The NYT and it's "journalists" are on the warpath again. After leading the "charge of the WMD brigade" they now seek to justify a war against Russia.There is not the slightest factual basis for the series of article and commentaries published by theTimes claiming that the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, paid bounties to Taliban guerrillas to induce them to attack and kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Not a single soldier out of the 31 Americans who have died in Afghanistan in 2019-2020 has been identified as a victim of the alleged scheme. No witnesses have been brought forward, no evidence produced.
The sole foundation of the reports in theTimes, since reinforced by similar articles in theWashington Post,theWall Street Journaland the Associated Press, and accounts on cable and network television, are the unsupported, uncorroborated statements of unnamed intelligence officials. These officials give no proof of their claims about the operation of the supposed network of GRU agents—how the money came from Russia to Afghanistan, how the money was distributed to Taliban fighters, what actions the Taliban fighters carried out, what impact these actions had on any American military personnel.
TheTimesreporters spearheading this campaign are not journalists in any real sense of the term. They are conduits, passing on material supplied to them by high-level operatives in the CIA and other intelligence agencies, repackaging it for public consumption and using their status as “reporters” to provide more credibility than would be given to a press release from Langley, Virginia. In other words, the CIA has provided the plot line, and the newspaper creates the narrative framework to sell it to the American people.The intelligence briefing did not “detail any connection to specific U.S. or coalition deaths in Afghanistan” and that “gaps remained in the intelligence community’s understanding of the overall program, including its precise motive …”
In other words, the Russian “bounties” program has no identifiable victims and no credible motive.https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/03/pers-j03.html
