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.
o.s.: please let us know which option you believe is correct.
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.
o.s.: please let us know which option you believe is correct.
I want to know what his National Security Advisor(s) & any of his cabinet members told him about this, & his response.
MSNBC's Pentagon Reporter reports that Russia has been providing arms & money to the Taliban for years, going back into the Obama admin.
What did Obama & Biden do about it ? She also conceded that there were differing opinions among the IC about the validity of the bounty claim.
jhu72 wrote: ↑Tue Jun 30, 2020 2:32 pm… no, but he is really good at calling out presidents who salute with a cup of coffee in their hands. The fall of the republic.
You lie. Just like the tan suit, I made no criticism of that. The only thing like that which I did comment on was his repeated mispronunciation of corpsman. I criticized his military advisors for not pointing it out to him after the first time.
CU88 wrote: ↑Tue Jun 30, 2020 8:54 am
David Sanger @SangerNYT
I’ve covered national security over four presidencies. This is the first in which a written intelligence product sent to the President didn’t constitute a “briefing.”
Quote Tweet
Jim Sciutto@jimsciutto
Several intelligence veterans have advised me to beware administration officials parsing the word “briefed”, as in whether they mean orally briefed or contained in briefing documents.
7:05 AM · Jun 30, 2020
It’s not a briefing because Old Sycophant said so.
It's not a briefing if it's buried in a PDB & is not specifically discussed.
" written intelligence products" contain all sorts of possible, but unverified, conjecture, as CYA in case it is subsequently confirmed by events.
Rep Kinsinger, after his briefing, says it wasn't verbally briefed. It was buried in a PDB as a dissenting opinion.
The Trump admin has claimed it was not confirmed sufficiently to be actionable intel.
Last edited by old salt on Tue Jun 30, 2020 3:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"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, which was among the 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.
Though the United States has accused Russia of providing general support to the Taliban before, analysts concluded from other intelligence that the transfers were most likely part of a bounty program that detainees described during interrogations. Investigators also identified by name numerous Afghans in a network linked to the suspected Russian operation, the officials said — including, two of them added, a man believed to have served as an intermediary for distributing some of the funds and who is now thought to be in Russia.
The intercepts bolstered the findings gleaned from the interrogations, helping reduce an earlier disagreement among intelligence analysts and agencies over the reliability of the detainees. The disclosures further undercut White House officials’ claim that the intelligence was too uncertain to brief President Trump. In fact, the information was provided to him in his daily written brief in late February, two officials have said.
Afghan officials this week described a sequence of events that dovetails with the account of the intelligence. They said that several businessmen who transfer money through the informal “hawala” system were arrested in Afghanistan over the past six months and are suspected of being part of a ring of middlemen who operated between the Russian intelligence agency, known as the G.R.U., and Taliban-linked militants. The businessmen were arrested in what the officials described as sweeping raids in the north of Afghanistan, as well as in Kabul.
A half-million dollars was seized from the home of one of the men, added a provincial official. The New York Times had previously reported that the recovery of an unusually large amount of cash in a raid was an early piece in the puzzle that investigators put together.
The three American officials who described and confirmed details about the basis for the intelligence assessment spoke on condition of anonymity amid swelling turmoil over the Trump administration’s failure to authorize any response to Russia’s suspected proxy targeting of American troops and downplaying of the issue after it came to light four days ago.
White House and National Security Council officials declined to comment, as did the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe. They pointed to statements late Monday from Mr. Ratcliffe; the national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien; and the Pentagon’s top spokesman, Jonathan Hoffman. All of them said that recent news reports about Afghanistan remained unsubstantiated.
On Monday, the administration invited several House Republicans to the White House to discuss the intelligence. The briefing was mostly carried out by three Trump administration officials: Mr. Ratcliffe, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and Mr. O’Brien. Until recently, both Mr. Meadows and Mr. Ratcliffe were Republican congressmen known for being outspoken supporters of Mr. Trump.
That briefing focused on intelligence information that supported the conclusion that Russia was running a covert bounty operation and other information that did not support it, according to two people familiar with the meeting. For example, the briefing focused in part on the interrogated detainees’ accounts and the earlier analysts’ disagreement over it.
Both people said the intent of the briefing seemed to be to make the point that the intelligence on the suspected Russian bounty plot was not clear cut. For example, one of the people said, the White House also cited some interrogations by Afghan intelligence officials of other detainees, downplaying their credibility by describing them as low-level.
The administration officials did not mention anything in the House Republican briefing about intercepted data tracking financial transfers, both of the people familiar with it said.
Democrats and Senate Republicans were also separately briefed at the White House on Tuesday morning. Democrats emerged saying that the issue was clearly not, as Mr. Trump has suggested, a “hoax.” They demanded to hear directly from intelligence officials, rather than from Mr. Trump’s political appointees, but conceded they had not secured a commitment for such a briefing.
Based on the intelligence they saw, the lawmakers said they were deeply troubled by Mr. Trump’s insistence he did not know about the plot and his subsequent obfuscation when it became public.
“I find it inexplicable in light of these very public allegations that the president hasn’t come before the country and assured the American people that he will get to the bottom of whether Russia is putting bounties on American troops and that he will do everything in his power to make sure that we protect American troops,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
He added: “I do not understand for a moment why the president is not saying this to the American people right now and is relying on ‘I don’t know,’ ‘I haven’t heard,’ ‘I haven’t been briefed.’ That is just not excusable.”
Mr. Ratcliffe was scheduled to go to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet privately with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, an official familiar with the planning said.
The Times reported last week that intelligence officials believed that a unit of the G.R.U. had offered and paid bounties for killing American troops and other coalition forces and that the White House had not authorized a response after the National Security Council convened an interagency meeting about the problem in late March.
Investigators are said to be focused on at least two deadly attacks on American soldiers in Afghanistan. One is an April 2019 bombing outside Bagram Air Base that killed three Marines: Staff Sgt. Christopher Slutman, 43, of Newark, Del.; Cpl. Robert A. Hendriks, 25, of Locust Valley, N.Y.; and Sgt. Benjamin S. Hines, 31, of York, Pa.
On Monday, Felicia Arculeo, the mother of Corporal Hendriks, told CNBC that she was upset to learn from news reports of the suspicions that her son’s death arose from a Russian bounty operation. She said she wanted an investigation, adding that “the parties who are responsible should be held accountable, if that’s even possible.”
Officials did not say which other attack is under scrutiny.
In claiming that the information was not provided to him, Mr. Trump has also dismissed the intelligence assessment as “so-called” and claimed he was told that it was “not credible.” The White House subsequently issued statements in the names of several subordinates denying that he had been briefed.
The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, reiterated that claim on Monday and said that the information had not been elevated to Mr. Trump because there was a dissenting view about it within the intelligence community.
But she and other administration officials demurred when pressed to say whether their denials encompassed the president’s daily written briefing, a compendium of the most significant intelligence and analysis that the intelligence community writes for presidents to read. Mr. Trump is known to often neglect reading his written briefings.
Intelligence about the suspected Russian plot was included in Mr. Trump’s written President’s Daily Brief in late February, according to two officials, contrasting Mr. Trump’s claim on Sunday that he was never “briefed or told” about the matter.
The information was also considered solid enough to be distributed to the broader intelligence community in a May 4 article in the C.I.A.’s World Intelligence Review, commonly called The Wire, according to several officials.
A spokesman for the Taliban has also denied that it accepted Russian-paid bounties to carry out attacks on Americans and other coalition soldiers, saying the group needed no such encouragement for its operations. But one American official said the focus has been on criminals closely associated with the Taliban.
In a raid in Kunduz City in the north about six months ago, 13 people were arrested in a joint operation by American forces and the Afghan intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, according to Safiullah Amiry, the deputy provincial council chief there. Two of the main targets of the raid had already fled — one to Tajikistan and one to Russia, Mr. Amiry said — but it was in the Kabul home of one of them where security forces found a half-million dollars. He said the Afghan intelligence agency had told him the raids were related to Russian money being dispersed to militants.
Two former Afghan officials said Monday that members of local criminal networks have carried out attacks for the Taliban in the past — not because they share the Taliban’s ideology or goals, but in exchange for money.
In Parwan Province, where Bagram Airfield is, the Taliban are known to have hired local criminals as freelancers, said Gen. Zaman Mamozai, the former police chief of the province. He said the Taliban’s commanders are based in two districts of the province, Seyagird and Shinwari, and that from there they coordinate a network that commissions criminals to carry out attacks.
And Haseeba Efat, a former member of Parwan’s provincial council, also said the Taliban have hired freelancers in Bagram district — including one of his own distant relatives in one case.
“They agree with these criminals that they won’t have monthly salary, but they will get paid for the work they do when the Taliban need them,” Mr. Efat said.
Twenty American service members were killed in combat-related operations in Afghanistan last year, the most since 2014."
^^^ NYT is 2 years late to the story. In 2018, the WP reported about Kremlin support to the Taliban.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wor ... er-broker/ U.S. officials doubt that Moscow is trying to help secure victory for the militants, the successors of the mujahideen guerrillas who battled the Soviet troops in the 1980s. Instead, the officials said, Russia is trying to strengthen its own position without provoking the United States.
Russia’s return comes as the Trump administration struggles to reverse a prolonged Taliban resurgence and push the militants toward a deal.
Russia’s determination to shape Afghanistan’s future anew first became visible in 2014, when a senior diplomat approached the United States with an offer.
Even as Russia was planning a new diplomatic drive with the United States and other countries in 2014, U.S. officials began to see increased intelligence reporting of what former officials described as Russia’s “weird flirtation” with elements of the Taliban
The Taliban wants the US out. The Russians don't need to incentivize them to attack US forces.
Last edited by old salt on Tue Jun 30, 2020 4:07 pm, edited 3 times in total.
CU88 wrote: ↑Tue Jun 30, 2020 8:54 am
David Sanger @SangerNYT
I’ve covered national security over four presidencies. This is the first in which a written intelligence product sent to the President didn’t constitute a “briefing.”
Quote Tweet
Jim Sciutto@jimsciutto
Several intelligence veterans have advised me to beware administration officials parsing the word “briefed”, as in whether they mean orally briefed or contained in briefing documents.
7:05 AM · Jun 30, 2020
It’s not a briefing because Old Sycophant said so.
It's not a briefing if it's buried in a PDB & is not specifically discussed.
" written intelligence products" contain all sorts of possible, but unverified, conjecture, as CYA in case it is subsequently confirmed by events.
Rep Kinsinger, after his briefing, says it wasn't verbally briefed. It was buried in a PDB as a dissenting opinion.
The Trump admin has claimed it was not confirmed sufficiently to be actionable intel.
"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, which was among the 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.
Though the United States has accused Russia of providing general support to the Taliban before, analysts concluded from other intelligence that the transfers were most likely part of a bounty program that detainees described during interrogations. Investigators also identified by name numerous Afghans in a network linked to the suspected Russian operation, the officials said — including, two of them added, a man believed to have served as an intermediary for distributing some of the funds and who is now thought to be in Russia.
The intercepts bolstered the findings gleaned from the interrogations, helping reduce an earlier disagreement among intelligence analysts and agencies over the reliability of the detainees. The disclosures further undercut White House officials’ claim that the intelligence was too uncertain to brief President Trump. In fact, the information was provided to him in his daily written brief in late February, two officials have said.
Afghan officials this week described a sequence of events that dovetails with the account of the intelligence. They said that several businessmen who transfer money through the informal “hawala” system were arrested in Afghanistan over the past six months and are suspected of being part of a ring of middlemen who operated between the Russian intelligence agency, known as the G.R.U., and Taliban-linked militants. The businessmen were arrested in what the officials described as sweeping raids in the north of Afghanistan, as well as in Kabul.
A half-million dollars was seized from the home of one of the men, added a provincial official. The New York Times had previously reported that the recovery of an unusually large amount of cash in a raid was an early piece in the puzzle that investigators put together.
The three American officials who described and confirmed details about the basis for the intelligence assessment spoke on condition of anonymity amid swelling turmoil over the Trump administration’s failure to authorize any response to Russia’s suspected proxy targeting of American troops and downplaying of the issue after it came to light four days ago.
White House and National Security Council officials declined to comment, as did the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe. They pointed to statements late Monday from Mr. Ratcliffe; the national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien; and the Pentagon’s top spokesman, Jonathan Hoffman. All of them said that recent news reports about Afghanistan remained unsubstantiated.
On Monday, the administration invited several House Republicans to the White House to discuss the intelligence. The briefing was mostly carried out by three Trump administration officials: Mr. Ratcliffe, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and Mr. O’Brien. Until recently, both Mr. Meadows and Mr. Ratcliffe were Republican congressmen known for being outspoken supporters of Mr. Trump.
That briefing focused on intelligence information that supported the conclusion that Russia was running a covert bounty operation and other information that did not support it, according to two people familiar with the meeting. For example, the briefing focused in part on the interrogated detainees’ accounts and the earlier analysts’ disagreement over it.
Both people said the intent of the briefing seemed to be to make the point that the intelligence on the suspected Russian bounty plot was not clear cut. For example, one of the people said, the White House also cited some interrogations by Afghan intelligence officials of other detainees, downplaying their credibility by describing them as low-level.
The administration officials did not mention anything in the House Republican briefing about intercepted data tracking financial transfers, both of the people familiar with it said.
Democrats and Senate Republicans were also separately briefed at the White House on Tuesday morning. Democrats emerged saying that the issue was clearly not, as Mr. Trump has suggested, a “hoax.” They demanded to hear directly from intelligence officials, rather than from Mr. Trump’s political appointees, but conceded they had not secured a commitment for such a briefing.
Based on the intelligence they saw, the lawmakers said they were deeply troubled by Mr. Trump’s insistence he did not know about the plot and his subsequent obfuscation when it became public.
“I find it inexplicable in light of these very public allegations that the president hasn’t come before the country and assured the American people that he will get to the bottom of whether Russia is putting bounties on American troops and that he will do everything in his power to make sure that we protect American troops,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
He added: “I do not understand for a moment why the president is not saying this to the American people right now and is relying on ‘I don’t know,’ ‘I haven’t heard,’ ‘I haven’t been briefed.’ That is just not excusable.”
Mr. Ratcliffe was scheduled to go to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet privately with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, an official familiar with the planning said.
The Times reported last week that intelligence officials believed that a unit of the G.R.U. had offered and paid bounties for killing American troops and other coalition forces and that the White House had not authorized a response after the National Security Council convened an interagency meeting about the problem in late March.
Investigators are said to be focused on at least two deadly attacks on American soldiers in Afghanistan. One is an April 2019 bombing outside Bagram Air Base that killed three Marines: Staff Sgt. Christopher Slutman, 43, of Newark, Del.; Cpl. Robert A. Hendriks, 25, of Locust Valley, N.Y.; and Sgt. Benjamin S. Hines, 31, of York, Pa.
On Monday, Felicia Arculeo, the mother of Corporal Hendriks, told CNBC that she was upset to learn from news reports of the suspicions that her son’s death arose from a Russian bounty operation. She said she wanted an investigation, adding that “the parties who are responsible should be held accountable, if that’s even possible.”
Officials did not say which other attack is under scrutiny.
In claiming that the information was not provided to him, Mr. Trump has also dismissed the intelligence assessment as “so-called” and claimed he was told that it was “not credible.” The White House subsequently issued statements in the names of several subordinates denying that he had been briefed.
The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, reiterated that claim on Monday and said that the information had not been elevated to Mr. Trump because there was a dissenting view about it within the intelligence community.
But she and other administration officials demurred when pressed to say whether their denials encompassed the president’s daily written briefing, a compendium of the most significant intelligence and analysis that the intelligence community writes for presidents to read. Mr. Trump is known to often neglect reading his written briefings.
Intelligence about the suspected Russian plot was included in Mr. Trump’s written President’s Daily Brief in late February, according to two officials, contrasting Mr. Trump’s claim on Sunday that he was never “briefed or told” about the matter.
The information was also considered solid enough to be distributed to the broader intelligence community in a May 4 article in the C.I.A.’s World Intelligence Review, commonly called The Wire, according to several officials.
A spokesman for the Taliban has also denied that it accepted Russian-paid bounties to carry out attacks on Americans and other coalition soldiers, saying the group needed no such encouragement for its operations. But one American official said the focus has been on criminals closely associated with the Taliban.
In a raid in Kunduz City in the north about six months ago, 13 people were arrested in a joint operation by American forces and the Afghan intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, according to Safiullah Amiry, the deputy provincial council chief there. Two of the main targets of the raid had already fled — one to Tajikistan and one to Russia, Mr. Amiry said — but it was in the Kabul home of one of them where security forces found a half-million dollars. He said the Afghan intelligence agency had told him the raids were related to Russian money being dispersed to militants.
Two former Afghan officials said Monday that members of local criminal networks have carried out attacks for the Taliban in the past — not because they share the Taliban’s ideology or goals, but in exchange for money.
In Parwan Province, where Bagram Airfield is, the Taliban are known to have hired local criminals as freelancers, said Gen. Zaman Mamozai, the former police chief of the province. He said the Taliban’s commanders are based in two districts of the province, Seyagird and Shinwari, and that from there they coordinate a network that commissions criminals to carry out attacks.
And Haseeba Efat, a former member of Parwan’s provincial council, also said the Taliban have hired freelancers in Bagram district — including one of his own distant relatives in one case.
“They agree with these criminals that they won’t have monthly salary, but they will get paid for the work they do when the Taliban need them,” Mr. Efat said.
Twenty American service members were killed in combat-related operations in Afghanistan last year, the most since 2014."
And your TBD heads exploded when Trump took out Soleimani and other terrorist leaders with precision air strikes.
Now you make up an unverified story and bleat that Trump did nothing.
Its tiresome listening to you folks day after day after day.
Just posted the article, and, checking my head, nothing seems to have exploded. The article is informational.
But the evidence is piling up that the President ignored the intelligence that suggested the GRU was funding a program of rewarding Taliban fighters for bringing in scalps of coalition forces. Your President doesn't read, doesn't assimilate and synthesize information, doesn't ask questions. He is completely incurious. His religiosity is widely understood to be phony. He thinks "being friendly" with the leaders of hostile powers is the same as the nation having good foreign relations with them. What is there to admire? He watches TV, and tweets. And I'm chortling at you.
Seems like some people will blame/attack the press, PDB, Obama, Binden, veterans, other citizens...
Everyone but o d and putin.
little r before country
by cradleandshoot » Fri Aug 13, 2021 8:57 am Mr moderator, deactivate my account. You have heck this forum up to making it nothing more than a joke. I hope you are happy. This is cradle and shoot signing out.
With the building debate about a force drawdown in Germany & updating our force disposition in Europe, & rotational deployments there,
this DW article will be useful, particularly the embedded interactive map.
by cradleandshoot » Fri Aug 13, 2021 8:57 am Mr moderator, deactivate my account. You have heck this forum up to making it nothing more than a joke. I hope you are happy. This is cradle and shoot signing out.
old salt wrote: ↑Tue Jun 30, 2020 3:25 pm
You lie. Just like the tan suit, I made no criticism of that. The only thing like that which I did comment on was his repeated mispronunciation of corpsman. I criticized his military advisors for not pointing it out to him after the first time.
That what I remember OS saying, fwiw. You and I both lamented Obama's crew's inability to get the communications and wordings correct on anything military. A fixable problem that wasn't fixed.....
