CNN Lies About Rifle to Incriminate Trump, But Then Expert Looks at Photo

Thanks to Donald Trump, CNN has become the all-Russia, all-the-time network — all in a desperate attempt to incriminate the president in any way possible. It’s gotten so bad that I halfway expect them to devote the overnight hours to a video of Don Lemon reading from the works of Dostoevsky and Gogol.

The most trusted niet in news was at it again earlier this week. On Tuesday, they breathlessly announced to the world that they now had definitive proof the Russians were arming the Taliban in Afghanistan, as had been rumored for some time.

“The Taliban have received improved weaponry in Afghanistan that appears to have been supplied by the Russian government, according to exclusive videos obtained by CNN, adding weight to accusations by Afghan and American officials that Moscow is arming their one-time foe in the war-torn country,” the July 25 report noted.

It sounded pretty damning — yet another example of the perfidy of one Vladimir Putin. That’s when experts examined the footage and realized just how flawed the report was.

According to Task and Purpose, “(n)one of these weapons touted by the Taliban in the CNN video appear particularly modern, and all but (one) are regular fixtures of the illicit small arms markets that accounted for 60 percent of the weapons flowing into and out of Afghanistan in the decades leading up to the U.S.-led invasion in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”

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In addition, most of the weapons were of different provenances, something that makes it unlikely they were part of a widespread Russian push to arm the Taliban.

We talked to an expert of our own, and he broke down just how flawed the CNN report was.

Jared Harris is Conservative Tribune’s own military weapons expert. He looked at the CNN video and noticed a number of discrepancies that indicated the report was misleading at best. For starters, not a whole lot of the new weapons shown during the report are even Russian.

First, let’s take a look at the video in question:

CNN exclusive: Videos suggest Russia may be arming Taliban https://t.co/XHG2d37kzH

— New Day (@NewDay) July 25, 2017

Take a look at the weapons shown at 1:24. The gun being held by the man in the foreground is the Iraqi Al-Kadesih, Harris said. It’s a clone of the Russian Dragunov rifle, but the slots on the handguard give the difference away.

Oh, and the guy in the background? Also not holding a Russian rifle. That’s a U.S.-made M249.

Let’s fast forward to 1:32. That gun is a Polish-made AKMS. While it’s a variant of the Russian-made AK, Harris notes that the “handguard and underfolder are dead giveaways” as to the the fact that it’s from Poland. In the background, he noted that a Hungarian FEG, which Harris said is distinguished by its wire stock and boxy handguard.

At 3:33 is another AK clone, this time the Hungarian AMD-65. Another AK clone, Harris noted “(its) distinguishing features are (a) unique heatshield and foregrip.”

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Prior to coming to Conservative Tribune, Harris served as an infantryman in the Army — and says that experienced reporters should have recognized several of the weapons featured in the report as not being Russian in origin, “(e)specially the M249.”

“Every U.S. fireteam has at least one of those, so it has some heavy news time,” Harris noted. “The AK and SVD variants are a little trickier — they could be confused if your knowledge of the AK family consisted solely of ‘they’re Russian, I think.’

“CNN should have gone to an expert for that if they wanted a hard-hitting exclusive story,” he added.

So, did the Russians perhaps arm the Taliban with a panoply of different weapons to make it harder to trace? Harris thinks not. He said that most nations will equip forces with the same type of weapon because it’s “(e)asier to cannibalize a rifle if it breaks out in the field. There’s no guarantee of that with an international community of captured firearms.

Even though many of the rifles were AK clones, he also noted that “AK family rifles won’t even have similar parts a lot of the time. About the only thing guaranteed to cross over is the magazine and ammo.

“So if Russia was wanting to arm them, they’d do a lot better than eight different models firing six different calibers.”

He also noted that when the United States originally armed the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, it specifically used Chinese-supplied Type 56 AK-clones almost exclusively for just this reason.

Now, maybe this is just what Putin wants us to think. Maybe he’s reading this right now, laughing a deep, hearty Bond-villain laugh. There have certainly been reports that Russia has funneled weapons to the Taliban, although not necessarily anything on the scale suggested by the CNN video.

However, if that’s the case, they owe us a plausible explanation why an array of antiquated, incompatible weapons are proof of Russia arming the Taliban. Surely they provided this, right?

Well, here’s a bit of what they based their conclusion on: “Two separate sets of Taliban, one in the north and another in the west, claim to be in possession of the weapons, which they say were originally supplied by Russian government sources. One splinter group of Taliban near Herat say they obtained the guns after defeating a mainstream rival group of Taliban. Another group say they got the weapons for free across the border with Tajikistan and that they were provided by ‘the Russians.'”

Just in case that wasn’t clear: part of their conclusion is based on “the Taliban told us so.” And apparently, they didn’t even bother checking what kind of weapons the Russians were giving them.

Don’t get us wrong: there’s still a good chance that the Russians are funneling weapons to the Taliban. However, CNN’s report is a deeply flawed one, and one gets the idea it was borne out of their deep, facts-optional obsession with the Kremlin.

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