On Friday, The New York Times reported that Russia offered Taliban-linked militants bounties for killing US troops in Afghanistan last year. The Times story was based on information they received from anonymous intelligence officials who were “briefed on the matter.” The report also claimed President Trump was briefed on the findings, a claim that was quickly rejected by the White House.
“While the White House does not routinely comment on alleged intelligence or internal deliberations, the CIA Director, National Security Advisor, and the Chief of Staff can all confirm that neither the President nor the Vice President were briefed on the alleged Russian bounty intelligence,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement on Saturday. President Trump also denied receiving a briefing on alleged Russian bounties in a tweet on Sunday.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe also rejected the Times report. “I have confirmed that neither the President nor the Vice President were ever briefed on any intelligence alleged by the New York Times in its reporting yesterday,” Ratcliffe said in a statement on Saturday.
Russia also denounced the Times story on Saturday and called the accusations “baseless and anonymous.” The Russian Embassy said on Twitter that the report has led to “direct threats to the life of employees of the Russian Embassies in Washington DC and London.”
For their part, the Taliban also rejected the claims. “The nineteen-year jihad of the Islamic Emirate is not indebted to the beneficence of any intelligence organ or foreign country,” the Taliban said in a statement. The group also reiterated their commitment to the peace deal signed with the US earlier this year.
Although fighting between the Kabul government and the Taliban is still raging, recent reports indicate the Trump administrations is ahead of schedule on troop drawdowns agreed to in the deal, and plan on reducing the number of troops on the ground to 4,500, which would be the lowest number since 2001.
Despite the widespread denial of the Times reporting, President Trump’s political rivals jumped on the story. Joe Biden slammed Trump on Saturday for not taking action after allegedly receiving a briefing on the intelligence. “I’m quite frankly outraged by the report,” Biden said. The former vice president promised that if he is elected in November “Putin will be confronted and we’ll impose serious costs on Russia.”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) chimed in on the news and accused President Trump of wanting to “ignore” any allegations against Moscow. The speaker said “all roads lead to Putin” when it comes to Trump. Pelosi said she had never been briefed on the intelligence herself, but seems to believe the claims. “Russia has never gotten over the humiliation they suffered in Afghanistan, and now they are taking it out on us, our troops,” Pelosi said.
On Sunday, the Times doubled down on the dubiously sourced report, and published another story that claims US intelligence officers and special forces in Afghanistan “alerted their superiors as early as January to a suspected Russian plot to pay bounties to the Taliban to kill American troops.” This story again cites anonymous officials “briefed on the matter.” Missing from the Times second bounty story is any comment from CIA, DNI, or Pentagon officials, who all declined to comment on the issue. Both stories say the intelligence was gathered during interrogations of captured “militants and criminals” in Afghanistan.
… Seems President Trump’s Afghan drawdown plans have ignited some serious MIC panic and desperation at the NYT….
Not the way I read it. Keeping Russia an “enemy” is good for business, after all, without Ghina and Russia, they couldn’t justify the “Space Force”. Even if the story is bs, the paranoid buy into it.
… Huh?
Russia will always be the MIC’s enemy with or without Afghanistan sucking the war machine dry and making it difficult to pay for new strategic programs like the so-called ‘Space Force’.
We are agreeing here. Yes the MIC always view Russia as enemy, so the marketing boys at Langley have to reinforce ” why “on a regular basis.
Ok so let’s assume Russia did this….
All it shows is how once again Russian politicians show how a measured response should be handled. Unlike incompetent US politician, when murderous terrorists go attacking civilians the Russians intelligently issue letters of mark and reprisal against the terrorists. The US response to terrorists: simply start dropping bombs on water treatment plants while instituting a blockade to starve any foriegn citizen that may have shared a geographical location with the terrorists unwillingly at some point…..
No question that the Russians are simply less Evil…..
“Russia” did it, is so simple. Is Putin “Russia”? No doubt some russian mobs are involved in opium within Afghanistan. Are they “Russia” ?
I think a year or so ago, US forces dismembered a couple hundred russian mercenaries in Syria. That company may want payback..are they Russia?
Ok Dave you have convinced me to be a bit less lazy with grammar.
For the sake of being with the times: I blame the ‘Russians’ for my shortcomings…
Hmm still too lazy to figure out how to get rid of the blue underline here….
I read an article on Yahoo about this. I made a comment about how no one should believe the “war party stenographers” that we call the media(I plagiarized Justin) and used the run up to the Iraq war as an example. The replies I got from my comment were very depressing. I was called a Putin lover, comrade and Ivan to name a few. Not one person agreed with me with an upvote. I can come here on a daily basis and get excited that there are people that are truly anti-war but the fact of the matter is that this is just a tiny echo chamber and the majority of Americans are fuc*ing idiot war mongering morons.
I quit posting comments on Yahoo for similar reasons. I wonder if israel had a bounty of those 34 US sailors killed on the USS Liberty back in 1967? Or was that fake news? At least israel paid millions in compensation to the crew for their “error”.
I had too. I never learn my lesson.
Gotta show the flag.
That’s really sad, wars. I’ve gotten the same type of responses on Yahoo.com for some of my comments in the past.
Yes, we are a militant nation no doubt. Seems odd so many automatically latched on to this story. 1) every army has bounties on enemies at war. In the US system, it’s called, a promotion. Grant promotes, McClellan is cashiered.
2) Putin has no motive to do such a thing. Now, a mercenary company, reliant on violence and obfuscation does. More mayhem, more contracts.
3) trumpsters
need to knock off the “deep state” nonsense. This is swift boating plain and simple, normally the right embraces this sort of thing if it targets dems.
4) reading most MSM blogs is always depressing, and makes me look for an exit from representative democracy
I know how you feel. I have been blackballed or banned from posting on certain websites because people can’t handle hearing the truth.
Typically shameless propaganda eagerly swallowed the masses, the creepy Corporacrats and senile old Biden via his ventriloquist. not dissimilar to other acts of Deep State interference. like the Deir Ezzor bombing and the Skripal scam.
The extraordinary thing to me is: how is it that a hundred years after Bernays laid out how propaganda can be done, forty years after Chomsky and Herman showed how manufacturing consent is practically done in the US, and twenty years after their lies led to Iraq and all that has followed, outfits like the Times, the Post, CNN, and the rest have ANY credibility at all?
In reality of course they do not. The public knows that they lie. The extraordinary thing seems to be that it does not matter; the public believes the lies despite knowing they are lies! Late empire period at its best.
Bernays, Goebbels, Gingrich, Rove, maybe Bannon. I like to call this chapter in human history..”The failure of literacy”.
NYTimes – all the lies that are fit to print.
This ‘story’ is very interesting and obviously untrue. One factor that seems to be ignored is the ISI/Pakistani one. The Taliban is a Pakistani military and political asset in Afghanistan. Tireless Pakistani efforts got the Taliban and the US to the negotiating table to get to an Afghan settlement, which Russia is on board as well.
For this story to be true, the Russians would have to get Pakistani approval to even talk to the Taliban, much less collude with them to kill coalition troops. In this hypothetical, the Pakistanis would say ‘NO’, because it would jeopardize the final Afghanistan settlement and because they would never allow Russians to open a channel of influence with their Taliban asset.
Let’s say that either the Russians went ahead and colluded anyway with the Taliban, thereby disobeying the Pakistanis. This would mean now that the Pakistanis have to respond to show both the Taliban and the Russians that they are the political masters of the Taliban. The Pakistanis could do this by eliminating the militants who colluded with the Russians. On the other hand, if the Pakistanis approved of this Russo-Taliban collusion, then they would only do so by extracting a major price from the Russians which would be acceptable enough to risk throwing the final Afghanistan settlement going to the dustbin.
The Russians too would have their own strategic goals. Are any of those achieved by paying Taliban to kill coalition troops? I say NO. The only motive for the Russians would be revenge, and the Russians don’t think that way. Revenge can be sweet cherry on top of strategic goals, but again, those goals have to be defined and they haven’t been.
The Russians would also have to assess the risk when it comes to retaliation from the CIA/UK intelligence. Are the strategic goals that will be achieved with this collusion worth the cost of retaliation? But again, these goals would have to be defined. For example, Pakistan continued to support the Taliban throughout the Afghan war, despite denials. This sponsorship of the Taliban by the Pakistanis, led to numerous counter terrorist attacks on Pakistani soil, done by the TTP (Pakistani Taliban, different from Afghan Taliban). The TTP was sponsored by both Afghan and Indian intelligence who are opposed to the Pakistan sponsored Afghan Taliban. Additionally, Pakistan had to bear the brunt of US drone attacks on militants in Pakistan. All of these costs were acceptable to Pakistan because they came with accomplishing its strategic goals: keep the Taliban in Afghanistan in a strong position to eventually negotiate with the Americans to leave. But what are Russia’s goals with this supposed collusion? Those are not defined in any news reports.
… Dave DeCamp accidentally touched on the core anti-messaging of the story in his title, “Taliban, Moscow, White House [blah blah blah] Afghanistan Bounties”
All tied together are the great villains of Trump’s White House, Moscow, and the Taliban.
Meanwhile time-on-target the NYT is rebutting Trump with the misleading headline Trump was informed back in February by the President’s Daily Brief.
They then helpfully explain he never reads the thing. Meanwhile, the intel community was still investigating the claim but obviously unable to verify and being blamed for not orally informing Trump.
“Trump Got Written Briefing in February on Possible Russian Bounties, Officials Say” – Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, Nicholas Fandos and Adam Goldman, New York Times, June 29, 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/us/politics/russian-bounty-trump.html
This is a really desperate DTS campaign; they’re even attacking the intel community attached to Trump.
From the Caitlin Johnstone article.
This Russia-Afghanistan Story Is Western Propaganda At Its Most Vile
It really is funny how the most influential news outlets in the western world will uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, and then turn around and tell you without a hint of self-awareness that Russia and China are bad because they have state media.
Yet we had other media hacks howling “how are we going to respond”
Which sets Catlin aside. She isn’t one of those.
And to think for a moment I was excited by the chance to vote for not-Trump.