> Did you know that the US only lost war in Afghanistan because Putin paid a head bounty to the Taliban for every US soldier killed? Not something the media cl

> Did you know that the US only lost war in Afghanistan because Putin paid a head bounty to the Taliban for every US soldier killed? Not something the media claimed. This is a claim pushed by anonymous conspiracy theorist patrec, which supports my point. The media said that Trump was briefed about possible bounties (true), the intelligence agencies had low to moderate confidence that Russia was paying bounties (also true) and made no assertions about how much this affected the outcome of the war. > I can well remember how former luminaries like Tom "Give War A Chance" Friedman, Bill "The war in Iraq was right and necessary, and we won it" Kristol and David "Axis-of-evil" Frum or Stephen "The Connection" Hayes lost their lucrative careers over advocating catastrophic policies These are news commentators, not reporters, and their articles are clearly marked as such. Their reputations _are_ poor among people who are not partisans, once again supporting my point. You could post more conspiracy theories in other social media accounts, and nobody will be the wiser. As far as Clapper, he clarified his statement soon after being informed that it wasn't about what the previous questions about collecting dossiers on Americans was about and went as far as declassifying documents about the phone metadata collection program in question: https://www.lawfareblog.com/ic-record-response-times-editorial-and-fisc-renews-telephony-metadata-program https://www.lawfareblog.com/ic-record-response-times-editori... That doesn't look like deliberately lying to me.