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But the real hoax is how White House officers are overlaying up for Trump’s incompetence as commander in chief who’s chargeable for the welfare of the US navy and who has constantly maintained a weird bromance with a former KGB officer, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On Monday White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany
said of the intelligence surrounding the Russian bounties, “there were dissenting opinions within the intelligence community, and it would not be elevated to the president until it was verified.” Robert O’ Brien, Trump’s nationwide safety adviser, equally
tweeted that as a result of the intelligence hadn’t been “verified” the president wasn’t briefed.
But this rationalization is not sensible in any respect. Presidents get loads of unverified data. Intelligence just isn’t like arithmetic the place 2+2 can all the time be “verified” to make 4.
Think of the operation throughout which Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011.
There was no “verified” intelligence that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. It was a completely circumstantial case that he is likely to be there, and former President Barack Obama needed to make the decision to dispatch the SEALs on a doubtlessly fairly harmful mission regardless of the very fact there was important dissent inside the intelligence group in regards to the probability that bin Laden was there.
As I discovered once I was reporting my e book “
Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad,” within the weeks earlier than Obama ordered the bin Laden raid, a small intelligence “Red Team” was tasked to look at the intelligence that bin Laden is likely to be in Abbottabad. The group got here again with a spread of estimates that al Qaeda’s chief was in Abbottabad various from 40% to 60% confidence. When Obama ordered the dangerous bin Laden operation he did so understanding that there was possible solely a 50/50 likelihood that he was in Abbottabad.
And that will get to the character of intelligence. When the US intelligence companies study a problem of explicit significance to US policymakers they typically will difficulty a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). The phrase “estimate” is telling. US opponents cloak their actions in secrecy and so the American intelligence group tries to interrupt by means of this veil of secrecy sometimes with some mixture of human sources, indicators intelligence and satellite tv for pc imagery. This would not sometimes produce a “verified” reality however relatively an estimate that usually comes with various ranges of “confidence” from “high” to “low.” Here, as an illustration, is
a declassified NIE from 2007 in regards to the historical past of the Iranian nuclear program
According to his nationwide safety adviser, O’Brien, Trump
wasn’t personally briefed in regards to the Russian bounties. If that is true, the real purpose for this appears possible not as a result of that intelligence wasn’t necessary, however that Trump merely would not need to hear something dangerous about his buddy Putin and so US intelligence officers have constantly downplayed to Trump something which may make Putin look dangerous, in keeping with
The Madman Theory, a forthcoming e book by CNN’s Jim Sciutto.
And the truth that the Russian bounty intelligence was put within the Presidential Daily Brief earlier this 12 months means little since Trump hardly reads these briefings, in keeping with the
Washington Post and the
New York Times, shirking his tasks as commander in chief to spend untold hours hate-watching cable information and tweeting about all type of trivia and grudges as an alternative of doing the laborious work of getting knowledgeable to guard the American individuals and its navy.
It’s not a secret, and even information that Russia has been supporting the Taliban. In March 2018, the highest US commander in Afghanistan, General John “Mick” Nicholson, instructed the BBC that Russian weapons had been smuggled to the Taliban and that they “provide some degree of support to the Taliban.” So,
some version of the facts of Russian help to the Taliban has been public for greater than two years.
The real query White House officers have yet to deal with — so keen are they to say that the President wasn’t knowledgeable about plots to kill US troops in Afghanistan — is: What will the Trump administration do about this? After all, Trump personally
ordered the killing in January of General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iranian navy operations within the Middle East, for supposedly planning assaults on US targets within the area.
Would Trump order some form of retaliatory motion towards the Russians primarily based on the intelligence about their bounties for the lives of US troopers? The query solutions itself.
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