Top general has doubts Russian bounty program killed US troops in Afghanistan
Source: ABC News
The top U.S. general in the Middle East said Tuesday he was aware of the intelligence of a Russian bounty program targeting U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but while he said he found it worrisome, he said he did not believe it was tied to actual U.S. military deaths on the battlefield.
I found it very worrisome, I just didn't find that there was a causative link there," Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command, said in an interview with a small number of reporters.
The intel (intelligence) case wasn't proved to me -- it wasn't proved enough that I'd take it to a court of law -- and you know that's often true in battlefield intelligence, said McKenzie.
You see a lot of indicators, many of them are troubling many of them you act on. But, but in this case there just there wasn't enough there I sent the intelligence guys back to continue to dig on it, and I believe they're continuing to dig right now, but I just didn't see enough there to tell me that the circuit was closed in that regard.
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/top-general-has-doubts-russian-bounty-program-killed-us-troops-in-afghanistan/ar-BB16s7vE?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=DELLDHP
soothsayer
(38,601 posts)Journeyman
(15,026 posts)he didn't ignore it out of hand. And he believes the search is ongoing, so in his mind there's at least the possibility it may be true, at least enough of a possibility to continue looking. More than can be said for his "commander in chief."
Sanity Claws
(21,841 posts)yaesu
(8,020 posts)that has been proven.
TomCADem
(17,382 posts)...before taking action against Osama bin Ladin, which is what Dubya did when he ignored intelligence reports until after we were attacked.
Oh well, if he said otherwise, he would be a former general.
or MIHOP?
JI7
(89,241 posts)TomCADem
(17,382 posts)It is not exactly controversial that Dubya ignored warnings of a planned terrorist attack. This is like denying that Trump ignored warnings of the growing COVID-19 pandemic.
https://www.politico.eu/article/attacks-will-be-spectacular-cia-war-on-terror-bush-bin-laden/
By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIAs counterterrorism center, it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die. There were real plots being manifested, Cofers former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years. The world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise. Terrorists were disappearing [as if in hiding, in preparation for an attack]. Camps were closing. Threat reportings on the rise. The crisis came to a head on July 10. The critical meeting that took place that day was first reported by Bob Woodward in 2006. Tenet also wrote about it in general terms in his 2007 memoir At the Center of the Storm.
But neither he nor Black has spoken about it publicly until nowor supplied so much detail about how specific and pressing the warnings really were. Over the past eight months, in more than a hundred hours of interviews, I talked with Tenet and the 11 other living former CIA directors for The Spymasters, a documentary set to air this month on Showtime.
The drama of failed warnings began when Tenet and Black pitched a plan, in the spring of 2001, called the Blue Sky paper to Bushs new national security team. It called for a covert CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threatgetting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan. And the word back, says Tenet, was were not quite ready to consider this. We dont want the clock to start ticking. (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that theyd been warned.) Black, a charismatic ex-operative who had helped the French arrest the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, says the Bush team just didnt get the new threat: I think they were mentally stuck back eight years [before]. They were used to terrorists being Euro-leftiesthey drink champagne by night, blow things up during the day, how bad can this be? And it was a very difficult sell to communicate the urgency to this.
TomVilmer
(1,832 posts)... actually the opposite. According to his Secretary of State, this Presidential Daily Brief was a response to the president's own questions whether something new might be planned by Al Qaida. The answer from CIA was historical information based on years old reporting. There was no new threat information. There was nothing in the memo suggesting that an attack was actually coming.
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB116/pdb8-6-2001.pdf
For me it has always been more interesting what happened in the days after the attack. NATO suggesting a joint answer, and the US rejecting. The attack on Afghanistan and the ongoing alliances with Saudi Arabia etc...
Ford_Prefect
(7,873 posts)Hoyt
(54,770 posts)even helping Afghans against Russia.
trump still should have taken some action, if only to tell his buddy to knock it off.
GeorgeGist
(25,311 posts)Yeehah
(4,568 posts)Just another lying general.
Snoopy 7
(526 posts)And when did he assume the position(?) well let's see March 28, 2019, another trump supporter?
Nitram
(22,768 posts)religious reasons, not for money. The Stingers we gave the mujahideen probably killed far more Russians than Americans killed for bounty money. That said, Trump had an obligation to respond to the intelligence with action of one sort or another.