Last week, we lived through the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle caused by our feckless President Joe Biden and the benign leadership of “Yes Men” in the Pentagon that did not stand firm against their boss who gave them a ridiculous set of instructions for how to withdraw our people out of the country. Sadly, no one has resigned.
According to the State Department, Biden officials directed federal agencies to scrub their websites of official reports detailing the $82.9 billion in military equipment and training provided to the Afghan security forces since 2001.
A lot of talk has been going around the Internet about Biden handing the Taliban terrorists billions of dollars of US military equipment, so to remedy that, instead of sending in troops to get the equipment back, the Biden people just hid the evidence. Problem solved in their eyes.
To be clear, the audits and reports that were deleted from government websites included detailed accounting records of the equipment that the United States provided to Afghanistan’s army right down to the number of night vision goggles, vehicles, rifles, and hand grenades.
Some of the data provided on the reports that the Biden administration just hid from the American people, who paid for all of it, include the following:
208 aircraft and helicopters
75,000 war vehicles – including 22,000 Humvees, 50,000 tactical vehicles and nearly 1,000 mine resistant vehicles
600,000 weapons – including 350,000 M4 and M16 rifles, 60,000 machine guns, and 25,000 grenade launchers
The gaslighting of the State Department was to admit they removed the reports, but the reason departments were to give was to protect Afghan allies.
A State Department spokesperson said, “The safety of our Afghan contacts is of utmost importance to us. The State Department advised other federal agencies of to [sic] review their web properties for content that highlights cooperation/participation between an Afghan citizen and the USG or a USG partner and remove from public view if it poses a security risk.”
But the Biden administration already put these people at risk when they handed over lists of Afghan nationals to the Taliban terrorists, thinking that was a great way to clear them for evacuation. Why? Because the Biden administration handed over the security detail for the Kabul airport to the Taliban instead of our military.
If you wanted to come up with a list of ways in which Joe Biden and his administration could have screwed things up in the Afghanistan withdrawal even worse, there’s nothing they left to chance. They covered it all. Every possible bad decision that could be made was made.
To prove the administration lied about scrubbing the equipment information to protect our allies, there are items that were scrubbed that have no information about human beings.
From OpenTheBooks.com:
#1. Government Accountability Office (GAO): OpenTheBooks.com reposted an audit of U.S. provided military gear in Afghanistan (August 2017) after it was removed from its official location.
#2. Special Inspector General For Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR): OpenTheBooks.com reposted an audit of $174 million in lost ScanEagle drones (July 2020) after the report was removed from its official location.
American taxpayers paid for these audits and the equipment we gave to the Afghans. Americans have the right to follow the money trail so that they can hold any administration accountable. But accountability is not in the Biden administration’s vocabulary.
The GAO confirmed they got the directive: “The State Department requested we temporarily remove and review reports on Afghanistan to protect recipients of US assistance that may be identified through our reports and thus subject to retribution.” Bullschtein. If they really cared about these people being harmed, they wouldn’t have left so many of them behind.
SIGAR also admitted the agency pulled reports offline.
“In recent days, some SIGAR reports have been temporarily removed from the agency’s public website due to ongoing security concerns in accordance with guidance received from the U.S. Department of State. This is in line with actions taken by other U.S. federal agencies and is out of an abundance of caution.”
Out of an abundance of caution? Where was that abundance of caution when the administration abandoned Bagram Air Base and handed Kabul airport security over to the Taliban? Where was the abundance of caution when the administration decided to hand all of this military equipment over to a terrorist group?
The directive clearly wasn’t crafted to protect our Afghan allies. There is one site that has not removed a reporting that details Afghan forces by rank. That report could be used by the illiterate goat herders with US military weaponry as a retribution list.
They scrubbed the lists to cover up the voluminous amount of military hardware we handed over to a brutal terrorist regime.
How can the Biden administration get away with such a bogus excuse?
Can you imagine what would have happened if the Trump administration started hiding government reports of military equipment they gave to an enemy and tried to give lame excuses for doing it? It would be a lead story on every cable news channel every night for a month.
Could handing over billions in military equipment to the Taliban be considered giving aid and comfort to the enemy?
