CBS Excoriates Biden, Exposing the 'Whitewash' in the Afghanistan Report
If you listen to CBS when it comes to the new Afghanistan report released by the Biden Administration on the debacle of a withdrawal, you might think they had been red-pilled because their response to it was so true — and so scathing.
The “report” is a summary of two classified reports that the Biden team only turned over to Congress after a subpoena threat by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-TX). That’s how little they think of our right to know about an issue so important — and how much they want to cover things up so it doesn’t come back and hit Joe Biden in the face as he considers whether to run again in 2024.
As I already reported, CBS’ Margaret Brennan was busting the Biden “Baghdad Bob” lies. But there was even more, such as in this report.
McCaul said the Biden Administration owed answers to the American people and their families.
Marine Lance Corporal Jared Schmitz’s father, Mark Schmitz, said they deserved so much more than what they got in the report, and that the 12-page summary that was released “was an insult.” Schmitz said that the “buck stops” with Joe Biden, it’s his responsibility, and he should “stop making excuses.”
CBS’s Margaret Brennan pointed out how they dropped this on a holiday weekend, and there were no plans to give out any of the further details that were in the classified reports. She was asked, “Was there anything missing from this summary?” “Yes,” she replied, noting that they left out a July report showing the Taliban was making “rapid territorial gains” and recommending that the evacuation be sped up. So when they say now that they had no warning this shows that was just a lie — and they knew it. She also explains that they left out any reference to the dissent of the military to Biden’s withdrawal actions. Biden did this over the objections of his military commanders, Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East; Gen. Austin Scott Miller, who led NATO forces in Afghanistan; and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They likely knew what would happen with how Biden was doing it, yet he ignored their recommendations.
It wasn’t just Brennan who excoriated the Biden team. CBS Senior White House and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe blasted the Biden Administration’s attempt to “whitewash” the situation as well.
O’Keefe said the account blamed Trump, and they only acknowledged a mistake “once” in the ridiculously brief report — when it came to where they gunned down 10 civilians, mostly children, in a drone strike. “That is the one time we see the word ‘mistake’ on an incident in all of this,” he said.
“But it spends three and a half pages laying it out and saying it’s the Trump administration’s fault,” O’Keefe said.
“National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said they were going to do a ‘hot wash’, which is a fancy bureaucratic term for a deep dive into what went wrong. This 12 page document is a whitewash,” O’Keefe declared.
O’Keefe went on to further slam the shoddiness of the document.
“It is narrative. It is light on specifics. It’s devoid of citations. And it is, in essence, their version of events,” he said.
He also called it a “watered down, neutered cleansing” that was dropped on the “high holidays.”
They are of course right on the money. Now, it’s up to Congress to respond to this “whitewash” when they come back into session next week. The failure to take accountability for any of this is an insult to the American people, particularly those who died and their families.
Just before the weekend, the Biden administration dropped their report on the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle. Reporters were furious that it was dropped in classic “dump” before the holiday weekend, indeed 10 minutes before their press briefing with National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby.
Kirby’s response? It was the “responsible thing to do.” He then went on to shamefully say Joe Biden was “proud” of the withdrawal and the purpose of the report wasn’t “accountability.” It never is with Biden, and they don’t want to hold anyone involved in their horrible decisions accountable, especially Biden.
Instead, they tried to blame former President Donald Trump and the Afghan army. Kirby said that they were restricted by the timeline that Trump had put in place. That wasn’t true, since they changed the timeline that had been in place from May to Sept. 11 for the withdrawal. He also denied there was chaos in the withdrawal, in an incredible denial of reality. Fox’s Peter Doocy nailed him repeatedly during the questioning.
But there was also a great question from Newsmax’s James Rosen that I didn’t want you to miss. It says a lot about the conflict, in what they are trying to sell us here. As we noted, they want to sell the fiction that this was somehow a success and something to be proud of, while at the same time blaming Trump for the very real disaster. So, which is it? It doesn’t add up. Rosen grills him on blaming Trump and just decimates him here.
Rosen said they blamed Trump for bad policies. “Bad outcomes,” Kirby responded. But there weren’t “bad outcomes” under Trump; the bad outcomes were all under Biden. When Trump was in office he worked a deal where no one was killed by the Taliban, while keeping a minimal number of troops in Afghanistan. Biden managed to wreck that.
Rosen said, according to Kirby’s remarks, Biden was holding Trump, the Afghans, and the intelligence community all at some fault for Biden not knowing how to respond properly in this situation. Rosen concluded, “You’re describing him [Biden] as a figure almost helpless, and shaped and buffeted by individuals and forces and entities that are beyond his control.” As Rosen explains, Biden had every option to increase troops. He did change the date, so he didn’t care about changing the timing with the Taliban in that respect. He also made it a point of tossing under the bus all kinds of Trump decisions, so this was just nonsense and it wasn’t Trump’s decisions that caused this. Rosen said he didn’t understand why Kirby was willing to depict Biden as “so helpless.”
Now, that was a great question, and it put Kirby completely on the spot. The reason is a simple one. Because they would rather blame anyone else and make Biden appear helpless than admit not only was he incompetent, but 13 Americans and more than 100 Afghans were killed because of him. Our adversaries took all kinds of notice of this, and that’s part of the reason they’re on the move now.
But there’s something even worse. As I wrote two years ago in August 2021, the debacle may have been—on some level—intentional. Biden has been wanting to pull out for years, long before he came into office. He reportedly did it against the advice of his top military commanders. What he said in the past reveals that he didn’t give a darn about leaving the allies hanging out in the wind, and he didn’t feel he had any obligation to them.
As we noted at the time, citing to a report from The Atlantic:
Warning: contains coarse language
In 2010, he told RICHARD HOLBROOKE, Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, that the U.S. had to leave Afghanistan regardless of the consequences for women or anyone else. According to Holbrooke’s diary, when he asked about American obligations to Afghans like the girl in the Kabul school, Biden replied with a history lesson from the final U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia… ‘F**k that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.’”
Then let’s go back to that time and what Biden did at the end of the Vietnam War, when Ford went to Congress and said he needed some money to help get the allies—who we had committed to and had helped us during the war—out. One of the strongest voices against that was Joe Biden, who said, “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals.” Within a couple of weeks, Saigon fell, the helicopters were on the roofs, and our allies were left to be butchered by the North Vietnamese. Some escaped but many others did not, and Joe Biden was once again wrong.
You can tell how aggrieved Biden was during the withdrawal debacle that anyone would dare to criticize him. After all, “Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.” How could anyone now be attacking him? That’s why I wrote at the time he seemed sociopathic, repeatedly insisting he was right.
He didn’t fail to plan. It sounds like the plan was always just to leave, whoever was left.
But helpless, incompetent, and/or deliberate—they show a man who endangers us all. Voters should show him the door for any of those reasons, and so many more.
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