Should have hired a plane. Russian style.
4 Likes
So this is the contents of his petty cash drawer. No doubt he still has plenty stashed in the Caribbean and Swiss banks.
Cold Cash
4 Likes
Yep. I’d like to know how much of that money went to the Taliban for those pre-November cease-fires last year.
2 Likes
When you want to butter-up someone.
Okay, so that’s not him in an ornithopter.
2 Likes
What’s notable is how the unverified Russian “news” of carting away cash has propagated throughout the comment section of the above video.
He addresses the money part and drops what sounds like a trump praise.
3 Likes
Well it comports with our pre-conceived notions, so we are primed to believe it. It is the opposite of “Fantastic claims require fantastic proof.” Actually the thing that I find suspicious is that he was escaping in a helicopter. Helicopters are inefficient, so they don’t have the range to get all that far. Certainly not all the way to the UAE. So unless the helicopter was just his ride from the palace to the airport, that doesn’t make much sense.
edited to add: And Russian intelligence is pretty good at spreading stories that people are already primed to believe. It makes disinformation campaigns significantly easier.
6 Likes
Chill bills?
1 Like
Each million would require a pretty sizable briefcase, then.
1 Like
That twitter thread is a shit show.
3 Likes
Came here to say something similar, most cold storage wallets are the size of a thumb drive…and why wait? What’s keeping you from crypto now? She asked knowingly 
That’s what I was thinking.
The whole story sounds like it was made up. Having said that I would be amazed if Ghani had not stolen millions to fund his further endevours, but he didn’t take cash, because why would he?
3 Likes
Also from that novel, in re: the choice of denomination:
The U.S. hundred is the international currency of bad shit
6 Likes
My paperback copy of Hawaii by James Michener has 1100 pages, so 550 pieces of paper. 10,000 $100 bills would be about 20 times the size of that book.
4 Likes
It ain’t just the neoCons. I grant upfront that NPR is at best a millimeter or two left of center. Still I was amazed with the “roundtable” of correspondents convened as the debacle was beginning. Several had lived in Afghanistan for years, yet to a person they expressed surprise that things fell apart so quickly. A lot of talk about how everyday life was pretty good and getting better. “Who could have imagined this?” Made me wonder what planet they’d been on during the last couple of years.
6 Likes
Planet Beltway, a province of the mind more than a physical location. That’s where the neoCons found willing shills at the NYT and amongst the Nice Polite Republicans for their PNAC fantasy in the early 2000s. That’s where a lot of the latter remain after building their careers, still insisting we clap our hands and believe that Western-style democracy can be forced from without upon cultures that are cursed by fundie religion and tribal warlordism.
9 Likes
And maybe also believe that that’s even what “we” were really trying to do there?
I don’t think western powers that be give a shit whether democracy actually exists pretty much anywhere. There’s more loot available to them where it doesn’t.
6 Likes
