Epilogue: Truth Is the First Casualty

September 10, 2021

In war, truth is the first casualty.

It’s a military maxim attributed to Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy. In the lead up to the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and ahead of the withdrawal from a war that became the longest in American history, GroundTruth’s founder Charlie Sennott returns to Afghanistan and revisits a conflict he has covered on the ground since its first battles, and its first casualties.

Two decades later, amid an American departure from Afghanistan that many have compared to the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, Sennott examines the two conflicts: the government’s lies and deceptions about Vietnam revealed by Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, the lessons left unheeded by American leaders during the Afghan war, and why it took us so long to see the mounting lies of that war.

This episode concludes The Whistleblower, the 10th season of the GroundTruth Podcast, which began with the award-winning series Foreverstan, on-the-ground reporting from Afghanistan examining the first 14 years of the war. Listen to GroundTruth’s first season: https://bit.ly/Foreverstan-uma