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"Which is a legitimate crisis for a guy like me, who has spent my whole life more-or-less believing what I read in the Times and the Post."

I went through that crisis about 1.5 years ago, and ever since then have felt very foolish for not having gone through it more like 20 years ago. After many painful months, I think I've finally made it to step 7 of the grieving process: Acceptance. The Times and the Post are simply not to be believed. I've accepted it. It sounds to me like you're still back on step 5: Anger. Best of luck with your journey. It's an uncertain and disconcerting world on the other side, but at least it's real.

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I’ve been in the room while higher ranking dudes were debating about blowing up people they couldn’t see very well- it was a PGM from an Apache team and not a drone, but the process of wrestling with lack of info and trying to interpret what little you have is similar.

The only two things I am sure of are-

That the primary victim was innocent, because if he’d had so much as a cousin in law who did business with a baddie the DoD would have screamed it from the rooftops to prove he was ISIS. The fact that they aren’t claiming vindication means that he wasn’t plotting a bomb attack.

And two-

They had some piece of data indicating that this guy in particular was plotting the second bomb attack. Some informant somewhere gave that address, they caught some radio traffic matching his vehicle, they scanned the city for anybody loading suspicious stuff, who knows. But they didn’t just throw a dart at the map of Kabul and sent a Hellfire wherever it landed, there was SOMETHING. That piece of data was wrong (as per above), but it was present.

So what we’re looking at is a decision made with limited intelligence (obvious army joke is obvious) and high stakes. There were still thousands of would-be refugees camped out by the airport, possibly the juiciest target ever in the history of the country. Our armed forces were still horribly exposed, entirely dependent on the good faith of the Taliban just to stay alive, let alone operate the air lifts. And if you have evidence that this guy over here is loading up a VBIED, exactly where do you draw the line between “the evidence is good enough to waste him” and “the evidence is too weak to waste him over”?

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What depresses me about today's post is to learn that General Milley actually talks like this:

“Secondly is we know that there was secondary explosions. Because there was secondary explosions, there's a reasonable conclusion to be made that there was explosives in that vehicle.”

Did he never have to write a paper at West Point that would be graded by an adult? I can forgive him being confused over who and whom, but now I'm guessing he is one of those people who writes "Your welcome!" in reply to someone online.

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Same as it ever was.

Just look at the recent wave of opprobrium of the Afghanistan withdrawal, some presented as straight reporting or "analysis"; or the credulous reporting on Russian bounties in Afghanistan before that; or, going back further, the infamous mainstream conspiracy theories about Iraq having WMD; or, still earlier, the bogus Nayirah testimony. If you want a domestic example, take the moral panic about crack babies. The NYT editorial board eventually admitted that the NYT and Washington Post had "demonized black women" "by wrongly reporting" on them birthing a generation of "less than fully human" kids (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/28/opinion/crack-babies-racism.html).

The core difficulty here is that getting information is costly (whether in terms of time or money or effort), so it's intrinsically costly to try independently checking reporting for yourself. You're not gonna fly to Kabul to fact-check what you read about Afghanistan. As such, the people getting the news are unlikely to closely scrutinize all of the news, or even most of the news, so news organizations and reporters intuit that they can get away with spin and dubious reporting.

I see no easy solution. (Legacy news organizations are woefully flawed, but replacing them with extremely-online axe-grinding kooks is not obviously an improvement.) There is a partial solution, but it's a pain in the ass so few apply it consistently: read and watch as broadly as possible, cross-check sources against each other, and then also compare what they claim to your own understanding of how the world works. And of course that relies on you having a competent mental model of the world in the first place, so there's a bootstrapping problem as well; if you have a badly broken model already, you're probably just screwed. Very much an imperfect solution.

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The thing i’m most interested in is what these elite newspapers’ angle is. It’s not simply a knee-jerk “democrats good” thing as the right wing media would have it, or anti-military thing as far as I can tell; they seem to have joined in the universal piling-on against Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal as much as the rest of the american news media. It’s hard to tell if it’s a matter of competing interests from within the institutions or if the overarching ideology is more coherent and just hard to understand in total.

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Have you read this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women ? I found it distressingly revealing. And excellent reporting. Maybe in no small part because *the guy was actually there.*

As a regular person with limited time and interest, I can say that headlines matter greatly. I was never a good headline writer in my former life as an editor and personal blogger, because I didn't go for the catchy stuff. The Times knew exactly what they were doing with that headline, and with burying the teensy weensie expert disagreement at the end of a long article.

Admittedly my first thought was: unless the car was a Tesla, of course there were "explosives" on board. But when I read the final expert's statement, I realized "hmm, I've never seen a drone strike and what it does to a vehicle."

I'm reminded of my favorite John McEnroe quote, which he just said last week while commenting on what he perceived as a mistake by Novak Djokovic in the US Open semifinals: "But he's won 20 grand slams, so what the hell do I know?"

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Thanks for your close reading and critical analysis. May I just point out that your objection is about levels of certainty based on the evidence gathered. For instance it may easily be true that the Pentagon chose the car they did based on what turned out to be water jugs, realized their problem, and made up a timeline to try to cover their asses. As you note, their credibility doesn't put them above doing this. It's just that the Times doesn't have direct evidence that's what they did

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