Michael Berry

Michael Berry

Michael Berry has drunk homemade moonshine from North Carolina with Robert Earl Keen, met two presidents with the same last name, been cussed at by...Full Bio

 

Russian Bounty Story Appears To Be Deep State Disinformation

Once again, the deep state lied about Trump & the media assisted in perpetuating that lie.

Back in June last year, the Washington Post so desperate to get Trump ran a story from anonymous sources that claimed there was a bounty program by the Russians on US Troops in Afghanistan.

Of course, the media fell in love with the story because it yet another scandal for the Trump administration. However, skeptics at the time called BS.

Well now US intelligence admits that the story was false.

Of course to the media, the ends justified the means. They wanted to hurt Trump, so they magnified an obvious lie.

The Daily Beast reports:

"...on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate” 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—and possibly untrue.
“The United States intelligence community assesses with low to moderate confidence that Russian intelligence officers sought to encourage Taliban attacks U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan in 2019 and perhaps earlier,” a senior administration official said.
“This information puts a burden on the Russian government to explain its actions and take steps to address this disturbing pattern of behavior,” the official said, indicating that Biden is unprepared to walk the story back fully.
Significantly, the Biden team announced a raft of sanctions on Thursday. But those sanctions, targeting Russia’s sovereign debt market, are prompted only by Russia’s interference in the 2020 election and its alleged role in the SolarWinds cyber espionage. (In contrast, Biden administration officials said that their assessment attributing the breach of technology company SolarWinds to hackers from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service was “high confidence.”)
“We 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,” a senior administration official told reporters in reference to the bounty claims.
According to the officials on Thursday’s call, the reporting about the alleged “bounties” came from “detainee reporting” – raising 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 “information and evidence of connections to criminal agents in Afghanistan and elements of the Russian government” as sources for the intelligence community’s assessment.
Without additional corroboration, such reporting is notoriously unreliable. Detainee reporting from a man known as Ibn Shaikh al-Libi, extracted from torture, infamously and bogusly fueled a Bush administration claim, used to invade Iraq, about Saddam Hussein training al-Qaeda to make poison gas.
The senior Biden official added on Thursday that the “difficult operating environment in Afghanistan” complicated U.S. efforts to confirm what amounts to a rumor."

Independent Journalist Matt Taibbi nails it:


Sponsored Content

Sponsored Content