Russia Offered Afghan Militants Bounties for Killing U.S. Soldiers: NYT

[Auburn85 432]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-offered-afghan-militants-bounties-for-killing-us-soldiers-nyt-reports

 

Quote

United States intelligence agents believe that Russia offered Afghan militants bounties to kill U.S. soldiers and other coalition troops during peace talks between the U.S. and the Taliban, The New York Times reports. The talks were part of an effort to wind down U.S. military presence in the Middle Eastern nation, but the covert effort by Russia appears aimed at undermining them. U.S. intelligence officers reportedly reached the startling conclusion months ago and have been debating a response since. President Donald Trump has been briefed on the matter, as has the White House National Security Council, but neither has made a direct response. Islamist militants and their associates killed 20 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan in 2019, and intelligence officers believe that the insurgents did collect bounties from Russia, but it’s unclear how many of those deaths are considered paid for by Russia.

 

[aubiefifty 16,695]

russia has never been our friend unless it somehow benefits them.

[aubiefifty 16,695]

where is the outrage for all of this? it is true. they said trump did not know but informed the uk? this is way worse than any apology obama made concerning the iraq war. now they are saying americans died because of this. i did not catch the whole segment on morning joe so i have no links. where are all the so called patriots that are so silent over this? i understand most of you are backing off on our idiot in chief but are you going to back off on our kids that pay the ultimate price as well as their families? now look back on my war heroes do not get caught or making fun of a gold star family that lost a son to save the lives of his men? shame on you people. shame! i look at that pic of trump supposedly hugging the american flag. that was not a hug it was a sex act.

[AFTiger 282]

Unverified, probably false.  Why would Russia pay bounties to the Taliban when they do it for free now? 

[Brad_ATX 13,654]

42 minutes ago, AFTiger said:

Unverified, probably false.  Why would Russia pay bounties to the Taliban when they do it for free now? 

The Taliban leadership were having peace talks with the U.S.  Doubtful they would have authorized an attack on U.S. soldiers during that period.

Also, Russia is not and has not been our friend since the end of WW2.  By having Taliban fighters shoot out soldiers, there's a greater chance peace talks break down and we keep spinning our wheels in Afghanistan: spending money, spreading resources, etc.  This takes our eye off of more concerning military opponents like China and Russia.

[savorytiger 182]

I'm not sure why @Auburn85 picked a purely left-wing source on this, but it was verified by the AP: https://apnews.com/02975c59e71e65327e2f582cd1a91f43

[AUDub 11,131]

40 minutes ago, savorytiger said:

I'm not sure why @Auburn85 picked a purely left-wing source on this, but it was verified by the AP: https://apnews.com/02975c59e71e65327e2f582cd1a91f43

85's sources run the gamut ideologically. 

He's truly the AUFamily political newsfeed lol.

[homersapien 11,352]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/29/america-first-president-keeps-putting-russia-first/

The ‘America First’ president keeps putting Russia first

Opinion by

Max Boot 

Columnist

June 29, 2020 at 1:03 p.m. EDT

At the heart of the Trump administration resides “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”: What is it with President Trump and Russia? Why does the “America First” president so often put Russia first?

That question has surfaced yet again after the New York Times first reported that a Russian military intelligence unit had paid bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The Post reported that those bounties had resulted in the deaths of Americans.

A normal president would have canceled his golf outing and made clear that there would be hell to pay if the reports are true. Not Trump. Instead, he lashed out at the news media, denying that the intelligence community had briefed him on its findings, as the Times and other publications had reported. Unfortunately, it’s hard to credit anything said by a president who has lied to or misled the public more than 19,000 times.

The U.S. government reportedly had this information since January, and the National Security Council even debated what to do about it. During that time, Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at least five times and issued a joint declaration celebrating the “Spirit of the Elbe” in honor of the meeting between U.S. and Soviet troops in Germany on April 25, 1945. Trump also invited Putin back to the Group of Seven and gushed that “we have this great friendship.”

As Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton recently said: “Putin thinks he can play him like a fiddle.” There is a long history of Trump’s dancing to Putin’s tune. Trump refused to accept that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and instead sought to pin the blame on Ukraine. “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” he simpered at the 2018 Helsinki summit.

The Trump administration did impose sanctions on Russia for various reasons, but, as Bolton notes, “almost all of them occasioned opposition, or at least extended grumbling and complaining, from Trump himself.”

Trump has shown deference to other dictators, including China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, but even by his standards, his record of obsequiousness to Putin stands out. Trump has never engaged in any tough-guy talk with the Russian strongman, as he has with Xi and Kim. Why? Bolton writes that he didn’t ask Trump what he thought of Putin, because he was “afraid of what I might hear.”

The only thing we can say with confidence is that Trump’s partiality toward Russia is likely spurred by self-interest, not national interest. As Bolton notes: “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.”

It is possible that “financial calculations” were also involved. Trump and his sons have bragged in the past about the money they made from Russians and were pursuing a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 campaign. But Trump has fought hard to keep his finances secret, so we still don’t know much about his financial dealings with Russia.

What we do know is that Trump might not be president were it not for Russia’s election interference — and Trump surely knows that, too, despite his angry denials. He insists that allegations of Russian collusion are a “hoax,” but the Trump campaign’s high command welcomed an offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton from a Russian emissary, and Trump himself publicly urged the Russians to hack her emails on the very day they attempted to do so.

Unredacted portions of the Mueller report make clear that Roger Stone was Trump’s emissary to WikiLeaks, the website used by Russian intelligence to disseminate stolen emails. Stone informed Trump in advance of WikiLeaks releases, and, instead of calling the FBI, Trump reportedly said, “Oh good, all right.” But special counsel Robert S. Mueller III could not get to the bottom of the story because Stone refused to cooperate. Trump praised Stone for not cooperating, and the Justice Department recommended an unusually lenient sentence for him on charges of lying under oath and witness tampering. A prosecutor told the House Judiciary Committee last week that this was because of Stone’s “relationship to the President.”

So here we are: We know that Trump is willing to sacrifice America’s national interests to Russia, but we don’t know why. That’s in part because Mueller kept his inquiry so narrowly focused. As Jeffrey Toobin writes in the New Yorker, the special counsel did not “examine the roots” of Trump’s “special affinity for Putin’s Russia.”

Does Trump think that if he calls out Putin for his misdeeds — including the alleged bounties on U.S. soldiers — Putin may be less eager to help him win reelection? Or that it might sour future Russia deals for the Trump Organization? Those are the most likely explanations I can come up with, but that’s only conjecture. All we can say for sure is that Trump is again putting America last.

 

[alexava 6,973]

Our intelligence agencies suck!  Unless they recommend bombing Iranians. 

[alexava 6,973]

Now they say this was early 2019!  I bet Bolton leaked it. 

[homersapien 11,352]

Trump shows us what ‘unfit’ means

 

Jennifer Rubin 

Columnist

June 30, 2020 at 9:30 a.m. EDT

President Trump’s record of failure — delaying his response to the coronavirus (and then undercutting health professionals’ advice, thereby allowing the pandemic to resurge); attempting to enlist foreign powers (certainly Ukraine and allegedly China) to further his own reelection; appointing a flock of utterly incompetent and ethically challenged advisers — is so damning that he will likely hold the distinction of being America’s worst president.

What has become apparent in recent months is that his character flaws are so profound that we could not have expected anything different and cannot expect a change for the better in his remaining time in office.

The latest Russia scandal illustrates the point. According to the New York Times, Trump did receive intelligence in his daily briefing about the bounty that Russia put on U.S. troops: “The intelligence was included months ago in Mr. Trump’s President’s Daily Brief document — a compilation of the government’s latest secrets and best insights about foreign policy and national security that is prepared for him to read. One of the officials said the item appeared in Mr. Trump’s brief in late February; the other cited Feb. 27, specifically.” (Trump and the White House have denied he was briefed on the matter.)

The Associated Press also reports that the White House knew in 2019 that “Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans, a full year earlier than has been previously reported” and that Trump was briefed once by former national security adviser John Bolton in March 2019 and again by his successor, Robert O’Brien (who denies doing so).

Incidents such as these do not just pop up. They are the result of an unfit president and an administration of political hacks. This president is so incurious, so self-absorbed and so resistant to facts and expertise that it was inevitable he would fail to protect Americans from a hostile power; he lacks the will or the ability to do so. This is what we mean by unfit: Trump’s yawning deficits (in attention, knowledge, honesty) render him unable to uphold his oath.

Similarly, the resurgence of the coronavirus pandemic, most acutely in red states that followed Trump’s lead, did not simply happen. As with the Russia scandal, the administration had plenty of warning of an imminent catastrophe; the president knew weeks before the pandemic was widely felt yet played down the emergency. Later, he failed to assume responsibility by refusing to fully activate the Defense Production Act, leading to shortages of critical materials. To this day, he refuses to wear a mask in public, inducing millions of his followers to do the same; preventable cases and deaths ensue. This is what happens when you elect someone with no capacity to process bad news, no respect for scientific expertise and no concern for other human beings.

In short, Trump has behaved in precisely the way his fiercest critics foresaw. They were not clairvoyant. Free from the compulsion of slavish loyalty and partisan hackery, they simply saw Trump for what he is and understood the ramifications of a president this hobbled. By contrast, Trumpers cared too little about character, fitness and simply decency.

The sycophants who continue to rationalize his conduct got practically nothing from the Faustian bargain. His Supreme Court justices did not overturn abortion precedent, undo protections for the “dreamers” or deny LGBTQ Americans freedom from discrimination. The tax cuts for the rich never delivered on promises of sustained prosperity (and surely did not pay for themselves). The price they (and we) paid was intolerable. We have suffered from a pandemic that has killed more than 124,000 Americans, an economy akin to the Great Depression, a Russian patsy masquerading as a friend of the troops, a self-dealer who corruptly promoted his own holdings as president and a racist entirely out of step with a country yearning for racial justice.

We dare not repeat the error of 2016. We know — because we know Trump — a second term would be equally if not more calamitous than the first. Character this twisted is destiny. Unfitness this severe is irreparable.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/30/trump-shows-us-what-unfit-means/

[aubiefifty 16,695]

On 6/29/2020 at 7:35 AM, AFTiger said:

Unverified, probably false.  Why would Russia pay bounties to the Taliban when they do it for free now? 

well since it has been verified by bolton and the white house i want to hear what you will pull out of your azz this time.. trump claims he was never briefed but we know that was wrong since he hires the best people. and why did he not act on it? they now claim on several news sites on the tele americans did die because of it. i want to hear your spin on this..............

[alexava 6,973]

51 minutes ago, aubiefifty said:

well since it has been verified by bolton and the white house i want to hear what you will pull out of your azz this time.. trump claims he was never briefed but we know that was wrong since he hires the best people. and why did he not act on it? they now claim on several news sites on the tele americans did die because of it. i want to hear your spin on this..............

He probably asked Putin. Putin denied it. Then trump saw no reason not to believe him. 

[homersapien 11,352]

......When the story about the Russian bounties broke on Friday, the White House insisted that Trump knew nothing about it, though they never denied that Russia may have done this. Yet within days, one report after another described how the information has been known — and sent his way — for some time.

The Associated Press reported that White House officials knew about the bounties in early 2019. CNN reported that the information was included in one of Trump’s “daily briefings on intelligence matters sometime in the spring.” The Post also reported that it was included in the president’s daily intelligence brief, or PDB.

But for now, anyway, the position of the White House is that the president had no idea about any of this.

“Neither the President nor the Vice President were briefed on the alleged Russia — Russian bounty intelligence,” said press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Monday. She claimed this was because the intelligence wasn’t “verified,” as though the president is only told about intelligence for which there is incontrovertible proof.

Asked whether the president had a message for Moscow in response, McEnany said, “A specific message for Moscow? No, because he has not been briefed on the matter.”

If true, this would mean that days after these reports had come out, Trump still had not been informed of what the intel community knows about the Russian bounties.

But one must understand the context, which is that Trump’s intelligence briefings are a kind of surreal comedy routine in which professionals try to figure out some way to inject vital information into the brain of a president determined not to hear it, no matter what it’s about.

Early in his presidency, it was reported that Trump is essentially incapable of reading anything much longer than a page or two, so briefers put in fun pictures and graphs to hold his attention (yet even now he still prefers to get information from conservative media).

Briefers also learned to repeat his name in “as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he’s mentioned,” as one source told Reuters. In addition — and most important when it comes to Russia — he grows angry if he’s told anything that contradicts what he believes or what he has said in public.

So the answer to the mystery of what Trump knew and when he knew it is one of the following:

• Intelligence officials, knowing that Trump would react negatively to information that cast the Kremlin in a bad light, decided not to tell him about the bounties.
• Trump was informed in his written PDB that Russia was offering these bounties, but didn’t read it.
• He read it, but promptly forgot it.
• He was told verbally, but forgot it.
• He was informed in the written PDB and/or verbally, but didn’t like what he heard so he decided to ignore it, and is now having aides lie about it.

While all of these are at least theoretically possible, the last option is the one that lines up most closely with the information we have as of now......

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/30/can-we-trust-trump-act-interests-united-states-ever/

 

[DKW 86 7,410]

BTW, these are coming from the Progressive blogs. They dont believe it either. 

The DNC has been screaming RUSSIANS!!! for almost four years. They aint gonna stop now. 

 

[DKW 86 7,410]

I am not saying it is false. I am saying LOUDLY, that everyone claiming this has lost all their credibility. 
The Progressive take?

Please listen to Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Code Pink, paraphrasing here: "Isnt it funny that just as we are about to leave Afghanistan, about to renegotiate the last nuclear arms treaty, that suddenly we have people trying to push us back in War Hawk mode? Sounds like fake news to me."

9:00 on the video. 

Remember when the Democratic Party was against war? No longer my friends. No more. Now its just a gotcha point we are after. The DNC used to stand for things. Now, they are just Republican Lite. When Code Pink is calling BS on this....well, even the Extreme Left thinks it stinks. 

 

[TexasTiger 12,800]

1 hour ago, DKW 86 said:

I am not saying it is false. I am saying LOUDLY, that everyone claiming this has lost all their credibility. 
The Progressive take?

Please listen to Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Code Pink, paraphrasing here: "Isnt it funny that just as we are about to leave Afghanistan, about to renegotiate the last nuclear arms treaty, that suddenly we have people trying to push us back in War Hawk mode? Sounds like fake news to me."

9:00 on the video. 

Remember when the Democratic Party was against war? No longer my friends. No more. Now its just a gotcha point we are after. The DNC used to stand for things. Now, they are just Republican Lite. When Code Pink is calling BS on this....well, even the Extreme Left thinks it stinks. 

 

Trump’s top defender weighs in.

[savorytiger 182]

 

1 hour ago, DKW 86 said:

BTW< these are coming for the Progressive blogs. They dont believe it either. 

The DNC has been screaming RUSSIANS!!! for almost four years. They aint gonna stop now. 

 

 

The AP is not a progressive blog.

[SaltyTiger 7,761]

4 hours ago, homersapien said:

......When the story about the Russian bounties broke on Friday, the White House insisted that Trump knew nothing about it, though they never denied that Russia may have done this. Yet within days, one report after another described how the information has been known — and sent his way — for some time.

The Associated Press reported that White House officials knew about the bounties in early 2019. CNN reported that the information was included in one of Trump’s “daily briefings on intelligence matters sometime in the spring.” The Post also reported that it was included in the president’s daily intelligence brief, or PDB.

But for now, anyway, the position of the White House is that the president had no idea about any of this.

“Neither the President nor the Vice President were briefed on the alleged Russia — Russian bounty intelligence,” said press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Monday. She claimed this was because the intelligence wasn’t “verified,” as though the president is only told about intelligence for which there is incontrovertible proof.

Asked whether the president had a message for Moscow in response, McEnany said, “A specific message for Moscow? No, because he has not been briefed on the matter.”

If true, this would mean that days after these reports had come out, Trump still had not been informed of what the intel community knows about the Russian bounties.

But one must understand the context, which is that Trump’s intelligence briefings are a kind of surreal comedy routine in which professionals try to figure out some way to inject vital information into the brain of a president determined not to hear it, no matter what it’s about.

Early in his presidency, it was reported that Trump is essentially incapable of reading anything much longer than a page or two, so briefers put in fun pictures and graphs to hold his attention (yet even now he still prefers to get information from conservative media).

Briefers also learned to repeat his name in “as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he’s mentioned,” as one source told Reuters. In addition — and most important when it comes to Russia — he grows angry if he’s told anything that contradicts what he believes or what he has said in public.

So the answer to the mystery of what Trump knew and when he knew it is one of the following:

• Intelligence officials, knowing that Trump would react negatively to information that cast the Kremlin in a bad light, decided not to tell him about the bounties.
• Trump was informed in his written PDB that Russia was offering these bounties, but didn’t read it.
• He read it, but promptly forgot it.
• He was told verbally, but forgot it.
• He was informed in the written PDB and/or verbally, but didn’t like what he heard so he decided to ignore it, and is now having aides lie about it.

While all of these are at least theoretically possible, the last option is the one that lines up most closely with the information we have as of now......

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/30/can-we-trust-trump-act-interests-united-states-ever/

 

Read this type of print and understand that you folks could care less about the actual story. People like you and whomever wrote this have accepted that a lot of people are damn stupid.

Still pondering door #5 Brother Homer

[homersapien 11,352]

12 hours ago, SaltyTiger said:

Read this type of print and understand that you folks could care less about the actual story. People like you and whomever wrote this have accepted that a lot of people are damn stupid.

Still pondering door #5 Brother Homer

WTF are you trying to say?  

Is there another option that wasn't covered above?

 

[DKW 86 7,410]

15 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

Trump’s top defender weighs in.

One of AUFamily's Bigggest Liars weighs in.

Quoted people from Progressive Politics and Media. Yea, I guess you think Progressives Support Trump? Get a life...

[DKW 86 7,410]

15 hours ago, savorytiger said:

The AP is not a progressive blog.

?

[homersapien 11,352]

Trump’s ugly new spin on Russia bounties actually incriminates him

 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

July 1, 2020

With President Trump, it’s often difficult to locate the point where his utter lack of self awareness blends into sheer shamelessness. This poses an urgent problem with the spin he is now offering amid revelations that U.S. intelligence indicated Russia may have paid bounties to Taliban-linked militias for the killing of U.S. troops.

Trump is now defending himself not just by claiming he wasn’t briefed on that intelligence, or just by contesting the significance of that intelligence. Instead, he’s declaring that the entire story simply doesn’t exist — that is, he’s suggesting no intelligence ever actually indicated anything like this.

Yet this defense is itself deeply self-incriminating. It only underscores what critics are saying — that at minimum, Trump should be taking this intelligence seriously and trying to get to the bottom of what it actually does indicate, even if the worst interpretation proves wrong.

 

Trump just tweeted:

The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party. The secret source probably does not even exist, just like the story itself. If the discredited @nytimes has a source, reveal it. Just another HOAX!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2020

Amusingly, moments later Trump reposted a tweet vowing to veto the Defense Authorization Bill if it renames military installations named after Confederate generals. This juxtaposed Trump’s defense of monuments to traitors alongside his blithe unconcern about a foreign power potentially paying for the killing of Americans.

That, too, is either profoundly un-self-aware or deeply shameless — take your pick. But on the Russia story in particular, the line between the two is not just blurry, but dangerously so.

There is a great deal we don’t know about the Russian bounties, and we should be exceptionally cautious. But one thing we can state right now is that the president of the United States should be taking a lot more of an interest in this and should be saying publicly that he is doing so.

Instead, Trump is denying that the story has any significance of any kind. In a second tweet, Trump noted he was “never briefed” on intelligence about the bounties, because “any info that they may have had” wasn’t corroborated. He again claimed the story is a “made up Fake News Media Hoax.”

Note the “may have had.” His only instinct is to cast doubt on the very existence of any such intelligence, not to further explore what it might indicate.

Yet the latest revelations from the New York Times tell us this:

American officials intercepted electronic data showing large financial transfers from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account, evidence that supported their conclusion that Russia covertly offered bounties for killing U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan, according to three officials familiar with the intelligence.

Crucially, the Times says this information both “bolstered the findings” gleaned from interrogations of detainees that had led officials to worry about the bounties, and that the info helped “reduce an earlier disagreement” among analysts over the reliability of their info.

That’s important, because any such increased confidence in the info could undermine the notion that Trump would not have been briefed by intelligence officials due to lack of corroboration.

A new level of denial

Reports have indicated that Trump actually was provided with a written briefing on this intelligence — which he probably didn’t read. The White House has cagily said Trump wasn’t directly briefed without saying whether he was given a written briefing, while insisting that of course he reads what’s presented to him.

But Trump is now taking this denial to a new level, suggesting any intelligence indicating this may not exist.

Yet the existence of such intelligence simply isn’t in doubt. Republican lawmakers who have been briefed on it confirmed its existence while saying it needs further review. A handful of Republicans have even said revelations of its existence actually make it more urgent to get to the bottom of what it really indicates.

Why doesn’t Trump agree with this? Why isn’t he saying publicly that he will not rest until he learns everything there is to know about these assessments? Making this more glaring, officials are investigating possible links between bounties and specific lethal attacks on U.S. troops.

“A real president would have said, ‘These reports are highly disturbing, and we’re doing everything we can to get to the bottom of them,'” Ned Price, a former National Security Council and CIA official, told me. “That is not what we’ve heard.”

Every interpretation looks bad

Even the most charitable interpretation here is incriminating. If you stipulate that Trump is merely demonstrating an instinct to protect himself politically — and is just lashing out at the “deep state” or whatever — then this instinct is itself preventing him from seeking a full accounting. Such a narcissistic reflex itself ensures that Trump won’t act for the good of the country.

The less charitable interpretation is worse. Fears are rising of another round of Russian interference in the 2020 elections — after the Trump campaign eagerly benefited from the last round while he largely pretended it never happened.

Trump, who is also pushing for the Group of Seven to readmit Russia, refuses to say outright that his administration will do everything it can to protect the integrity of our elections from outside interference that might help him. As Price pointed out to me, failure to take a hard public stand on the alleged bounties might further embolden Russia on other fronts, such as on electoral interference.

Given all this, you’d think that at a minimum, Trump would use this bounties story as an occasion to send the message that he does, in fact, have our country’s best interests at the top of his mind. But he simply feels no obligation of any kind to signal this.

“I can’t think of a better occasion to have stressed something like that,” Price said.

The full story of why Trump won’t put the national interest first has yet to be told. But Trump has once again made it absolutely clear that this is very much not where his true loyalties lie.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/01/trumps-ugly-new-spin-russia-bounties-actually-incriminates-him/

 

 

We probably won't know the full extent of Trump's Russian/Putin connections until after he's out of office - and particularly until we get the lowdown on his financial connections with them. 

[savorytiger 182]

2 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

?

https://apnews.com/425e43fa0ffdd6e126c5171653ec47d1

No idea why my original link is pointing at a different story now, but I found a new one. I'm just saying it's not just progressive media that's putting this out. 

[DKW 86 7,410]

7 minutes ago, savorytiger said:

https://apnews.com/425e43fa0ffdd6e126c5171653ec47d1

No idea why my original link is pointing at a different story now, but I found a new one. I'm just saying it's not just progressive media that's putting this out. 

Btw, Welcome to the FacePalm Club! I am sure you as an Independent thinker are about to get 1-2 facepalms today. Dont take it personal. Its just some folks saying that you arent following the party line....and...OMG! You are thinking for yourself.