[rad-green] Afghan Papers Inadvertently Document WaPo ’s Role in Spreading Official Lies

*https://fair.org/home/afghan-papers-inadvertently-document-wapos-role-in-spreading-official-lies/
<https://fair.org/home/afghan-papers-inadvertently-document-wapos-role-in-spreading-official-lies/>FAIR
         DECEMBER 18, 2019*

Afghan Papers Inadvertently Document WaPo’s Role in Spreading Official Lies
*BY JOSHUA CHO*
[image: WaPo: Stranded Without a Strategy]
<https://fair.org/home/afghan-papers-inadvertently-document-wapos-role-in-spreading-official-lies/>

*by Joshua Cho*

[image: WaPo: The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war]

*To get the secret history of the media’s role in the Afghan War, you have
to compare the Washington Post‘s Afghanistan Papers (12/9/19
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/documents-database/>)
with what the Post was telling its readers in real time.*

The *Washington Post*’s publication of the “Afghanistan Papers” (12/9/19
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/documents-database/>)
unveiled over 2,000 pages of unpublished notes of interviews with US
officials involved in the Afghanistan War, from a project led by the Office
of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to
investigate waste and fraud. Hailed by some as the “Pentagon Papers of Our
Generation
<https://www.thenation.com/article/afghanistan-papers-forever-war/>” after
the *Post *won access to those documents under the Freedom of Information
Act in a three-year legal battle, the *Post*’s exposé found that

senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan
throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be
false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The paper published direct remarks
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/>
on
the war by US officials who assumed that “their remarks would not be made
public”:

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,”
<http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_07_xx_woodbridge_08032016&page=2&anno=2&filter=filter-spin>
Bob
Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser
to US military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government
interviewers. “Surveys,
for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that
<http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_07_xx_woodbridge_08032016&page=2&anno=5&filter=filter-spin>
everything
we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
<http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_07_xx_woodbridge_08032016&page=3&anno=1&filter=filter-spin>

While more explicit admissions of deception on the part of US officials
involved in wars are always appreciated, one question rarely discussed
among the reports
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/world/asia/afghanistan-war-documents.html>
and
opinion pieces praising the “Afghanistan Papers” is what this scoop says
about the *Washington Post*.

If the *Post *is now publishing material demonstrating that US officials
have been “following the same talking points for 18 years,” emphasizing how
they are “making progress,” “especially” when the war is “going badly,”
shouldn’t the paper acknowledge that it has been cheerleading this same
line for all of those 18 years? Doesn’t it have a responsibility to examine
how it served as a primary vehicle for those officials to spread these same
“talking points” to spin the coverage
<https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html> in the desired
fashion?

FAIR has been tracking the *Post*’s coverage of the Afghanistan War from
the very beginning, when the paper—along with the rest of corporate
media—was actively following the Bush administration’s “guidance” on how to
cover the war. In 2001, a FAIR survey (11/2/01
<https://fair.org/take-action/action-alerts/op-ed-echo-chamber/>) of the
*Post*’s op-ed pages for three weeks following the September 11 attacks
found that

columns calling for or assuming a military response to the attacks were
given a great deal of space, while opinions urging diplomatic and
international law approaches as an alternative to military action were
nearly nonexistent.

Eight years later, FAIR (3/1/09
<https://fair.org/home/act-now-think-later-in-afghanistan/>) found that the
*Post*’s cheerleading coverage didn’t change much from 2001, as 7 out of 9
*Post* op-eds and 4 out of 5 editorials supported some kind of military
escalation from the day Barack Obama was elected president (11/4/08)
through March 1, 2009, as the US was debating a “surge” of additional
troops in Afghanistan later that year.

Another study (*Extra!*, 11/1/09
<https://fair.org/extra/in-afghan-debate-few-antiwar-op-eds/>) of the first
ten months of the *Post*’s opinion columns that same year found that

pro-war columns outnumbered antiwar columns by more than 10 to 1: Of 67
*Post* columns on US military policy in Afghanistan, 61 supported a
continued war, while just six expressed antiwar views. Of the pro-war
columns, 31 were for escalation and 30 for an alternative strategy.

The *Post *offered this lopsided coverage even though there were several
polls at the time showing a majority of the US public opposed the war,
because they believed that the Afghan War was “not worth fighting.”
[image: WaPo: Trump risks turning a chance for success in Afghanistan into
a shameful failure]

*The Washington Post (8/19/19
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-risks-turning-a-chance-for-success-in-afghanistan-into-a-shameful-failure/2019/08/19/d60958da-c29e-11e9-9986-1fb3e4397be4_story.html>)
has consistently amplified the talking points the Post‘s Afghanistan Papers
exposes as lies.*

The *Post *also has a history of facilitating official spin for the war.
When *WikiLeaks* posted tens of thousands of classified intelligence
documents related to the Afghanistan War, FAIR (7/30/10
<https://fair.org/take-action/media-advisories/wikileaks-and-the-u-s-press/>)
found that the *Post *either dismissed them as not being as important as
the Pentagon Papers (7/27/10
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/26/AR2010072601570.html>),
or absurdly spun the leaks
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/26/AR2010072605657.html>
as
good news for the US war effort (7/27/10
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/26/AR2010072605657.html>)
because the “release could compel President Obama to explain more
forcefully the war’s importance,” and because they “bolstered Obama’s
decision in December to pour more troops and money into a war effort that
had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush
administration.”

The *Post* also buried attempts by whistleblowers and other journalists who
were working to expose official lies and war crimes in Afghanistan. When US
Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning was sentenced to serve 35 years in
prison for sharing intelligence documents that first exposed
<https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/us/bradley-manning-admits-giving-trove-of-military-data-to-wikileaks.html>
what
the “Afghanistan Papers” are now corroborating, the *Post*, along with
other corporate outlets, largely neglected Manning’s legal trials and
punishment (*FAIR.org*, 12/4/12
<https://fair.org/take-action/media-advisories/turning-their-back-on-bradley-manning/>
, 6/18/14 <https://fair.org/home/chelsea-manning-speaks-but-who-listened/>,
1/18/17
<https://fair.org/home/manning-sentence-commuted-no-thanks-to-corporate-media-opinion/>
, 4/1/19
<https://fair.org/home/chelsea-manning-again-takes-fall-for-defending-publics-right-to-know/>).
The *New York Times*, to its credit, did give Manning space for an op-ed (
6/14/19
<https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/opinion/sunday/chelsea-manning-the-us-militarys-campaign-against-media-freedom.html>)
to explain why she risked her freedom to expose matters that the US
military recorded but left unreported, including hundreds of US military
attacks on Afghan civilians. The *Post*, for its part, found room to
publish frequent op-eds by the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon
(e.g., 11/16/09
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/15/AR2009111502213.html>
, 6/26/10
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/25/AR2010062504126.html>
, 6/3/11
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/success-worth-paying-for-in-afghanistan/2011/06/01/AGwGGZHH_story.html>
, 2/10/13
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-ohanlon-gen-john-allens-steady-hand-in-afghanistan/2013/02/08/4b6258e8-721a-11e2-8b8d-e0b59a1b8e2a_story.html>
, 7/12/13
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/us-should-not-abandon-afghanistan/2013/07/11/e6c24968-e97c-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211_story.html>)
spouting the same optimistic US official talking points that the *Post*’s
“Afghanistan Papers” has now exposed as lies (*FAIR.org*, 1/3/14
<https://fair.org/home/always-turning-the-corner-in-the-afghan-war/>).

In fact, one major reason why the Afghanistan Papers are unnecessary to
discern deceit from US officials is that—as Michael Parenti pointed out in *The
Face of Imperialism*
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Face_of_Imperialism/ztbOCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=new%20and%20different%20explanations>—when
US officials constantly provide new and different justifications for
invasions, it’s a sign that they’re being dishonest, not incompetent.
[image: WaPo: Stranded Without a Strategy]

*The Washington Post (12/9/19
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-strategy/>)
declared that the US “adopted fatally flawed warfighting strategies based
on misguided assumptions about a country they did not understand.”*

The *Post* (12/9/19
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-strategy/>)
admits this when it mentions that the US “largely accomplished what it set
out to do,” with Al Qaeda and Taliban officials “dead, captured or in
hiding,” yet “veered off in directions that had little to do with Al Qaeda
or 9/11.” This is consistent with FAIR’s finding (*Extra!*, 7/11
<https://fair.org/extra/losing-the-plot/>) that corporate media largely
ignored the question of whether to end the Afghanistan War after the
ostensible goal of the invasion—to capture or kill the leader of the group
that carried out the September 11 attack—was accomplished in the death of
Osama bin Laden.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the *Post*’s Afghanistan Papers have
inadvertently exposed the *Post *as a subservient accomplice in
disseminating US official lies; corporate media rely on official sources
for free content and “scoops” to subsidize their journalism, which often
spreads dishonest but convenient talking points by these same sources to
retain “access” to this information, trustworthy or not (*Extra!*, 5/02
<https://fair.org/extra/power-sources/>; *New York Times*, 4/20/08
<https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html>; *FAIR.org*,
12/12/19 <https://fair.org/home/abcs-epstein-story-didnt-kill-itself/>).

Political cartoonist and journalist Ted Rall pointed out, in an
account (*Common
Dreams*, 12/11/19
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/12/11/us-government-lied-about-afghanistan-war-they-couldnt-have-done-it-without-lapdogs>)
of being marginalized by corporate outlets like the *Post*:

“The Afghanistan Papers” is a bright, shining lie
<https://www.amazon.com/Bright-Shining-Lie-America-Vietnam/dp/0679724141> by
omission. Yes, our military and civilian leaders lied to us about
Afghanistan. But they could never have spread their murderous BS—thousands
of US soldiers and tens of thousands of Afghans killed, trillions of
dollars wasted
<https://bigthink.com/charles-koch-foundation/the-true-costs-of-the-afghan-war-americas-longest-and-most-invisible-war>—without
media organizations like the *Washington Post*, which served as
unquestioning government stenographers.

Press outlets like the *Post* and *New York Times* weren’t merely idiots
used to disseminate pro-war propaganda. They actively censored people who
knew we never should have gone into Afghanistan and tried to tell American
voters the truth.

It’s this mutually beneficial relationship between the need for corporate
media outlets like the *Post* for “access” to US official sources, and US
officials who need corporate media outlets to propagate their preferred
spin on US foreign policy to manipulate public opinion, that explains what
the Afghanistan Papers expose as the *Post*’s own role in deceiving the US
public. It’s why the *Post*’s coverage and editorial board
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-risks-turning-a-chance-for-success-in-afghanistan-into-a-shameful-failure/2019/08/19/d60958da-c29e-11e9-9986-1fb3e4397be4_story.html>
can
argue that the Trump administration shouldn’t “abandon the country in
haste” (even though it’s been 18 years), and rally around the US’s “forever
war” in Afghanistan (*FAIR.org*, 1/31/19
<https://fair.org/home/media-rally-around-forever-war-in-afghanistan/>,
9/11/19
<https://fair.org/home/on-18th-anniversary-of-9-11-media-worry-about-premature-end-to-afghan-war/>),
even as the paper investigates the official lies the continuing occupation
depends on.

Of course, this is also the reason why it’s systemically impossible for
corporate outlets like the *Post* to take the opportunity to raise more
substantive and provocative questions about whether deceit is a constant
and essential aspect of US foreign policy, and not merely confined to
isolated military invasions of “quagmire” countries like Vietnam and
Afghanistan, despite the Afghanistan Papers providing a perfect opportunity
to do so. To say nothing of challenging a worldview that invokes “winnable”
wars, in which predictions of increasing numbers of (enemy) human deaths
are best described as “rosy.”

There’s quite a long history of US media assisting officials in fabricating
moral pretexts for invasion—from fictional accounts of North Vietnamese
attacks on American destroyer ships in the Gulf of Tonkin (*FAIR.org*,
8/5/17
<https://fair.org/home/remembering-the-gulf-of-tonkin-and-the-consequences-of-wanting-to-believe/>),
to conflating very different Islamic groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda,
or claims that formerly US-backed dictator Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs
and the intent to use them against the US (*CounterPunch*, 6/11/14
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/11/the-fundamental-lie-of-the-afghan-war/>
; *FAIR.org*, 3/19/07
<https://fair.org/take-action/media-advisories/iraq-and-the-media/>).
[image: WaPo: If you’re surprised by what’s in the Afghanistan Papers, you
haven’t been paying attention]

*Or, possibly, you’ve been paying too much attention to the Washington
Post (12/12/19
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/12/if-youre-surprised-by-whats-afghanistan-papers-you-havent-been-paying-attention/>).*

Observers note that the Afghanistan Papers “only confirm what we already
know” (*Daily Beast*, 12/14/19
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-pentagon-papers-changed-history-the-afghanistan-papers-confirm-what-we-knew>),
or that “the shocking thing about the *Post* stories…is how unshocking they
are” (*Atlantic*, 12/9/19
<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/afghanistan-pentagon-papers-vietnam/603316/>);
even the *Washington Post *(12/12/19
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/12/if-youre-surprised-by-whats-afghanistan-papers-you-havent-been-paying-attention/>)
reminds us that only people who “haven’t been paying attention” to the
Afghan War are “surprised” by what’s found in the Afghanistan Papers.

Perhaps instead of pursuing FOIA requests to confirm the obvious, the
*Post *could just interrogate its own contradictory coverage of the Afghan
War and stop functioning as credulous mouthpieces for the US government.
But to do that would also require confronting the lie that this entire
so-called “War on Terror” has any moral credibility, when the US is a leading
terrorist state
<https://inthesetimes.com/article/17311/noam_chomsky_the_worlds_greatest_terrorist_campaign>
that
consciously pursues imperial policies that inflame hatred against the
US to serve
corporate interests <https://socialistproject.ca/2010/12/b445/> (*FAIR.org*
, 3/13/19
<https://fair.org/home/what-is-terrorism-nyt-asks-but-offers-no-answers/>,
11/22/19
<https://fair.org/home/after-al-baghdadis-death-media-failed-to-ask-where-war-on-terror-is-going/>
).

Absent that, an exercise like the Afghanistan Papers come off more as a
“please consider” note to the Pulitzer judges than as an earnest effort to
use the spotlight of journalistic investigation to speak truth to power and
halt the ongoing, generation-long destruction of a foreign nation.

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