Sanctions against Russia and [the indefatigable "suspected bounties" in Afghanistan pile-on]
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"The C.I.A. presented the Trump administration with an intelligence assessment that Russia had covertly offered to pay bounties to militant fighters to incentivize more killings of Americans in Afghanistan. But while the National Security Council at the Trump White House initially led an interagency effort to come up with response options, months passed and the White House did not authorize anything — not even the mildest option, delivering a diplomatic warning.
While the Biden administration has not released any new information on the suspected bounties, it did make public a report on Russian election interference. That report said that Mr. Putin had authorized extensive efforts to hurt Mr. Biden’s candidacy during the 2020 election, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump."
"None of this should be happening. The New York Times has admitted itself that it was wrong for uncritically parroting the unsubstantiated spook claims which led to the Iraq invasion, as has The Washington Post. There is no reason to believe Taliban fighters would require any bounty to attack an illegitimate occupying force. The Russian government has denied these allegations. The Taliban has denied these allegations. The Trump administration has denied that the president or the vice president had any knowledge of the spook report in question, denouncing the central allegation that liberals who are promoting this story have been fixated on.
Outlets like CNN are running the story with the headline “Russia offered bounties to Afghan militants to kill US troops“, deceitfully presenting this as a verified fact. Such dishonest headlines are joined by UK outlets like The Guardian who informs headline-skimmers that “Russia offered bounty to kill UK soldiers“, and the Murdoch-owned Sky News which went with “Russia paid Taliban fighters to attack British troops in Afghanistan” after “confirming” the story with anonymous British spooks.
Western propagandists are turning this completely empty story into the mainstream consensus, not with facts, not with evidence, and certainly not with journalism, but with sheer brute force of narrative control. And now you’ve got Joe Biden once again attacking Trump for being insufficiently warlike, this time because “he failed to sanction or impose any kind of consequences on Russia for this egregious violation of international law”.
"WASHINGTON — Two months after top Pentagon officials vowed to get to the bottom of whether the Russian government bribed the Taliban to kill American service members, the commander of troops in the region says a detailed review of all available intelligence has not been able to corroborate the existence of such a program.
"It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me," Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told NBC News. McKenzie oversees U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The U.S. continues to hunt for new information on the matter, he said.
"We continue to look for that evidence," the general said. "I just haven't seen it yet. But … it's not a closed issue."
McKenzie's comments, reflecting a consensus view among military leaders, underscores the lack of certainty around a narrative that has been accepted as fact by Democrats and other Trump critics, including presidential nominee Joe Biden, who has cited Russian bounties in attacks on President Donald Trump.
U.S. intelligence agencies have for years documented Russian financial and military support to the Taliban, but a Russian program to incentivize the killing of American service members would represent a significant escalation.
Echoing comments in July by Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, McKenzie said that if he could establish that the Russians were offering payments to kill Americans, he would push to forcefully respond. But the intelligence is far from conclusive, he said.
"I found what they presented to me very concerning, very worrisome. I just couldn't see the final connection, so I sent my guys back and said, look, keep digging. So we have continued to dig and look because this involves potential threats to U.S. forces, it's open," he said, adding, "I just haven't seen anything that closes that gap yet."
A U.S. military official familiar with the intelligence added that after a review of the intelligence around each attack against Americans going back several years, none have been tied to any Russian incentive payments.
The suggestion of a Russian bounty program began, another source directly familiar with the matter said, with a raid by CIA paramilitary officers that captured Taliban documents describing Russian payments.
A Taliban detainee told the CIA such a program existed, the source said, although the term "bounty" was never used. Later, the CIA was able to document financial transfers between Russian military intelligence and the Taliban, and establish there had been travel by key Russian officers to Afghanistan and by relevant Taliban figures to Russia.
That intelligence was reviewed by CIA Director Gina Haspel and placed in Trump's daily intelligence briefing book earlier this year, officials have said. The source described the intelligence as compelling, but meriting further investigation. Nonetheless, current and former U.S. officials have said, many CIA officers and analysts came to believe a bounty program existed. They concluded that the Russians viewed it as a proportional response to the U.S. arming of Ukrainian units fighting Russian forces in Crimea, the source said."
"WASHINGTON—The National Security Agency strongly dissented from other intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia paid bounties for the killing of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, according to people familiar with the matter.
The disclosure of the dissent by the NSA, which specializes in electronic eavesdropping, comes as the White House has played down the revelations, saying that the information wasn’t verified and that intelligence officials didn’t agree on it.
Because of that, President Trump was never personally briefed on the threat, the White House said, although a key lawmaker said the information apparently was included in written intelligence materials prepared for Mr. Trump.
The people familiar with the dissent by the NSA either declined or were unable to say why the agency differed from others—including the Central Intelligence Agency—about the strength of the intelligence showing operatives with Russia’s GRU intelligence agency paid bounties to the insurgent Taliban movement to kill Americans.
In the nuanced practice of intelligence analysis, which involves piecing together sometimes incomplete and ambiguous bits of data, such disagreements aren’t unusual, and sometimes stem from institutional differences, experts and former officials have said.
The NSA focuses on electronic eavesdropping, mining intercepted phone conversations, texts and emails, and other electronic signals. The CIA’s role is human intelligence, which on battlefields such as Afghanistan often means interrogation of enemy detainees.
The NSA in the past has been more conservative than other U.S. intelligence agencies in its analysis of high-profile intelligence matters involving Russia. A January 2017 intelligence community assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, ordered by then-outgoing President Obama, stated that while the CIA and Federal Bureau of Investigation had “high confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin aspired to help Mr. Trump’s electoral chances, the NSA reported only “moderate confidence” of that finding.
The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report in April that concluded the analytic difference between NSA and the other intelligence agencies in that case was “reasonable, transparent, and openly debated among the agencies and analysts, with analysts, managers, and agency heads on both sides of the confidence level reasonably justifying their positions.”
The NSA declined to comment in an email to The Wall Street Journal. The CIA has declined to comment on the issue, aside from a statement late Monday by CIA Director Gina Haspel, in which she decried media leaks and indicated analysis of the threat to U.S. troops is ongoing.
Pentagon officials late Monday said the military was still evaluating intelligence that Russian GRU operatives were engaged in malign activity against the U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. “To date, DOD has no corroborating evidence to validate the recent allegations found in open-source reports,” the statement said.
The issue has roiled Washington since Friday, with both Republican and Democratic lawmakers demanding briefings on the issue and information on how President Trump and his national security team have handled it. Republicans lawmakers were briefed by the White House on Monday, and a group of Democrats were briefed Tuesday.
While White House officials said Mr. Trump never received an in-person briefing on the reported threat to U.S. troops, information about the intelligence assessment apparently was included in his written daily intelligence briefing, a Republican lawmaker said.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas) after a White House briefing Monday told NBC News that he thought the intelligence was included in the President’s Daily Brief, often known as the PDB, a collection of highly sensitive intelligence presented to the president each day. “I believe it may have been” in the PDB, he told NBC News Monday.
Mr. McCaul said that intelligence presented to the president generally “has to be credible, actionable intel” and officials were still in the process of vetting the intelligence and “looking at ideas” about how to proceed.
In a separate interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. McCaul said one intelligence agency was “strongly dissenting” with another, but he wouldn’t name the agencies at odds or the issues in question.
Following a White House briefing Tuesday, Rep. Adam Smith (D., Wash.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said White House officials outlined evidence of Russian wrongdoing.
“They did not dispute that there is some intelligence that supports the conclusion,” Mr. Smith said. But they insisted there is other intelligence “that disputes the conclusion,” he said.
“I think there is certainly enough there to pursue it further,” Mr. Smith added. “There is certainly enough there” to factor this into the relationship with Putin and Russia, he said."
