| In 2007, a suicide bomber detonated his vest 30 minutes before the vice president arrived at Bagram air base. U.S. military officials downplayed the event, saying Cheney was a mile away and never in danger. But in a previously undisclosed Army oral-history interview, a company commander responsible for security at Bagram confirmed that word had leaked out about Cheney's presence. The suicide bomber, he added, saw a convoy and blew himself up because he mistakenly thought Cheney was a passenger. By lying about how close the insurgents had come to harming Cheney, the U.S. military sank deeper into a pattern of deceiving the public about many facets of the war, from discrete events to the big picture. This account is adapted from "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War," a Washington Post book written by Craig Whitlock that will be published Aug. 31 by Simon & Schuster. | 
