Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst, has suggested that al Qaeda is winning the honesty war against the United States in a piece entitled “Is al Qaeda outdoing the U.S. on truth telling?” While on first blush the suggestion might seem like partisan slander, a look at Bergen’s argument reveals an unsettling truth: we may be losing the honesty war to al Qaeda due to our secret, and unaccountable, drone program. To make his point, Bergen compares two recent, and accidental, civilian massacres by each side, and how each side dealt with the situation. Unfortunately for the Obama administration, Bergen’s example demonstrates how we have become a nation so secretive in the region that we are incapable of apologizing for our mistakes, much less acknowledge them:
When Gen. David Petraeus was U.S. commander in Afghanistan in 2010 he issued guidance to his troops, one of the key points of which was to “be first with the truth.” Yet, in Yemen where the U.S. has been fighting a small, undeclared war for the past four years, we have now arrived at the ironic point where America’s main enemy there, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is doing a better job of truth telling than the U.S.
In a video message released on Sunday, a leader of al Qaeda in Yemen apologized for an attack on a hospital in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa earlier this month in which civilians were killed …