It was Mark Twain who said, “First get your facts, then distort them.”

The most recent example of this is our top defense, intelligence and executive branch leaders chatting about an upcoming military strike on an unsecured medium, Signal.

So here are the facts that people involved agree with:

• It was an unsecured network.

• The strike was discussed two hours in advance.

• The discussion got out to a person that it shouldn’t have

The art of the spin requires three key components:

1. Select emphasis or significance — “The mission was a success and the entire Signal thing doesn’t matter.”

2. Misdirect and distract — “Hillary Clinton had a Blackberry she used and it wasn’t secure.”

3. Language manipulation — “lt wasn’t ‘secret’ or ‘classified,’ it was ‘private’ and ‘sensitive.’ ”

The questions you can’t spin away are:

• Would a two-hour advance notice have an effect or put U.S. personnel in peril during the raid on Osama Bin Laden?

• Would a two-hour advance notice have changed the outcome of 9/11 or Pearl Harbor?

I supported JD Vance and generally agreed with the positions of Marco Rubio. They should have directly admitted their errors, apologized and promised to never repeat. Instead they chose to spin.

Anthony Marks

Penn Township, Westmoreland County

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