev said at a press conference after the APEC Summit. "I believe that in the near future I will have to give a complete assessment on how Russia is to react to the developing situation now, as well as after 2012.”
Although Medvedev lauded the achievements forged with Obama, he acknowledged that this particular area is proving thorny.
"In regard to the European missile defense system, the situation is much more difficult," he said.
Russia has expressed its staunch opposition to the deployment of a US missile defense system near its borders, claiming it would present a security threat. NATO and the United States argue that the shield would help defend Eastern Europe against a hypothetical missile attack from rogue countries, usually identified as Iran. The cost of this unproven security against such a threat, which many analysts say is dubious at best, could turn out to be nothing less than Russia’s friendship.
President Medvedev has warned of an imminent arms race unless the US and NATO find a way to cooperate with Moscow in the project.
“After 2020, if we do not come to terms, a real arms race will begin," the Russian leader warned in May at the G8 Summit in Deauville, France.
Most frustrating to Russian diplomats is that Moscow and NATO agreed to cooperate on the European missile shield during the NATO-Russia Council summit in Lisbon in November 2010. Later, however, NATO began to argue there should be two independent systems that exchange information. Russia favors a joint system with full-scale interoperability.
Meanwhile, the unfurling shield continues to encroach on Russia’s ‘near abroad’.
Bucharest announced in May that it had reached an agreement with Washington to deploy US missile interceptors at a defunct Soviet airbase on its territory. At this point, Moscow issued an urgent request for legal assurances from the United States that the system was not designed to target Russia's strategic nuclear forces.
Although such a simple gesture would do much to put Moscow at ease, Washington has so far declined to provide any written guarantees.
http://rt.com/politics/medvedev-obama-missile-defense-apec-269/In the spirit of transparency, President Dmitry Medvedev has reiterated Moscow’s... more

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US government wants to legally lie - Shocking Information for Every American

The article that you have inquired about does not exist. That’s the message that the US government could be sending out to citizens seeking documents currently available through the Freedom of Information Act.

Under a new proposed plan, the government would be able to defer FOIA requests for certain documents not just by refusing them, but by making claims that the files don’t even exist. A report this week from ProPublica reveals that certain documents pertaining to law-enforcement matters or issues of national security could be just shrugged off with officials being able to lie about the existence of documents that they decide to deem as imaginary.

According to the actual wording of the proposal that the Department of Justice recently offered, agencies would be able to respond to requests “as if the excluded records did not exist." Politicians, journalists, researchers and any concerned citizen hoping to dig deep into certain matters would thus not just hit a road block, but be posed with a detour altogether. With the government denying the existence of potentially crucial materials, the public could only be expected to take their word for it and go on assuming they were simply on a path to something that never was.

“The problem is, if you’re a FOIA requester and the agency says they don’t have the records, you have no reason to doubt that,” Anne Weismann, the chief counsel of CREW, tells the Daily Caller. She adds that she believes that the government has a responsibility at times to protect sensitive information from certain audience, but this proposal “is an overbroad and improper response.”

In a joint response from the ACLU, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and OpenTheGovernment.org, they say that this revision to FOIA rules “will dramatically undermine government integrity by allowing a law designed to provide public access to government information to be twisted to permit federal law enforcement agencies to actively lie to the American people.”

Jennifer LaFleur of ProPublica writes in her report that some advocacy groups have already offered a different revision to the FOIA rules, insisting that rather than the government deny the existence of files, simply offer a statement saying that they might not be available to interested parties, something she suggests along the lines of “You have requested ‘…records which, if they exist, would not be subject to the disclosure requirements of FOIA…” In an instance such as that, the applicant interested in obtaining files could move to sue the government if they’d like to challenge their decision. From there, she cites a previous ruling from US District Judge Cormac Carney in that the "Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court."
http://rt.com/usa/news/us-government-exist-foia-737/The article that you have inquired about does not exist. That’s the message that... more

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It's not a warzone - US Marine Corps. Sgt. Shamar Thomas weighs in on Occupy movement

OWS protesters have said since the beginning that their movement is a leaderless one. However, a video of a disgruntled US vet sharing some words with the NYPD during last week’s Times Square stand-off has made him an unintentional spokesperson.
Sgt. Shamar Thomas became an Internet celebrity nearly a month into the Occupy Wall Street movement after a video of a fiery diatribe unleashed on Big Apple police officers went viral on the Internet. In the past week, the passionate speech he delivered before New York’s boys in blue has garnered around 2 million hits. Why does his voice resonate so strongly with the rest of America?
“I’m just one person,” Sgt. Thomas tells RT. “I’m just part of the 99 percent. I just want to inspire people and veterans to go out and protect these people.”
When armed cops surrounded Occupy Wall Street protesters last weekend in New York, demonstrators were shocked that their non-violent movement warranted such aggressive action from the NYPD — an ongoing motif of their strife that largely became evident when a video surfaced weeks earlier of an officer using pepper-spray on peaceful, female protesters.
When former enlisted Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas saw the scene himself in Times Square, he was quick to voice his objecting to how the cops were acting, with their weapons ready and protesters perturbed.
“It’s not a war zone,” Thomas is heard yelling to the NYPD. “These are unarmed people.”
Thomas repeatedly tells the cops, “These are US citizens. Leave these people alone.”
Sgt. Thomas says that he took an oath to protect and serve his country as a member of the US military, and adds that it is not an oath that he has taken lightly.
“What made me angry was to see the police hurting unarmed protesters that I haven’t seen become violent with the police or dangerous to anybody else that was in the populace,” he says. Much like the oath he took to serve and protect as a member of the US military, Sgt. Thomas says that the officers of the NYPD have a job to look after their fellow Americans domestically. When he saw them taking on peaceful protesters with weapons, however, it made him question what is good and just about America.
“This country has an ongoing war that I don’t necessarily agree with,” says Thomas, “but to hurt the citizens that you swear to protect is kind of a contradiction to the oath that you take as a police officer to be courteous and professional.”
Thomson adds that while serving for his country in Iraq, his force was once pelted with rocks by Iraqis. “After the rock throwing was done,” he says, “we didn’t go into the crowd and start beating and arresting people. To come back to my country and see the police doing this to the people . . . I’m not going to stand for it.”
As Sgt. Thomas made a stand last week, he said other veterans should follow suit if they believe in continuing their protection over the American people.
“As part of the 99 percent, I think it’s my duty as a leader, as somebody who chose to serve and protect my country, to continue my job,” he says.
And for those that are just civilians, Sgt. Thomas adds that they should also be willing to voice themselves before it is too late.
“This is our opportunity our opinions and people need to take this opportunity and go support their local occupation because we can't leave it into the hands of senators and congressman…to one day wake up and fix everything. We have to use our voices,” he says.
Though the Occupy movement will go on to be leaderless as participants rally together as once, Thomas may not be their figurehead but he has become a respected member who is helping lend a voice, and a big one, to a growing movement.

http://rt.com/usa/news/sgt-thomas-movement-occupy-465/OWS protesters have said since the beginning that their movement is a leaderless one.... more

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Fox freaks after Ron Paul wins debate

If you’ve noticed a lack of Ron Paul in the mainstream media’s coverage of the 2012 presidential race, it might not be an accident. After he placed first in a Fox News poll, the outlet has removed the results from their website without explanation.
Fox had launched an online poll to gauge readers’ opinions on last night’s Republican show-down and asked their audience, “Which GOP presidential candidate do you think won the Fox News/Google debate?” At one point Paul placed in first, with 30 percent of the votes, but a reader of Infowars.com has pointed out that the poll has disappeared from the website, or has been shuffled to another page far from the front of Fox’s political coverage.
Logging onto the poll now produces an error in which the user is told “No content item selected.”
A screen shot of the poll produced by Infowars shows that Paul led with 24,8945 votes, with Mitt Romney trailing in second place with 22,656 votes, of 27 percent of the total. Rick Perry placed third with 15 percent of the votes, followed by Herman Cain with 9 percent.
Speaking from the stage during last night’s debate, Paul reminded the audience that he has been placing quite well in most surveys as of late. The mainstream media, however, continues to ignore him, despite pleasant polling.
When quizzed during last night’s debate from Orlando, Florida on whom he might consider as a running mate, Paul deterred the question and noted that he wouldn’t bother selecting anyone until he made it in the “top two.” In the meantime, Paul said, he was running in third in most national polls.
The mainstream media continues to overlook Paul, however, favoring Rick Perry and Mitt Romney as the frontrunners, and unexplainably offering more airtime to Michele Bachmann. Speaking to CNN yesterday, former presidential candidate and long-time activist Ralph Nader said he thought Paul was perhaps most appealing of the current GOP candidates.
“He wants to get out of these wars overseas, he wants to bring the soldiers back, he wants to cut the bloated military budget, he wants to change some of the anti-civil liberty provisions in the Patriot Act, he hates corporate welfare an all these bailouts of Wall Street crooks,” said Nader. “He ought to get more attention, instead of ten times more attention being given to Michele Bachmann.”
A USA Today/Gallup poll released on Tuesday put Paul as the number three candidate in the GOP race, receiving nearly three times the favor of Bachmann. In New Hampshire, where the first primary of the 2012 race will take place this winter, Paul came in second place, between Mitt Romney in first and Jon Huntsman in second.
http://rt.com/usa/news/fox-paul-debate-poll-257/If you’ve noticed a lack of Ron Paul in the mainstream media’s coverage of... more

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