The email below was sent Sep. 12 to Washington Post reporters Alex Horton, Sarah Cahlan, Dalton Bennett, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Meg Kelly and Elyse Samuels. Their important story exposing the U.S. military’s recent drone strike in Afghanistan as yet another example of Biden administration incompetence was published online Friday, Sep. 10. But their editors, several of whom were copied on this email, have chosen thus far to keep the story out of the Post’s arguably more visible and influential print editions.
Dear Alex, Sarah, Dalton, Joyce, Meg and Elyse,
Thanks to your work and that of a few other actual journalists elsewhere (see NYTimes, NPR and The Guardian), everyone now understands that our military’s desperately political, wag-the-dog drone strike on Aug. 29, killing innocent children and adults carrying water in their vehicle, not explosives, was about as “righteous” and competently executed as was the entire U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan [“ Examining a ‘righteous’ strike,” online only, Sep. 10]. Perhaps not since Pickett’s charge have military leaders made such foolish, ill-timed decisions that squandered the lives of troops and innocents.
Yet as far as I can tell (and please correct me if I’m wrong), Post editors have decided to keep your story – a very rare example these days of supposedly “mainstream” media reporting critically on the Biden administration – out of Post print editions. I realize the fancy online video and interactive illustrations you created can’t translate to ink on paper. But surely your text and photos could have been readily adapted for a story placed prominently across the top of Saturday’s front page. That it wasn’t, and that potential readers now, just two days later, have to go out of their way to find it online, may leave many with the impression that editors actually feel sheepish about reporting accurately on the Biden administration’s incompetence and fecklessness, and would prefer to limit the story’s visibility.
Nonetheless, and despite this willful suppression, I’m hopeful your honorable, let-the-political-chips-fall-where-they-may reporting can now help persuade at least a few on the lockstep left – those who reflexively fill the Post’s online comment boards with DNC talking points and ad hominem attacks – to join more thoughtful, objective Americans in demanding resignations from high-ranking leaders at the Pentagon and State Dept.
Had these leaders not been so consumed with their partisan witch hunt for ” white rage” and ” political extremism” within our service ranks, and confessing America’s sins to the likes of China’s dungeon masters and the oxymoronic U.N. Commission on Human Rights, upon which China, Russia and other gulag states sit, perhaps they’d have had the time and wherewithal to properly advise and prevent our twilighting president from making the calamitous decisions he’s made about Afghanistan.
Secretary Austin, Secretary Blinken and General Milley, all of whom failed miserably in their principal tasks, should have delivered their resignations to the president yesterday, giving him an ad-lib opportunity to salvage the Sep. 11 “Day of Remembrance” as the turn-the-page day it was originally scripted to be. The president can still accept their resignations as a means to making if not a silk purse out of this sow’s ear, then at least a decent Chinese knockoff.
If several heads don’t roll after the exposure of this add-on drone disaster, which military leaders apparently still defend, the independent and moderate Republican voters who tired of President Trump’s ignorance and bombast and gave President Biden his win last November will regret their choice more than they already do and surely wash away Democrats’ razor-thin congressional majorities next year. You should make this outside-the-newsroom reality clear to seemingly out-of-touch senior editors and urge them to get on the right side of history by demanding accountability for the Afghan debacle. Partisanship be damned.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.