When we kill the innocent.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today’s read: 7 minutes.

On August 29th, just a few days after a devastating ISIS-K suicide bombing killed more than a hundred people in Afghanistan, the American press began reporting a successful retaliatory strike.

Here is the lede from a Reuters article that day:

American forces launched a drone strike in Kabul on Sunday that killed a suicide car bomber suspected of preparing to attack the airport, U.S. officials said, as the United States nears the end of its military presence in the Afghan capital. 

The strike, first reported by Reuters, was the second carried out by U.S. forces in Afghanistan since an Islamic State suicide bomber struck the airport on Thursday, killing 13 U.S. troops and scores of Afghan civilians trying to flee the country.

One U.S. official said Sunday's strike was carried out by an unmanned aircraft and that secondary explosions following the strike showed the vehicle had been carrying a “substantial amount of explosive material.”

The official U.S. military story, which was repeated dutifully by much of the press in the ensuing hours after the strike, described a potential ISIS-K threat who had been seen loading explosives into his car, and had even stopped at an ISIS-K safehouse.

We are now fairly certain, however, that this entire story is fiction.

Instead, it appears the Reaper drone that leveled an imminent ISIS-K threat planning to bomb the Kabul airport actually killed Zemari Ahmadi, a 43-year-old veteran aid worker for a U.S.-based company who was, in all likelihood, one of the many Afghans attempting to flee to the United States. Along with Ahmadi, nine other civilians were killed, including seven children.

We know this not because the Pentagon has acknowledged its “mistake” — to use a word that does not fit the crime — but because of the dogged reporting of journalists on the ground and the Afghan civilians who have spoken