I was paralyzed with self-loathing that I might have just done something I (rightly) deplored.

Recently on Facebook, I copied and reposted a piece about the deaths of the four US soldiers in Niger.  A good friend had put it on his Facebook page.

I read the post and was outraged.  I copied, pasted and posted…adding “horrific” to the lead-in.

I felt it was important to do so.  The message of the post seemed particularly important to me as something that cut through the noise of the issue: that the current president’s bewildering and reprehensible handling of the aftermath—while dismaying and frankly sickening—was a distraction; that there was more going on.

The issues in the post were:

• We had ignored (or had not consulted!) our intelligence experts;
• Our troops have been systematically neglected and undermined;
• Communication is abysmal or nonexistent.
• Years of outsourcing key portions of military operations (for private gain) and years of scrimping on equipment have left our fighting men and women exposed to greater danger than they already would be.
• As a result, four soldiers are dead.

A number of Facebook friends “liked” the post and shared it.  Two friends, however, asked me what the source(s) were.  They were themselves aghast at the criminal level of ineptitude described in the post, but the points about contractors and the French was new information, and they wanted to understand its provenance before reposting themselves.

Which is what I should have done.

The insidiousness of fake news is that it can work directly as dis-information; and, more subtly, it can also serve to undermine the very notion of truth.  In the past, I’ve been more than happy to repost the debunking of fallacious stories propagated by reactionary wingnuts.

In this instance I was paralyzed with self-loathing that I might have just done something I (rightly) deplore just because it fit the kinds of things that make me angry.  Because if I had just reposted something dubious, I was giving reactionaries a cudgel with which to strike at the battered and bloodied notion of truth, where they could say, “See? No one has regard for the truth. It’s just as we [the reactionaries] say:  it’s all about your perspective and outrage…and everyone does it.”

I started tracing the story—now well after the fact.  It seems to have started on a man named Bob Lamb’s Facebook page.  I saw it picked up in the comments/forum section on Talking Points Memo (TPM), which referred to him.  From there, it bounced around, and was reposted by me…and others.

I regret reposting what seems now to be “truthy.”

Here is the full text of the post.  The notes in square brackets are mine.

While everyone is so busy talking about Trump’s handling of his call to the widow of the soldier killed in Niger, you’re all missing the important part of that story — the part about what happened that night in Niger.

The story that is emerging is so much worse than anything that happened in Benghazi, but the same GOP Congress that investigated Benghazi with a fury seems to have little or no interest in this story.

Here’s what we know so far:

These soldiers went to a meeting in an area near the border with Mali. This is a well known hot spot for ISIS activity. [true. this is backed up by everything I’ve now read.]

Our soldiers were not backed up by US Military air support. No, they were backed up by the French, who were not authorized to intervene or even fire a shot. [this was the original reporting, but it now seems that the French pilots were not asked to engage out of fear of “friendly fire.”]

Our soldiers did not have armored vehicles. They traveled in pickup trucks. [true]

Our soldiers were given faulty intel that said “it was unlikely that they would meet any hostile forces.” Of course, they walked into an ISIS ambush. It was chaotic and they took three casualties. [this is an odd part: the various reports say the soldiers knew it was an ISIS hotspot and had gone to the village to speak with one of the village elders.]

It took the French 30 minutes to arrive. [they were called in for support about an hour into the fight and by all accounts arrived quickly.]

When they did, they were not authorized to help. [by the troops on the ground, who were fighting at close quarters and didn’t want to risk “friendly fire (see above)] So, a dozen of our Green Berets fought a battle with more than 50 ISIS fighters, without help, for 30 minutes.

Finally, a rescue helicopter arrived, but it was not a US military helicopter. [I can find no reporting confirming this point.]

No, we apparently outsourced that job to “private contractors.” So, these contractors landed and loaded the remaining troops, the injured and the dead.

Here’s where this gets really bad ….

Because they were not military, they never did a head count. That is how Sgt. La David Johnson was left behind. [again, I’ve seen no reporting that confirms this]

That’s right …. they left him behind.  [they did leave him behind, but why they did so remains an open question]

According to the Pentagon, his locator beacon was activated on the battlefield, which indicates that he was alive when they left him there.

They recovered his body 48 hours later, but are refusing to say where. According to his widow, she was told that she could not have an open casket funeral. This indicates that he was mutilated after being left behind on the battlefield.  [it indicates that his body is not viewable; the reason is speculative]

This is what led to the nonsense we’re obsessing over. This is the real story. As usual, you’re allowing it to be about Trump’s distraction, but this is Benghazi on steroids.

The Trump Pentagon gave these men bad intel, no support, outsourced rescue people and then tried for more than a week to pretend it never happened.  [our soldiers clearly had bad intelligence…]

In that time, Trump spoke on many occasions and never mentioned it. He tweeted attacks on many but never mentioned these men. [true]

Only after pressure from the media has he bothered to even acknowledge these men and their service

Please share, copy and paste. [which  I did]

#worsethanbenghazi

The post above indulges in “truthiness.”  There is much that’s wrong and unknown about what happened, and our soldiers and their families deserve better.  However, they—and we—are not served by adding seemingly true statements that fit our version of the facts.

I intensely regret my part in propagating this cynical pabulum.  If any of the unsupported claims here turn out to be true, they will need addressing.  In the end, it may be that these deaths are worse than what happened in Benghazi. It may be that out-sourced “contractors” left a man behind to die.  It is true that we don’t properly support our military.  But when outrage rides in on an obviously stolen horse, we would all do well to ask a few questions before rallying to follow it.

The current administration supplies us with a daily diet of callous cruelty and bumptious, self-dealing ineptitude. Adding in false claims undermines the very real effort to resist.

I thank the two friends who reminded me.

John Le Carre’s new novel, A Legacy of Spies—his 24th!—is due out September 5th; and I can’t wait. I’ve read a number of reviews, and they only make me more eager to get my hands on it. When summing up, the reviews I’ve read talk a good deal about how Le Carre’s books fit into and inform our popular understanding of the Cold War—and how this latest goes back over that ground to assess what it is, and what we gained, if anything. Ned Resnikoff’s piece in ThinkProgress is superb.

On the one hand, during the Cold War, the “enemy” is implacable, inscrutable, and ruthless. On the other, we have to confront what we become in opposing it. As the head of the Circus, Control, notes to Alec Leamus in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: “I mean, you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?” Le Carre’s work evokes a world that’s not about good vs. evil, or light vs. dark, but about those who toil in the penumbra. Legacy examines what we did, why we did it, and whether we gained anything by it.

Which brings us to today, and the forces we confront. Oliver Sachs has said the object is always “to write–intelligently, creatively, evocatively–about what it’s like living in the world at this time.”

So what is it like to write now, post Cold War, when the world is atomized, hued rather than shaded, and (for all its bluster) nuanced?

Today, we see the growth of authoritarianism even among nations with a democratic pedigree and wonder how, why? Edward Luce’s book, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, has much to say on this point. Harry Cheadle interviews Luce in Vice (from May).

Though he doesn’t use the term in the interview, Luce describes what political scientists call “constitutional order” breaking down across the world, not just in the US, and not merely with regard to standards and tenets of the Constitution, but in the myriad ways people express and uphold their understanding of right and wrong, of what can and can’t be done. The rhetoric and actions, the divisions between left and right become ever more stark and severe. Hostility reigns. The ideal of moderation or compromise—even just getting along—seems increasingly problematic. Those taking sides feel that normal politics—that which constituted their understanding of how the world works—has failed, and they must win absolutely. How did we get here? We got here the way we get anywhere: one step at a time.

I started this literary journey some 20 years ago. When I first fully understood the workings of the Electoral College, I found it disturbing, ripe for mischief. The broad outlines of a conspiracy to upend the supposed result quickly took form. But who would do such a thing? I asked myself.

Even twenty years ago, those with wealth, position and power saw that the then-current constitutional order didn’t allow them to do what they wanted, and they grew impatient. They’d tried buying candidates, tried influencing elections, but the constitutional order was too diffuse (or too robust). Then, they tried motivating and mobilizing discontent from outside the parties in groups the parties had to address. This was movement politics of a kind, but only insofar as it articulated opposition. Those in the various movements weren’t a political party, so there was no ideology at work, only a petulant, reactionary reflex. This opposition meant that a group who could stoke the sense of aggrievement needed only to demonstrate their agreement in order to subvert order and exercise control. They can’t command a majority, but as the only seeming power in amongst the squabbling, they would be able to issue central directives beneficial to them and have them executed—an authoritarianism without ideas.

I won’t claim I saw all of this twenty years ago, but I worried about what I saw (and see) happening, and I wrote about it. I wanted to examine how a well-heeled, anti-democratic force might rise to power. Faithless Elector was the product.

Over the years, some 40 agents and editors rejected Faithless Elector. Those who were kind enough to write something more than “thank you, no, this is not right for us” (one had a rubber stamp which said just that) praised the writing, the characters, but all said something like “too obscure,” or “too improbable,” or “no one knows anything about the Electoral College, much less how it could be manipulated.” It isn’t obscure now; they know now. And the petulant class is closer to cementing its power.

This is the world we’re in now, the world writers must intelligently, creatively, evocatively confront. It’s the world my characters inhabit. It’s the world Imogen Trager and Duncan Calder push back against. In Faithless Elector, Calder tumbles to the fact that the conspirators can’t be from within either major party; in Dark Network, Imogen grows concerned about what the extra-judicial methods she uses to expose the conspirators and collaborators means for her own principals.

Taken together, the books—Faithless Elector, Dark Network and Consent of the Governed—aren’t meant as prophecy. And it’s not that the conflict is coming, but that it’s here, and we’ve very nearly lost. My work is about ordinary people risking their lives, toiling to uphold and preserve the constitutional order.