In more than 30 cases, The Post determined the identities of people who were interviewed by the context of what they said and through additional reporting. The Post has asked a federal judge to order SIGAR to disclose all the redacted information, arguing that there is a compelling public interest in knowing which government officials criticized the war and the full scope of what they said. SIGAR also redacted substantial portions of what people said in the interviews, as well as some information that was later classified by the State Department, Defense Department and Drug Enforcement Administration. SIGAR redacted most of the names of the people it interviewed, citing a variety of FOIA privacy exemptions. The Washington Post obtained the Lessons Learned interview documents from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) after filing multiple public-records requests beginning in 2016, and two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits. Together, the interviews and the Rumsfeld memos reveal a secret, unvarnished history of the conflict and offer new insights into how three presidential administrations have failed for nearly two decades to deliver on their promises to end the war. Known as “snowflakes,” the memos are brief instructions or comments that the Pentagon leader dictated to his underlings as the war unfolded. Rumsfeld from the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute. To augment the previously undisclosed interviews, The Post also obtained hundreds of confidential memos by former defense secretary Donald H. Those interviews reveal there was no consensus on the war’s objectives, let alone how to end the conflict. After a three-year legal battle, The Washington Post won release of more than 2,000 pages of “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The full, unsparing remarks and the identities of many of those who made them have never been made public - until now. In those interviews, generals, ambassadors, diplomats and other insiders offered firsthand accounts of the mistakes that have prolonged the war. As part of a government project to understand what went wrong, a federal agency interviewed more than 400 people who had a direct role in the conflict. For 18 years, America has been at war in Afghanistan.
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