NATO General Worried About Russian Military Build-Up In Syria: "We see some very sophisticated air defenses going into these airfields. We see some very sophisticated air-to-air aircraft going into these airfields," Breedlove told an audience at the German Marshall Fund in Washington. "I have not seen (the Islamic State) flying any airplanes that require sophisticated air-to-air capabilities."
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Agence France-Presse 7:30 p.m. EDT September 28, 2015
NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe US Gen. Philip Breedlove speaks during a Sept. 4 press conference at the military airport near the town of Slatina, Kosovo.(Photo: Armend Nimani/AFP)
WASHINGTON — NATO Gen. Philip Breedlove expressed concern Monday about the strength of Russia's military build-up in northwestern Syria and the apparent creation of a defensive "bubble" in the Mediterranean.
The supreme allied commander in Europe for the 28-member military alliance said Russia had sent advanced weaponry beyond what is needed to fight the Islamic State group — meaning the hardware is to protect Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
"We see some very sophisticated air defenses going into these airfields. We see some very sophisticated air-to-air aircraft going into these airfields," Breedlove told an audience at the German Marshall Fund in Washington.
"I have not seen (the Islamic State) flying any airplanes that require sophisticated air-to-air capabilities."
The Pentagon says Russia has sent at least 500 troops, along with fighter jets, artillery units, tanks and other military hardware to an airbase in the Latakia region on Syria's Mediterranean coast.
Breedlove suggested the weaponry included SA15 and SA22 surface-to-air missile defense systems, used to take down enemy planes.
"I have not seen ISIL flying any airplanes that require SA15s or SA22s," he said, using an alternative acronym for the IS group.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Barack Obama sparred over the crisis in Syria in dueling UN speeches on Monday, each accusing the other of fueling the carnage.
The two leaders were due to meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly later.
Breedlove said Russia was trying to protect Assad's regime "against those that are putting pressure on" it.
Using military jargon, he warned of Russia forming an "A2AD" (Anti-Access Area-Denial) exclusion zone.
"It's one of the things we are beginning to watch (them) develop in the northeast Mediterranean as we see these very capable air defense capabilities beginning to show up in Syria," Breedlove said.
"We are a little worried about another A2AD bubble being created in the eastern Mediterranean."
He noted Russia already had created such a zone in the Black Sea, thanks to missile batteries sent to Crimea after its annexation by Russian forces.
They are also using the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad to create a bubble over the Baltic, he said.
Breedlove's comments come as the West frets over Russia's intentions in Syria and in eastern Ukraine, where it is supporting pro-Moscow rebels in an ongoing conflict.
"Russia very much wants to be seen as an equal on the world stage, a great power on the world stage," he said.
Moscow "wants to maintain warm water ports and airfield capabilities in the eastern Mediterranean and they saw that possibly being challenged on the ground by those opposing the Assad regime."
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WASHINGTON — NATO Gen. Philip Breedlove expressed concern Monday about the strength of Russia's military build-up in northwestern Syria and the apparent creation of a defensive "bubble" in the Mediterranean.
The top US intel official is skeptical a new cyber agreement between the US and China will affect Chinese cyber attacks
WASHINGTON—Ten Puerto Rico police officers have been indicted for their alleged participation in a criminal organization, run out of the police department, that used their affiliation with law enforcement to make money through robbery, extortion, manipulating court records and selling illegal narcotics, announced U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodríguez-Vélez of the District of Puerto Rico.
“The criminal action today dismantles a network of officers who, we allege, used their badges and their guns not to uphold the law, but to break it,” said U.S. Attorney Rodríguez-Vélez. “The indictment portrays a classic criminal shakedown; but the people wielding the guns and stealing the drugs here weren’t mob goodfellas or mafia soldiers – these were police officers violating their oaths to enforce the law, making a mockery of the police’s sacred responsibility to protect the public.”
“Corruption is at the root of all evil,” said Special Agent in Charge Carlos Cases of the FBI’s San Juan Division. “These police officers violated the trust of the people of Puerto Rico and not only dishonored the police department, but also their fellow, honest, and hardworking officers. The FBI, along with the United States Attorney’s Office, will continue to attack corruption at all levels.”
The indictment, returned on Sept. 24, 2015, by a federal grand jury in the District of Puerto Rico, includes 11 charges against the following police officers: Shylene López-García aka “Plinia;” Ángel Hernández-Nieves, aka “Doble;” Xavier Jiménez-Martínez, aka “Negro;” Alvin Montes-Cintrón, aka “Vinillo;” Ramón Muñiz-Robledo, aka “Marmota;” Guillermo Santos-Castro, aka “Caco Biftec;” Luis Flores-Ortiz, aka “Piquito;” José Neris-Serrano; Manuel Grego-López; and David Centeno-Faría, aka “David Bisbal”.
The defendants are charged with conspiring to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Other charges against certain defendants include extortion under color of official right, narcotics trafficking, civil rights violations and false statements to federal agents.
According to the indictment, the officers charged with RICO conspiracy were members of a criminal organization who sought to enrich themselves through a pattern of illegal conduct. The officers worked together to conduct traffic stops and enter homes or buildings used by persons suspected of being engaged in criminal activity to steal money, property and narcotics. The officers planted evidence to make false arrests, extorted narcotics and firearms from individuals in exchange for their release. The members of the enterprise gave false testimony, manipulated court records and failed to appear in court when required so that cases would be dismissed. The officers also sold and distributed wholesale quantities of narcotics.
For example, in January 2012, defendants Hernández-Nieves, Muñiz-Robledo and Grego-López, in their capacity as police officers, released a federal fugitive from custody in exchange for firearms.
In another example, the indictment alleges that in February 2013, defendants López-García and Montes-Cintrón, in their capacity as police officers, stole at least 500 grams of cocaine during the course of a police intervention, which Jiménez-Martínez sold afterward in furtherance of the goal of the enterprise.
The indictment charges that the defendants frequently shared the proceeds they illegally obtained and that they used their power, authority and official positions as police officers to promote and protect their illegal activity. Among other things, the indictment charges that they used the Police of Puerto of Rico’s (POPR) firearms, badges, patrol cars, tools, uniforms and other equipment to commit the crimes and concealed their illegal activity with fraudulently obtained court documents and falsified POPR paperwork to make it appear that they were engaged in legitimate police work.
The case is being investigated by the FBI’s San Juan Division. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Mariana Bauzá-Almonte and Teresa Zapata-Valladares of the District of Puerto Rico.
The charges contained in the indictment are merely accusations. The defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
Citizens of Puerto Rico with allegations of law enforcement corruption are encouraged to contact the FBI’s San Juan Division at (787) 754-6000.
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— Washington, D.C.
Originally published on May 2, 2015.
During the Cold War, Moscow’s Ministry of Culture was a master of censorship. The Kremlin’s cultural bulwark screened non-Russian films, suppressed literature and shaped the lives of Soviet artists.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency also dabbled in the dark arts of cultural influence. Except it preferred the carrot to the stick.
Words matter. A society’s books and movies impact the world. Books, in particular were often internationally influential during the Cold War. Both the ministry and the agency understood this.
The CIA funded the production and distribution of individual literary projects. It made sure Russian-language copies of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago flooded into the Soviet Union. Further, the agency directed more comprehensive operations.
Eric Bennett, a professor of English at Providence College and author of the forthcoming Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle and American Creative Writing During the Cold War, wrote that the CIA’s efforts produced lasting and potentially damaging effects.
According to Bennett, the CIA and other conservative organizations actually infiltrated the United States’ leading writing programs and literary journals. The goal was to establish an American literary tradition that would “venerate and fortify the particular, the individual, the situated, the embedded, the irreducible.”
That literary voice would be an alternative to the Soviet Union’s socialist realism — and its selfless heroes sacrificing themselves for good of the revolution.
Soon after Pres. Harry Truman founded the CIA with the National Security Act of 1947, the agency began focusing on the arts.
One of its first literary projects involved George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The book had been already been published, but the agency decided it was ready for the big screen. They just needed someone to write the screenplay — and to write it the way the CIA wanted.
In 1950, CIA agent Carleton Alsop — who was working undercover at Paramount Studios — approached George Orwell’s widow to secure the rights for a film adaptation of Animal Farm.
The agency was a big fan of the book’s anti-communist message. But they weren’t so crazy about the ending.
In Orwell’s version, when the pigs overthrow their human oppressors, they form an alliance with the humans instead of ushering in an egalitarian utopia. Pigs and humans sit down at the dinner table in farmhouse, toasting each other as the rest of the farm animals watch from outside.
In the book, the ending is a critique of communism and capitalism, suggesting that the two in many ways are one and the same. But in the film, the CIA changed the ending to leave out the human capitalists and portray the farm animals attacking only their communist pig oppressors.
There is one brief moment in the movie when Benjamin the donkey hallucinates and sees Napoleon the pig as having a human face. Other than that, “when the barnyard animals attack the new ruling class,” Michael Rogin noted in The Nation, “capitalist exploiters are as invisible on the screen as was the CIA behind the camera.”
Animal Farm opened in theaters in 1954, did well at the box office and received critical praise. Co-directors John Halas and Joy Batchelor were unaware of the CIA’s influence on screenplay’s adaptation until the 1980s.
Above — Cossacks attack a demonstration during Doctor Zhivago. MGM capture. At top — a screenshot from the CIA’s Animal Farm
Another of the CIA’s early forays into literature involved the production of thousands of copies of a Russian translation of Doctor Zhivago. The 1957 novel centers on protagonist Yuri Zhivago’s love for his wife and a mistress during and after the Russian revolution.
Pasternak was widely revered as a poet within the Soviet Union, but he had difficulty finding a domestic publisher for Zhivago due to the complexity of Yuri’s emotions regarding the revolution and life in Russia.
The CIA loved the book. A declassified CIA dispatch from December of 1957 heralded “the appearance of [Doctor Zhivago] as more important than any other literature which has yet come out of the Soviet Bloc and is deeply concerned that its exploitation in the West be handled with care.”
The memo encouraged the publication of Zhivago in “a maximum number of foreign editions, for maximum free world discussion and acclaim and consideration for such honor as the Nobel Prize.”
The dispatch suggested that U.S.-funded Radio Liberty should avoid broadcasting the novel in Russian until after its publication and instead present positive reviews of the book.
The CIA found a translator and publisher, and began its operation in June 1958. “The goal was to have copies of the book printed in Europe in time to distribute them to Soviet visitors to the Brussels International World Fair in September, and also to give copies to sailors on ships bound for the Soviet Union,” the New York Review of Books reported in a 2014 article.
The agency distributed more than 1,000 copies of the translation at the fair, and Pasternak received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958.
The distribution of Zhivago was part of a larger campaign to smuggle subversive literature into the Soviet Union.
According to the Times, the CIA smuggled up to 10 million books and magazines into the Soviet Union under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization funded by the CIA to maintain and widen the gap between non-communist intellectuals and their communist counterparts in Europe.
Books by Orwell, James Joyce, Vladamir Nabokov and Ernest Hemingway were among the CIA’s favorites, according to a BBC report.
While the “Zhivago Affair” was only a small part of the CIA and CCF’s operations, Zhivago still holds a special place in the agency’s heart.
As Slate recently noted, the CIA posted a tweet in Cyrillic on Jan. 15, 2015. The tweet translates as, “I wrote the novel in order for it to be published and read, and that remains my only desire.” That’s a quote from Pasternak about Zhivago.
Two subsequent tweets on the CIA account boasted that the “CIA’s book program kept a critical mass of intellectuals in the Soviet Bloc informed about the values & culture of the free world.” The second stated that “Books & periodicals were smuggled in by travelers & mailed in under the cover of various organizations.”
Both tweets bore a Zhivago hashtag.
The CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia in 1979. AP photo
While the CIA introduced literature into the Soviet Union, it sought to shape American literature at the same time. As Bennett pointed out in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the CIA used the Farfield Foundation and the Asia Foundation to funnel money to the Iowa Writers Workshop, the Iowa International Writing Program and writing teacher Paul Engle.
Engle directed the writers workshop from 1941 until 1965, and founded the International Writing Program in 1967. He served as editor of the O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies, one of the most distinguished annuals in American literature, from 1954 to 1959.
Further, Engle used funds he received from CIA fronts, the Rockefeller Foundation and other conservative donors to promote the Iowa programs and attract students and faculty. He was a “do-it-yourself Cold Warrior,” Bennett wrote.
He promoted writers whose work conveyed anti-communist themes. He courted Henry Luce — the publisher of Time and Life, and Gardner Cowles Jr. — the publisher of Look, to help him promote the workshop. Both publishers were staunch anti-communists.
“Engle staged spectacles in Iowa City for audiences far beyond Iowa City,” Bennett added. “He read memorial sonnets for the Iowa war dead at a dedication ceremony for the new student union.”
“Life and Time and Look transformed these events into impressive press clippings, and the clippings, via Engle’s tireless hands, arrived in the mailboxes of possible donors.”
During Engle’s directorship and afterwards, the Iowa Writers Workshop became one of the most important literary institutions in America.
The founders and directors of numerous other graduate writing programs came from there, as did countless literary luminaries. Raymond Carver, Marilynne Robinson, Denis Johnson, Frank Conroy and Stuart Dybek are a few that Bennett cited.
While Engle served as editor of O. Henry Prize Stories, he stacked the anthology with Iowa alumni.
The CIA also funded and influenced several literary journals, including The Kenyon Review and The Partisan Review, according to Bennett and Frances Stoner Saunders, author of The Cultural Cold War — The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.
Robie Macauley, a CIA agent who received his MFA from Iowa, served as editor of The Kenyon Review from 1959 until 1966. He then became fiction editor at Playboy.
But the CIA and CCF’s biggest literary coup was The Paris Review.
According to a 2012 Salon article by Joel Whitney, George Plimpton, then editor of The Paris Review, wrote a letter in 1958 to his Paris editor concerning the possibility of the magazine publishing a special issue on the “Zhivago Affair.” In the letter, Plimpton suggests seeking funds to promote the issue from the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
The Paris Review had ongoing ties with the CIA. After all, Peter Matthiessen helped found the magazine while serving as an undercover CIA agent in Paris in 1953.
Whitney explained that the ties started out “modestly” with ad exchanges and reprints of Paris Review interviews in Congress’ official magazines, but later grew into “much more robust” links. These included a “joint emploi [sic]” in which the CCF and The Paris Review would “team up to share an editor’s living expenses in Paris and also to share interviews and other editorial content.”
With the CFF’s links to the CIA and Matthiessen’s relationship exposed, Paris Review could no longer deny its role in the cultural Cold War. “All of which means that at the dawn of the CIA’s era of coups and nefarious plots, America’s most celebrated apolitical literary magazine served, in part, as a covert international weapon of soft power,” Whitney wrote.
In all, the CIA shaped American literature by influencing the Iowa programs and their successors, including the nation’s leading literary magazines and mainstream publications.
According to Bennett, the effects linger on in today’s writing programs and literary journals, often without the contributors realizing it.
Bennett is not alone in his critique. MFA vs NYC, a collection of essays edited by Chad Harbach, explored the tensions between the MFA institution and the New York City literary establishment.
In an essay reprinted by Slate, Harbach explained that one of the dilemmas MFA programs face today is pervasive sense that they churn out cookie cutter “program fiction.”
To Bennett and others, the CIA’s incursion into literary matters stifled creativity in American writing, Harbach wrote. “Raymond Carver, trained by writers steeped in anti-Communist formulations, probably didn’t realize that his short stories were doing ideological combat with a dead Soviet dictator.”
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Annual report shows violent crimes and property crimes decreased in 2014.
Puerto Rico Officials to Testify on Debt Crisis Before Senate Panel
New York Times - 18 hours ago
Puerto Rican officials will appear before a skeptical United States Senate panel on Tuesday to explain why the island may need federal assistance by the end of the year and how lawmakers preoccupied with the federal debt might help without setting an ...
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