Sunday, July 12, 2020

BountyGate


Gareth Porter @ The Gray Zone
The New York Times dropped another Russiagate bombshell on June 26 with a sensational front-page story headlined, “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says.” A predictable media and political frenzy followed, reviving the anti-Russian hysteria that has excited the Beltway establishment for the past four years.

But a closer look at the reporting by the Times and other mainstream outlets vying to confirm its coverage reveals another scandal not unlike Russiagate itself: the core elements of the story appear to have been fabricated by Afghan government intelligence to derail a potential US troop withdrawal from the country. And they were leaked to the Times and other outlets by US national security state officials who shared an agenda with their Afghan allies.

In the days following the story’s publication, the maneuvers of the Afghan regime and US national security bureaucracy encountered an unexpected political obstacle: US intelligence agencies began offering a series of low confidence assessments in the Afghan government’s self-interested intelligence claims, judging them to be highly suspect at best, and altogether bogus at worst.

In light of this dramatic development, the Times’ initial report appears to have been the product of a sensationalistic disinformation dump aimed at prolonging the failed Afghan war in the face of President Donald Trump’s plans to withdraw US troops from it.

The Times quietly reveals its own sources’ falsehoods

The Times not only broke the Bountygate story but commissioned squads of reporters comprising nine different correspondents to write eight articles hyping the supposed scandal in the course of eight days. Its coverage displayed the paper’s usual habit of regurgitating bits of dubious information furnished to its correspondents by faceless national security sources. In the days after the Times’ dramatic publication, its correspondent squads were forced to revise the story line to correct an account that ultimately turned out to be false on practically every important point.

The Bountygate saga began on June 26, with a Times report declaring, “The United States concluded months ago” that the Russians “had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.” The report suggested that US intelligence analysts had reached a firm conclusion on Russian bounties as early as January. A follow-up Times report portrayed the shocking discovery of the lurid Russian plot thanks to the recovery of a large amount of US cash from a “raid on a Taliban outpost.” That article sourced its claim to the interrogations of “captured Afghan militants and criminals.”

However, subsequent reporting revealed that the “US intelligence reports” about a Russian plot to distribute bounties through Afghan middlemen were not generated by US intelligence at all.

The Times reported first on June 28, then again on June 30, that a large amount of cash found at a “Taliban outpost” or a “Taliban site” had led US intelligence to suspect the Russian plot. But the Times had to walk that claim back, revealing on July 1 that the raid that turned up $500,000 in cash had in fact targeted the Kabul home of Rahmatullah Azizi, an Afghan businessmen said to have been involved in both drug trafficking and contracting for part of the billions of dollars the United States spent on construction projects.

The Times also disclosed that the information provided by “captured militants and criminals” under “interrogation” had been the main source of suspicion of a Russian bounty scheme in Afghanistan. But those “militants and criminals” turned out to be thirteen relatives and business associates of the businessman whose house was raided.

The Times reported that those detainees were arrested and interrogated following the January 2020 raids based on suspicions by Afghan intelligence that they belonged to a “ring of middlemen” operating between the Russian GRU and so-called “Taliban-linked militants,” as Afghan sources made clear.

Furthermore, contrary to the initial report by the Times, those raids had actually been carried out exclusively by the Afghan intelligence service known as the National Directorate of Security (NDS). The Times disclosed this on July 1. Indeed, the interrogation of those detained in the raids was carried out by the NDS, which explains why the Times reporting referred repeatedly to “interrogations” without ever explaining who actually did the questioning.

Given the notorious record of the NDS, it must be assumed that its interrogators used torture or at least the threat of it to obtain accounts from the detainees that would support the Afghan government’s narrative. Both the Toronto Globe and Mail and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) have documented as recently as 2019 the frequent use of torture by the NDS to obtain information from detainees. The primary objective of the NDS was to establish an air of plausibility around the claim that the fugitive businessman Azizi was the main “middleman” for a purported GRU scheme to offer bounties for killing Americans.

NDS clearly fashioned its story to suit the sensibilities of the US national security state. The narrative echoed previous intelligence reports about Russian bounties in Afghanistan that circulated in early 2019, and which were even discussed at NSC meetings. Nothing was done about these reports, however, because nothing had been confirmed.

The idea that hardcore Taliban fighters needed or wanted foreign money to kill American invaders could have been dismissed on its face. So Afghan officials spun out claims that Russian bounties were paid to incentivize violence by “militants and criminals” supposedly “linked” to the Taliban.

These elements zeroed in on the April 2019 IED attack on a vehicle near the US military base at Bagram in Parwan province that killed three US Marines, insisting that the Taliban had paid local criminal networks in the region to carry out attacks.

As former Parwan police chief Gen. Zaman Mamozai told the Times, Taliban commanders were based in only two of the province’s ten districts, forcing them to depend on a wider network of non-Taliban killers-for-hire to carry out attacks elsewhere in the province. These areas included the region around Bagram, according to the Afghan government’s argument.

But Dr. Thomas H. Johnson of the Naval Postgraduate School, a leading expert on insurgency and counter-insurgency in Afghanistan who has been researching war in the country for three decades, dismissed the idea that the Taliban would need a criminal network to operate effectively in Parwan.

“The Taliban are all over Parwan,” Johnson stated in an interview with The Grayzone, observing that its fighters had repeatedly carried out attacks on or near the Bagram base throughout the war.

With withdrawal looming, the national security state plays its Bountygate card

Senior US national security officials had clear ulterior motives for embracing the dubious NDS narrative. More than anything, those officials were determined to scuttle Trump’s push for a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan. For Pentagon brass and civilian leadership, the fear of withdrawal became more acute in early 2020 as Trump began to demand an even more rapid timetable for a complete pullout than the 12-14 months being negotiated with the Taliban.

It was little surprise then that this element leapt at the opportunity to exploit the self-interested claims by the Afghan NDS to serve its own agenda, especially as the November election loomed. The Times even cited one “senior [US] official” musing that “the evidence about Russia could have threatened that [Afghanistan] deal, because it suggested that after eighteen year of war, Mr. Trump was letting Russia chase the last American troops out of the country.”

In fact, the intelligence reporting from the CIA Station in Kabul on the NDS Russia bounty claims was included in the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) on or about February 27 – just as the negotiation of the US peace agreement with the Taliban was about to be signed. That was too late to prevent the signing but timed well enough to ratchet up pressure on Trump to back away from his threat to pull all US troops out of Afghanistan.

Trump may have been briefed orally on the issue at the time, but even if he had not been, the presence of a summary description of the intelligence in the PDB could obviously have been used to embarrass him on Afghanistan by leaking it to the media.

According to Ray McGovern, a former CIA official who was responsible for preparing the PDB for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the insertion of raw, unconfirmed intelligence from a self-interested Afghan intelligence agency into the PDB was a departure from normal practice.

Unless it was a two or three-sentence summary of a current intelligence report, McGovern explained, an item in the PDB normally involved only important intelligence that had been confirmed. Furthermore, according to McGovern, PDB items are normally shorter versions of items prepared the same day as part of the CIA’s “World Intelligence Review” or “WIRe.”

Information about the purported Russian bounty scheme, however, was not part of the Wire until May 4, well over two months later, according to the Times. That discrepancy added weight to the suggestion that the CIA had political motivations for planting the raw NDS reporting in the PDB before it could be evaluated.

This June, Trump’s National Security Council (NSC) convened a meeting to discuss the intelligence report, officials told the Times. NSC members drew up a range of options in response to the alleged Russian plot, from a diplomatic protest to more forceful responses. Any public indication that US troops in Afghanistan had been targeted by Russian spies would have inevitably threatened Trump’s plan for withdrawal from Afghanistan.

At some point in the weeks that followed, the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency each undertook evaluations of the Afghan intelligence claims. Once the Times began publishing stories about the issue, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe directed the National Intelligence Council, which is responsible for managing all common intelligence community assessments, to write a memorandum summarizing the intelligence organizations’ conclusions.

The memorandum revealed that the intelligence agencies were not impressed with what they’d seen. The CIA and National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) each gave the NDS intelligence an assessment of “moderate confidence,” according to memorandum.

An official guide to intelligence community terminology used by policymakers to determine how much they should rely on assessments indicates that “moderate confidence” generally indicates that “the information being used in the analysis may be interpreted in various ways….” It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the NDS intelligence when the CIA and NCTC arrived at this finding.

The assessment by the National Security Agency was even more important, given that it had obtained intercepts of electronic data on financial transfers “from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account,” according to the Times’ sources. But the NSA evidently had no idea what the transfers related to, and essentially disavowed the information from the Afghan intelligence agency.

The NIC memorandum reported that NSA gave the information from Afghan intelligence “low confidence” the lowest of the three possible levels of confidence used in the intelligence community. According to the official guide to intelligence community terminology, that meant that “information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information.”

Other intelligence agencies reportedly assigned “low confidence” to the information as well, according to the memorandum. Even the Defense Intelligence Agency, known for its tendency to issue alarmist warnings about activities by US adversaries, found no evidence in the material linking the Kremlin to any bounty offers.

Less than two weeks after the Times rolled out its supposed bombshell on Russian bounties, relying entirely on national security officials pushing their own bureaucratic interests on Afghanistan, the story was effectively discredited by the intelligence community itself. In a healthy political climate, this would have produced a major setback for the elements determined to keep US troops entrenched in Afghanistan.

But the political hysteria generated by the Times and the hyper-partisan elements triggered by the appearance of another sordid Trump-Putin connection easily overwhelmed the countervailing facts. It was all the Pentagon and its bureaucratic allies needed to push back on plans for a speedy withdrawal from a long and costly war.

42 comments:

  1. Report: Financial transfers back intelligence of Russian bounty scheme. (excerpt) Large financial transfers between a Russian intelligence agency and a bank account linked to the Taliban were evidence of an alleged scheme in which Russia offered bounties to militants to kill U.S. soldiers ... electronic data supported information Taliban detainees gave U.S. intelligence officials during interrogations. The information also was included in in President Donald Trump's written daily intelligence briefing in February, contradicting his claim Sunday that he'd never received a briefing about the alleged scheme. [end quote]

    Continued lies from Dotard. As usual. Yet this is another plot against him. Sure. Russia must have been in one the scheme to trick US troops into not withdrawing as well. LOL.

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  2. Did you miss this part? The assessment by the National Security Agency was even more important, given that it had obtained intercepts of electronic data on financial transfers “from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account,” according to the Times’ sources. But the NSA evidently had no idea what the transfers related to, and essentially disavowed the information from the Afghan intelligence agency.

    The NIC memorandum reported that NSA gave the information from Afghan intelligence “low confidence” – the lowest of the three possible levels of confidence used in the intelligence community. According to the official guide to intelligence community terminology, that meant that “information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information.”


    I thought so.

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  3. You ignored the part where Dotard lied about being briefed. If the was nothing to this story, why not tell the truth. He lied because he was caught covering for Putin... AGAIN! Never believe a LIAR. The SAFE bet is to believe the OPPOSITE of anything he says. Why I believe bounties were paid. And Dotard simply does not care. Also, the puppet must show deference to his puppet master.

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  4. They don't brief low confidence intelligence to the President.

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  5. "The information also was included in in President Donald Trump's written daily intelligence briefing in February, contradicting his claim Sunday that he'd never received a briefing about the alleged scheme".

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  6. The president gets an oral briefing and the briefers decide what to brief from the written material. Why is it important to you to prove that the president received planted/ fake Afghani intelligence?

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  7. ...and then DIDN'T start WWIII with Russia over it?

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  8. I'd like a president who isn't illiterate. Of course the Russia apologists are going to say this was "planted/fake Afghani intelligence" because the Afghani government wants our troops to stay. Do they want us to stay? And (if they were not) why wasn't the Afghan government involved in the talks with the Taliban? Seems they should be onboard with any agreement. Yet your excuse as to Dotard's inaction obvious indicates they aren't. Otherwise, why would our puppet government be producing fake intel?

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  9. I prefer readers who aren't illiterate.

    MAGA, baby!

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  10. A reader, by definition, is literate.

    Dotard = Putin puppet.

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  11. A first grader is literate? Who knew?

    Dervish - DNC Useful Idiot

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  12. A reader, by definition, is literate. There are, of course, degrees of literacy.

    Dervish = DNC critic.

    Minus = Dotard & Putin's useful idiot.

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  13. Literacy means able to read and Write, so no, readers are not literate by definition. And people who can only write slogans like " Orange man bad" are functionally illterate.

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  14. OK, I will agree with you about yourself. You write that slogan. I never have.

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  15. Seems your mind has fallen into a debilitating thought-rut that prevents actual mental processing to the level of "literacy".

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  16. Kinda like "the right is racist". Another debilitating mental mind-rut.

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  17. Your debilitating mind-rut is that you continue to think denying reality will actually work. It isn't and it won't. "Alternative facts"... BWAHHH!

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  18. 1. It isn't. But that you BELIEVE this is obvious. For example, you think you can change the reality concerning Dotard's Russian collusion. From "he did" to "he was framed by the deep state".

    2. What happened to the health care insurance that was going to cost less and cover everybody that Dotard promised? Why didn't he make it a reality?

    3. Bending reality to his will is something Dotard is clearly very bad at. For example, he keeps trying to wish the coronavirus away (by doing nothing). It keeps getting worse.

    4. Delusions are not reality.

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  19. Russia, Russia was reality? Who knew? What was the agreement and when did they make it?

    Show me the promise for healthcare.

    Corona deaths are down. How is that worse?

    Reality is what remains after you've thought about it.

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  20. 1. Quote: The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father's former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton.

    The documents "would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father", read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, "This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump". [end quote]

    2. Donald Trump Promises to Replace Obamacare With "Insurance for Everybody" [YouTube video]

    3. A Second Coronavirus Death Surge Is Coming [Article]

    4. Senator John McCain on Dotard: "What he did was he fired up the crazies" [source]

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  21. 1. Unsolicited help isn't "collusion."

    2. Trumpcare

    3. I've been posting evidence for the surge. Other than a few localized hot spots, there's "none."

    4. What do I care what a dead RINO globalist thinks?

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  22. btw - On #3, NJ adjusting it's death count in late June adding 2,000 "probable" deaths that nobody recognized but your source.

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  23. 1. Paul Manafort and Roger Stone were the "inside men". They accepted and coordinated the "help" :(

    2. That's branding by a for profit insurer. It has nothing to do with the Dotard administration and it doesn't cover everyone for a lower cost. There is no "Trumpcare" (legislation). You must not have been paying attention.

    3. You haven't.

    4. Of course you don't care. Being one of the fired up crazies.

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  24. 1. Claim in NYT article: "Officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, and how many of Trump's advisers were talking to the Russians."

    Note by Strzok: "Again, we are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intel officials" and "Our coverage has not revealed contact between Russian intelligence officers and the Trump team."

    Note by Strzok: "We are unaware of any calls with any Russian government official in which Manafort was a party."

    Note by Strzok: "We have not investigated Roger Stone."


    2. "That's branding by a for profit insurer." What was Obamacare?

    3. :)

    4. Sue me. I'm no fan boy for Money grubbing Leadership Institute sellout Senators.

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  25. 1. Bullshit. That the Dotard campaign was talking to Russians was why the FBI/CIA was alarmed.

    2. Obamacare was legislation.

    3. Deaths are a lagging indicator.

    4. You sue me. I'm not a fan of corrupt money grubbing orange-clown-makeup-wearing traitors.

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  26. 1. Strzok WAS the FBI.

    2. Obamacare provided no healthcare? If you say so...

    3. Not infinitely lagging

    4. I can't help it if you like to play clown dressup.

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  27. 1. Strzok was an FBI agent. The supposed notes you quote mention Russian intelligence. Putin didn't use Russian intelligence officers to contact the Dotard campaign. He used other assets.

    2. I did not say so. I pointed out that Obamacare is legislation and Trumpcare isn't. btw, Obamacare doesn't provide healthcare. It provides healthcare insurance. Doctors, nurses and hospitals provide the healthcare.

    3. "We do expect deaths to go up", warns White House COVID-19 task force's Adm. Giroir as cases rise. btw, deaths are increasing in a number of states right now.

    4. Unlike Dotard, I have never dressed as a clown. Is that what Dotard is doing? Playing dress up? I was under the impression that he thought orange clown makeup makes him look good. That must be why he wears suits that are far to big and comically long red ties.

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  28. 1. Strzok was an FBI agent charged with responsibility for the Russia Counterintelligence operation. ps Name the agents or demonstrate the direct link between Putin and the Trump Tower meeting.

    2. Obamacare provided insurance, Trumpcare is insurance. Insurance enables healthcare. What's your point>.

    3. Up by how much? So far the "up" doesn't correlate with "new cases" in the same proportions as "deaths" when comparing wave 1 with wave 2. Thanatos' low hanging fruit was reaped in the first wave.

    4. Your words identify your clownishness.

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  29. 1. The email received by Dotard Junior (publicly released) explicitly states that the Russian government supported the Dotard candidacy. Putin is the TOP representative of the Russian government.

    2. There is no "TrumpCare" legislation. How obtuse are you?

    3. We're still in the first wave, although younger people are getting it now. More of whom "recover".

    4. YOUR words identify YOUR clownishness. As do Dotard's. i.e. "...then I see the disinfectant. Knocks it out in a minute. One minute. Is there a way we can do something like that? By an injection, inside. Or almost a cleaning". That statement is SURELY a clown identifying himself.

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  30. 1. If I send Joe Biden an e-mail saying that the Russian Government supports him and asking to meet with him to tell him how, is that incontravertable proof that Biden is collaborating with the Russian Government? Wow, I'll send the e-mail today!

    2. There are Trumpcare insurance policies.

    3 Say it all you want but there's a trough even if you choose to deny it.

    4. Questions to experts are never clownish unless one already knows the answers.

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  31. 1. If he shows up and Russian nationals are there to meet with him. That would be pretty strong evidence. Are you a Russian national who would meet with Joe Biden after sending him that email?

    2. So the f*ck what. As I pointed out, that is branding, not legislation.

    3. Deaths are going back up. Even if you deny it.

    4. Unless one is a moron, one should know that injecting disinfectant into the human body would not be a good idea. And probably have negative effects. Not positive ones.

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  32. Wikipedia: Disinfectants are chemical agents designed to inactivate or destroy microorganisms on inert surfaces. ... Disinfectants are generally distinguished from other antimicrobial agents such as antibiotics, which destroy microorganisms within the body, and antiseptics, which destroy microorganisms on living tissue. [end Wikipedia quotes]

    Disinfectants = chemical agents not for use in the human body! Probably not a good idea to get them on the human body either. Why many people use rubber gloves when working with them.

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  33. 1. I'll send Ayn Rand. That should be proof enough of a Russian conspiracy...

    2. He "promised insurance for everybody" no "regulation" needed. Now buy your Trumpcare, Dervy.

    3. not in proportion to new cases and w/ a doubling every 3-4 days. It's either up to 4,000 a day by next week or the epidemic is OVER.

    4. I have no idea as to what gets disinfected during or after surgery.

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  34. 1. Ayn Rand is dead. In any case, she was a US citizen (from age 26 until her death at age 77).

    2. How can you promise something we already have (insurance for everyone who can afford it)? Dotard said his health care legislation would provide healthcare for everyone and at a lower cost. Obviously he lied.

    3. We're going to have to wait a LOT longer than next week for the announcement that the pandemic is over. Biden will be president.

    4. Disinfectants are never injected into the human body. Not unless the desired result is death.

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  35. Trumpcare cost less than Blue Cross. Trump makes America Great!

    You have a scientific study that proves your disinfectant theory? Lets see it.

    ...and Biden will NEVER be president. NEVER.

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  36. I have no "disinfectant theory". That disinfectants are harmful to the human body is a fact. "Trumpcare" is junk insurance. But it is no surprise that you think health insurance sellers ripping people off makes America great.

    Did Putin tell you that Biden will never be president? The polls say otherwise. They're worse for him now than when he ran against HRC. As they should be. Given the horrible job he has been doing as predisent.

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  37. Obamacare was just junk insurance? I think we all knew that the moment Democrats unilaterally passed it.

    You're gonna be hating the next four years of your post-election life. :)

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  38. Obamacare forbade insurance companies from selling junk insurance. Obamacare wasn't insurance at all. It only (in addition to other things it did) set up a marketplace for people to buy plans from public-sector companies. Obviously you're really confused on this matter. Why you keep falsely equating Obamacare (legislation) with Trumpcare (branding by a private insurer of their product).

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  39. lol! Obamacare turned 85% of existing private health insurance into junk insurance by attacking "Cadillac" plans.

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  40. Bullshit. You're talking about a tax that had ZERO effect on the coverage received by anyone with a non-Cadillac private plan and only made it more expensive for those with the Cadillac plans (with the coverage still not being affected).

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