NPR has the story. Intelligence officials included information about the Russian determination to put a bounty on Coalition forces in his daily briefing report.
However, they made a mistake. They put the ominous story in the president’s daily intelligence briefing, which is written. The president doesn’t read. They should have given the information to Fox & Friends. Then he would have noticed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“However, they made a mistake. They put the ominous story in the president’s daily intelligence briefing, which is written. The president doesn’t read. They should have given the information to Fox & Friends. Then he would have noticed.”
You got it – right on the nose !
This was just sent to me by a friend. It gets curiouser and curiouser, deadlier and deadlier, and…wait for it…Bolton knew, briefed and kept quiet!
https://apnews.com/425e43fa0ffdd6e126c5171653ec47d1
John Bolton is a war mongering sociopath.
All this handwringing!
Combatants being incentivised to kill their enemy.
Please, when was it otherwise?
Is it different to offer a bounty?
How so? Is not one paid in dollars, the other in dollars?
Do the international rules of war SPECIFICALLY prohibit paying bounties for enemy dead? I don’t know, but I suspect that they do.Certainly, the international rules (in the Hague Conventions) prohibit force in excess of legitimate military objectives, and the paying of a bounty for ANY enemy solider would be an example of that. So, in general, yes, this would be illegal under international law, I think. Any other reader of this blog have an answer?
dunno Bob, soldiers get paid to kill.
Did you forget that Vlad Putin is one of Trump’s closest friends?
Friends don’t kill the troops of friends.
Do they?
touche
David, the paying of bounties for enemy dead is illegal under international law. It’s a war crime. Governments pay soldiers. But those soldiers and their commanders and the governments that pay them must conduct their operations under the rules established by international treaty. Otherwise, they are guilty of war crimes.
Correct! During the (alleged) hunt for Obama, U.S. forces offered bounties for anyone turning in Taliban and other “Islamofascist” “enemy combatants” against the U.S. That’s how we got most of the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and other black sites. Most of those people were turned in just for the bounty and/or vengeance reasons, without regard for their actual status as enemy combatants or not.
People who are breathless over this story haven’t been paying attention for the last 20 years and are getting played.
Yes, we offered money for information leading to the capture of Osama bin Ladin, who was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks that killed some 3,000 people in New York City. Did you forget about 9/11? That was a foreign attack on American soil. I lost friends there. Do you think the US should have simply forgotten about Bin Ladin? This is truly a disgusting comment, Dienne. Shameful.
And, incidentally, the U.S. did forget about Osama bin Laden. The Taliban offered to turn him over – we refused. He was then allowed to escape Afghanistan when our attention turned to Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of people died in on-going unprovoked attacks on sovereign soil. Those hundreds of thousands were also people’s friends and family. But the architect of all that said mean things about Trump, so it’s all good.
Can’t stop finding the good in Trump. At least he’s not Bush or Obama, eh?
This false equivalency is really over the top now.
Trump could shoot a dozen children on Fifth Avenue and the Trump apologists would say “Obama killed children, you are getting played”.
It is the hypocrisy that really gets to me. There is absolutely nothing Trump can do that they won’t normalize.
And what is really odd is that most people here were critical of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and did not try to normalize it and say “you are getting played because Truman dropped a bomb on Hiroshima”.
The choice NOT to be critical of Trump and always try to normalize what he does is very revealing. It is also very common because Trump supporters do that every day.
Dear dienne77,
Is there anything that Trump has done that you are critical of? I respect that you believe Diane Ravitch is “getting played” on this issue. So what issues regarding Trump should be highlighted, in your opinion?
In other words, I would be interested in hearing the reasons why you believe that Trump is an awful president who should not be re-elected.
If you believe Trump has been a perfectly normal president whose re-election is – in your opinion – preferable to empowering the democrats, and you can’t think of any good reason that electing a democrat to replace Trump is preferable, then that speaks for itself.
No one here thinks the democrats are perfect. Everyone here knows that if Biden is elected, the fight for more progressive policies will have just begun. But we also know those are battles that are possible to win under Biden, while if Trump is re-elected and continues to pack the federal and Supreme Court and voting becomes a privilege and not a right, then tear gassing peaceful protesters will be the norm.
Is it important to you that that Trump and the Republicans be disempowered or do you actually believe it is no big deal if Trump and the Republicans are empowered for another 4 years?
“Please, when was it otherwise?”
Seriously, you have the gall to ask that question when Putin (who is not part of the Afghan conflict and should not be involved) was paying a bounty to the Taliban for the U.S. troops they killed?
How is that different from a mob boss in another country putting a hit out on you, your family, and your friends just because you are a U.S. citizen if you are a U.S. citizen and not a Russian and/or Trumpish troll?
Putin is a brutal dictator that Donald Trump fawns over.
Putin is a brutal dictator that Trump had closed-door meetings with and Trump did not allow any of our people to take notes. What the hell did Trump and Putin talk about in secret?
Putin is the brutal dictator that ran a propaganda campaign from Russia in 2016 to get Trump elected and is doing it again to get Trump elected in 2020, and when all 17 of our U.S. intelligence agencies and even a Senate investigation by the GOP dominated Senate found that Russia did meddle in the election and help get Trump elected, Trump called it fake news and defended Putin.
Folk get incentivised for killing their enemies? Que?
David-
The U.S., if it paid bounties for Russian soldiers in Libya and Syria, would be an equivalency?
Mic drop!
Saw that video. Compared to Trump, Obama looks like Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson, rolled into one person.
They could have also given the report to Hannity, Limbaugh, and Alex Jones.
They could read the daily briefing to him like story hour.
From what I have read about Trump over the last few agonizing years of seeing his mean, hate-filled serial lying face almost every day with another news shocker, if Trump doesn’t hear his name linked with praise of some kind in just about every sentence, he loses interest and tunes out. Sometimes he just ends the meeting or walks out without saying a word.
Like the ghost author Trump paid to write the book with Trump’s name on it once said, he couldn’t imagine Trump sitting still for more than a minute or two before he’d be out in the White House’s Rose Garden bouncing around on a pogo stick. He said Trump has a very short attention span and craves, no needs, repeated praise by everyone around him all the time.
To write the book, this ghost author spent too much time with Trump shadowing him and even eating dinner with Trump and his family.
Of course Trump knew. Or did he? Does a president automatically get left out of the loop on some things by his handlers? Ronald Reagan arguably knew very little during the last part of his term in office as he battled whichever degenerative disease. Wilson, battling a stroke, knew almost nothing for about a year. Either of the two above men was, at the nadir of their performance, superior intellectually to trump.
Bolton described his reason for expecting others to vote Trump out of office, not him, as a measure of his “principles” — self-interest, toadying for the GOP, scheming for his financial future.
The first item of the day for President Obama was reading the briefing. Before he met with anyone, Obama had read and digested the briefings so he could be up to speed when he met with his team. That is the difference between someone that serves his country and someone that only serves himself.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/29/politics/trump-phone-calls-national-security-concerns/index.html
Trump’s plan is to bring the troops home from Afghanistan by election day. Doesn’t that make this whole discussion moot? Russian bounty problem solved. John Bolton was outraged that Trump didn’t bomb Iran for shooting down one of our spy drones. Do you think that just maybe this story could have been leaked at this time by someone like Bolton who desires to keep the forever wars going? If Trump is successful he will be the first president to have ended this horrible 20 yr war that accomplished nothing! That would be quite an accomplishment if he can pull it off, and he’s planning to do it by election day. Imagine the powerful imagery of wives and children being reunited with returning soldiers. If democrats want to win next November they better start backing peace, which is what the American people want, not US/Russian proxy wars.
The latest on Trump’s scary, deeply disturbing ignorance and deranged, abusive behavior.
I just read this on CNN…the Carl Bernstein piece. GregB references it, too.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/29/politics/trump-phone-calls-national-security-concerns/index.html
Okay, let’s say only half of this story is true. (Just for argument’s sake.) Or, a quarter. Holy crap! This is STILL the worse case scenario. Trump is a madman.
No wonder why I was so upset in 2017…I mean Trump’s election made my PHYSICALLY ill…and it still hovers over me like a dark, poisonous cloud.
How DO we return to the classroom in September….with THIS president and THIS pandemic?
Any ideas? I’m seeking out wisdom. Really. Like the practical, how do you teach a classroom of high school students if we are not in a classroom on day one? And, how do you teach about government in an unbiased way that is respectful of many viewpoints when the elected President of the United States is destroying the nation?
And, it’s only Tuesday morning, folks.
I get the feeling this could be a very long week.
“worst-case”…(correction)… and that phrase doesn’t accurately depict this disaster….
Where do you get these wrong-headed notions about the military?
The troops (soldiers) are not paid to kill. Assassins are paid to kill. Most of the troops are in support positions and never see combat, and many of the troops that are in combat don’t kill anyone unless they are defending their position against attackers.
In Vietnam, we almost never saw who was shooting at us (snipers, mortars, rockets, improvised explosive devices), so it is almost impossible to kill people when you can’t see where they are or they are long gone after planting an IED.
“They are support troops backing up those who do. When you break it down, about one out of every 10 soldiers in the military — 10% overall — actually go to combat and have to fire their weapons.”
https://www.midwestdisability.com/blog/2019/12/what-percentage-of-soldiers-see-combat.shtml