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SOJOMAIL: A weekly ezine of spirituality, politics and culture
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'The Whole Damn Thing Was a Lie'
Jim Wallis
"A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. 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."

This is the opening paragraph of an explosive report published on Monday afternoon in the Washington Post, based on the Post's review of thousands of pages of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, all previously unreleased until the paper recently won a multi-year court case on Freedom of Information Act grounds. And the report only gets more damning as it goes on. For example, in describing the gulf between what the public has been told throughout the 18 years of this war and what the American government knew at the time, the report states:

"The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting. Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul -- and at the White House -- to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case ... John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show '"the American people have constantly been lied to.'"

... When I first read the report on Tuesday, my initial reaction was one of sadness and anger, once again -- but not surprise.

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