{"id":200418,"date":"2021-04-15T18:25:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-15T23:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/04\/15\/gee-now-theres-a-surprise\/"},"modified":"2021-04-15T18:25:00","modified_gmt":"2021-04-15T23:25:00","slug":"gee-now-theres-a-surprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/04\/15\/gee-now-theres-a-surprise\/","title":{"rendered":"Gee, Now There’s a Surprise"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>It turns out that the evidence that Russia put bounties on American Troops was decidedly sketchy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The technical term for this is, “low to moderate confidence.”  The layman’s term for this is, “Likely bullsh%$.”<\/p>\n

Color me not surprised. This allegation has been made against the Russians, the Chinese<\/a>, the Iranians<\/a>, and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.<\/p>\n

It’s bullsh%$.  It’s always been bullsh%$.<\/p>\n

When you invade someone’s country, the occupied citizenry will try to kill you for free:<\/p>\n

It was a blockbuster story<\/a> about Russia\u2019s return to the imperial \u201cGreat Game\u201d in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had spread money around the longtime central Asian battlefield for militants to kill remaining U.S. forces. It sparked a massive outcry from Democrats and their #resistance amplifiers about the treasonous Russian puppet in the White House whose admiration for Vladimir Putin had endangered American troops.<\/p>\n

But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had \u201clow to moderate\u201d confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven\u2014and possibly untrue.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have noted our conclusion of the review that we conducted on the bounties issue and we have conveyed through diplomatic, intelligence, and military channels strong, direct messages on this issue, but we are not specifically tying the actions we are taking today to that matter,\u201d a senior administration official told reporters in reference to the bounty claims.<\/p>\n

According to the officials on Thursday\u2019s call, the reporting about the alleged \u201cbounties\u201d came from \u201cdetainee reporting\u201d\u2013raising the specter that someone told their U.S.-aligned Afghan jailers what they thought was necessary to get out of a cage. Specifically, the official cited \u201cinformation and evidence of connections to criminal agents in Afghanistan and elements of the Russian government\u201d as sources for the intelligence community\u2019s assessment.
<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Given the rather dubious history regarding intelligence reports from tortured prisoners, I think that it’s safe to call bullshit, particularly since any halfway competent intelligence agency would be using cut-outs if they were making payments.<\/p>\n

Also, there never was a justification for the Russians to do this.<\/p>\n

Also, with 2,312 deaths in Afghanistan over the past 20 years, if the Russians wanted to kill Americans, they would have done a better job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It turns out that the evidence that Russia put bounties on American Troops was decidedly sketchy. The technical term for this is, “low to moderate confidence.”  The layman’s term for this is, “Likely bullsh%$.” Color me not surprised. This allegation has been made against the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1153,974,1102,1131,1098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-hack-journalism","category-intelligence","category-propaganda","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200418"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}