Nah, the worst part will be parents who lost their kids to a bounty seeker will say they died for Freedom and it was totally necessary to prevent America from falling into demon-rat tyranny.

He's either lying or totally incompetent. No way he wouldn't be briefed on this.

It came out almost a week ago that he was briefed thoroughly and didn't do anything at all.

On that note, fuck Russia for this kind of shitty behaviour—see also using a chemical weapon in the UK. Since Putin took power their foreign policy has been ‘Damage the world, damage ourselves, as long as it damages the West.’ The result? They’ve ringed themselves with countries who’ve learned to never trust them or work with them under any circumstance.

Then the leadership at RT like to bitch and moan about how no one trusts poor Russia. Which is a bit like murdering your parents then demanding pity for being an orphan.

see description.

America's war crimes and support of war criminals to kill "communists" is well documented.

Ah, right, I forgot that when it comes to Russia, SolRo is 100% aligned with Trump’s ‘kiss Putin’s feet and beg for more’ stance.

The rest of us hopefully see a difference between supporting Afghan efforts to kick out the Soviets four decades ago - mistaken as the might have been - and paying a literal bounty for dead American soldiers to disrupt peace negotiations.

I remember when teabaggers were telling me with all earnestness that Obama was working for Putin and that he was planning to never leave office and become a dictator, etc.

SolRo is sorta correct here. Offering a bounty to kill foreign troops isn't really beyond the pale for covert ops... our support of the mujahadeen in Afghanistan was kinda the same thing.

Actually, since we were more actively involved in Afghanistan, the argument could be made that what we did was worse. But really, neither offering a bounty nor supporting the mujahadeen were that bad, by the standards of international covert ops.

That doesn't mean that we should do absolutely nothing in response; Trump's complete passivity is pathetic & detrimental to America's national interest in several ways.

I'm not sure what SolRo is talking about with his air-quotes around communism, though. Also, what do our war crimes have to do with Russia? We've committed plenty of war crimes against non-Russian countries, but so far Russia hasn't been the target of any of them.

I see Binro's prediction above came true pretty fast

The worst part is they'll brush over this, but will STILL go on about Hillary Clinton's "BENGHAZI!" well into the next decade.

Badly pointing out that America has been doing a version of this for decades with the intent of killing Russians or "communists" either through proxy wars or propping up right-wing fascists or providing intelligence to regimes that would do the killing for them.

"Communists" in quotes because to the CIA anyone that dares refuse the blessing of American corporate takeover of their natural resources is a communist.

If Obama had done this, Republicans would never stop shitting their pants.

think there might be a little wiggle room between "discouraging foreign powers from putting bounties on your armed servicemen" and total endless war

just a little

There should be less gobbling up of intelligence "leaks" and more asking for proof. Skepticism towards intelligence agencies sure took a nosedive since it could be used as cheap Trump "resistance".

Those last three words tell us how seriously we need to take Siebenstein

how dare somebody disparage the brave resistance to Trump, who boldly wear dashiki scarves while kneeling and then immediately go back to approving every military budget and expansion of executive branch power that he demands

Can confirm that intelligence services know what they're talking about. Trump literally ignored the advice of those services and said "intelligence should go back to school" because the reality of the facts and the assessments created based on those facts did not fit the narrative he wanted.

Intelligence doesn't have any agenda; all it does is make predictive analysis of enemy activity based on patterns of behaviour.

I know you want to read into what the movies and media want to tell you about the dark scary world of secret people operating in the shadows but 99% of intelligence personnel are literally nerds hunched over desks to read reports and write PDFs, then usually argue over what powerpoint format to use.

Five counteracting stars.

If only they had used a better PowerPoint format, we would have found those WMDs in Iraq.

Also, and I know you don't care: https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Releases/Release/Article/2241964/ statement-by-assistant-to-the-secretary-of-defense-for-public-affa irs-on-intell/source/GovDelivery/

Is it possible? Yes. Should you eat it up and be done with your opposition to Trump? Fuck no.

There's not much that the intelligence community produces that can be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, and, even setting aside the Iraq WMD debacle, they make mistakes all the time. But their best guesses are usually the best info that the people who make decisions have to go on, especially when compared to the self-serving worldview of a Commander-in-Chief who feels entitled to ignore any reality he doesn't find quite to his taste.

You really need to get away from the idea that intelligence is all-knowing. It isn't; generally it has access to protected information and uses all source data in order to create a better model of what is going on so the guesses made are more accurate.

It's a scary fucking world out there. Iraq had no WMDs but every analyst who said that was taken off the case until they found analysts who would say it. Intelligence isn't an excuse to justify war. It's a predictive tool based on experience, facts, and probability. MH6gc gets it, although I will add that there is no such thing as surety when you're literally predicting the future.

I honestly hope I'm helping here; I know the 2 function pretty well. As much fun as being the secret agent gods would be, it's got a lot of mythos surrounding it that doesn't need to be there.

Yeah, just a bunch of pencil pushers who torture, kill, traffic drugs and weapons, overthrow governments. Nothing to see here.

Do your lips get sore when you're throat-punching yourself this hard with a magical fantasy dick?

Sad to see that CIA-stans are taking over poetv. Not surprised by the homophobia though.

Careful you don't dislocate a joint, reaching that far.

Hey you should read The Afghanistan Papers and then come back and tell me why Obama didn't withdraw fully in like 2009.

"Obama!"

What, you JUST noticed 9/11? :P