Speaker 1: The Armstrong and Jetty Show. Well, we've been saying all
Speaker 1: day long that the wrong story is going to get
Speaker 1: most of the headlines. That is impeachment and or the
Speaker 1: Inspector General report coming out. The biggest story in America
Speaker 1: should be the Afghanistan papers that are out in the
Speaker 1: Washington Post. US officials misled public about Afghan war. Confidential
Speaker 1: documents reveal for eighteen years we were misled or lied to, uh,
Speaker 1: which I'm not surprised by, but I'm still very angry about.
Speaker 1: Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter for the Washington Post,
Speaker 1: and we are very grateful that Craig carved us out
Speaker 1: a couple of minutes today on the day of the
Speaker 1: release of this blockbuster story. Craig, how are you, sir?
Speaker 1: Very good? Thanks for having me. What's our pleasure? I'm
Speaker 1: I'm so mad reading through this um we we had
Speaker 1: been saying on the air for years, what are we
Speaker 1: trying to ACCOMPLI It doesn't look to me like we
Speaker 1: have a goal. It seems to me like if we
Speaker 1: left today would be the same result as if we
Speaker 1: left five years from a how or five years ago.
Speaker 1: It turns out behind the scenes, they were saying the
Speaker 1: same sorts of things, right, that's right. I mean those
Speaker 1: are pretty basic questions, and you think people in position
Speaker 1: of power would have been asking them, and it turns
Speaker 1: out they were, and they didn't have very good answers.
Speaker 1: And this has been going on for many, many years.
Speaker 1: They didn't know why we were there, how it would end,
Speaker 1: or how would we would get out. How did you
Speaker 1: get this information? So this started over three years ago.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a slow reporter, I guess, but we we
Speaker 1: filed freedom information at requests with an obscure government agency
Speaker 1: called the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan. We'd heard they
Speaker 1: had done an interview with Michael Flynn, the retired army general.
Speaker 1: This was back in ten and Flynn was in the news,
Speaker 1: of course for a support of Trump during the presidential campaign.
Speaker 1: But we had heard Flynn had given this long, very
Speaker 1: blunt interview about Afghanistan and the were there. So we've
Speaker 1: put in a public records request and uh, we thought
Speaker 1: we were going to get it, and we had to
Speaker 1: file a lawsuit and this agency really dragged its feet
Speaker 1: for three years. It turned out that in addition to
Speaker 1: the Flynn interview, there were hundreds more, and so we
Speaker 1: had to sue and file more freem Information Act requests
Speaker 1: for those two and it just it took a long
Speaker 1: time to pry them lose out of the government. They
Speaker 1: didn't want to cough them up. Well, it's encouraging in
Speaker 1: a way, Craig, that those documents exist at all. There
Speaker 1: seemed to have been a serious effort to understand what
Speaker 1: our strategies are, how they're working, and whether they're likely
Speaker 1: to bear fruit. It's just that once many of those answers,
Speaker 1: or preliminary answers were learned, they were buried, which is frightening. Well,
Speaker 1: that's right. And the context of this, this was a
Speaker 1: special project that this Inspector General f Afghanistan had started.
Speaker 1: And the timing is important because everybody thought the war
Speaker 1: was coming to an end, right Obama had said I'm
Speaker 1: gonna pull all you troops out by the end of
Speaker 1: my presidency. Uh, and that's where people thought things were going.
Speaker 1: We were drawing down the number of troops there. So
Speaker 1: they thought they'd do this project and interview hundreds of
Speaker 1: people to see what went wrong in Afghanistan, so that
Speaker 1: you know, in the future, if we ever got stuck
Speaker 1: in another war, we wouldn't repeat the mistakes. But of
Speaker 1: course it turned out we we didn't leave Afghanistan, and
Speaker 1: Obama left several thousand troops there and Trump sent several
Speaker 1: thousand more and the war is still going on. So
Speaker 1: these were these were lessons that were not learned, and
Speaker 1: subsequently the government was trying very hard to to keep
Speaker 1: them suppressed. As you pointed out, do you get any
Speaker 1: sense that there was um much difference in the attitudes
Speaker 1: behind the scenes in the Obama administration versus the Bush administration,
Speaker 1: or did it just once you got at the level
Speaker 1: of the military kind of be the same direction of
Speaker 1: let's just keep stumbling along doing our best. I think
Speaker 1: both of them were trying to to operate the war
Speaker 1: as best they knew. But what was striking is behind
Speaker 1: the scenes, both of them are equally guilty of not
Speaker 1: being forthcoming with the American people about how things were going.
Speaker 1: I mean, we went back and we separately we got
Speaker 1: these memos that Rumsfeld had written, thousands of them from
Speaker 1: an outfit called the National Security Archive, which is a
Speaker 1: nonprofit group that had sued the Pentagon to get these memos.
Speaker 1: Rumsfeld had written, there's one back in April of two
Speaker 1: thousand two, so six months after the war started, he
Speaker 1: writes a memo to several generals and he says, I
Speaker 1: may be impatient, in fact I know him a bit impatient,
Speaker 1: but we are never going to get the U. S.
Speaker 1: Military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see
Speaker 1: that there is something going on that will provide the
Speaker 1: stability that will be necessary for us to leave. Then
Speaker 1: he ended it with one word, he said, help exclamation point. Again,
Speaker 1: this is back in two thousand two, well saying we're
Speaker 1: never going to get the troops out. Uh. And and
Speaker 1: that's a guy, you know, nobody was told this back then,
Speaker 1: and he was a Vietnam era guy, so he he
Speaker 1: understood how that momentum happened, that inertia, right. Craig Whitlock
Speaker 1: is on the line of the Washington Post. Craig, it's
Speaker 1: it's disturbing if the generals or the politicians say, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we have x number of this and we
Speaker 1: have pacified this amount of score mileage and therefore it's
Speaker 1: clear we are making progress. I mean, if if if
Speaker 1: their example is not good evidence, that's disturbing. But if
Speaker 1: the evidence itself was faked, up. That's just extra galling in.
Speaker 1: According to your article, down to the lowest level, a
Speaker 1: lot of the statistics were being faked up, that's right,
Speaker 1: and you know, to be honest, I wasn't shocked by that.
Speaker 1: I covered the Pentagon in the West Military for several
Speaker 1: years ro the post, particularly during the Obama administration. For
Speaker 1: that it was a foreign correspondent, and we would get
Speaker 1: told all the time by commanders, uh, you know, that
Speaker 1: they were making progress, and they would couch by saying that,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a tough fight and there's going to
Speaker 1: be setbacks. But they would throw out these statistics all
Speaker 1: the time, and they always they always seem cherry picked,
Speaker 1: you know, one's you know, meant to show a certain
Speaker 1: certain portrait. But to see people admit in these interviews,
Speaker 1: these confidential interviews, that yeah, we we did doctor them up.
Speaker 1: We distorted the statistics. We only pulled the ones that
Speaker 1: made things look good and we buried the others. And
Speaker 1: we funneled these all the way up to the White
Speaker 1: House like that. You know, it's one thing to see
Speaker 1: it in black and white them admit it. Craig a
Speaker 1: thousand apologies. We are up against a hard break but
Speaker 1: this is some some serious, great journalism. It's stuff the
Speaker 1: American people ought to be reading. And uh and we
Speaker 1: thank you not only for the work you did, but
Speaker 1: your time today. Man, thanks, thank you. Take care of