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Dick and Jane: Fun with Soft Coups
By Kent R. Kroeger (July 22, 2020)
By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com; July 22, 2020)
The New York Times broke a bombshell story on June 26th with this headline:
Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says.
No, the bombshell information is not that Russians might be paying our adversaries to kill our soldiers. That’s been going on for close to 75 years now. And, truth be told, the U.S. does the same to Russia. The CIA’s Operation Cyclone during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan (1979 to 1989) comes to mind, but sometimes the U.S. just kills Russians directly, as we did in Syria. No middleman or bounty required. Either way, it’s called statecraft, and its a dirty business.
Rather, the bombshell news is that the CIA is leaking classified intelligence — probably illegally, as only the President and those he delegates have the legal authority to declassify such information, per Executive Order 12356 — in an apparent effort to undermine the Trump administration’s policies in Afghanistan, if not undermine the administration’s overall ability to govern.
If this were done in one of Donald Trump’s sh*thole countries, we’d call this type of government intelligence activity part of a coup effort. As it was done in the…
