US lies and deception spelled out in Afghanistan papers’ shocking detail
The tranche of documents show that in trying to paint the best pictures, those involved delivered the worst
During the Vietnam war, the daily US military briefings were known to journalists as the Five O’ Clock Follies, described by one of the AP reporters who attended them as “the longest-playing tragicomedy in south-east Asia’s theatre of the absurd”.
The Pentagon Papers, the Department of Defense’s secret history of that war, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, only underlined the level of that deception under subsequent US presidents.