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https://nypost.com/2023/09/03/gold-star-families-force-biden-to-face-his- failure-in-the-botched-afghanistan-withdrawal/

The families of 13 American service members killed during Joe Biden’s
botched withdrawal from Afghanistan two years ago inserted themselves back
into the country’s conscience last week.

“Not a single person has been held accountable,” said Mark Schmitz, the
father of Marine Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz, one of the 13 heroes killed in
a terrorist bomb blast on Aug. 26, 2021, during the chaotic military
evacuation of Kabul airport. “Our so-called leader can’t seem to even
utter their names in public, not even once.”

The Gold Star families’ unanswered reproach of the president finally found voice when they testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last
week, almost exactly two years after the debacle.

They told their stories eloquently, with dignity, anger and still-raw
pain.

A wrong has been done, no one has been held to account and no lessons have
been learned.

Their pain has been compounded by the memory-holing of that day.

Their tragedy has been suppressed, their inconvenient grief largely
ignored by the media, their stories buried by Google search and the breezy Wikipedia entry on the Afghanistan withdrawal which barely mentions the 13 fallen.

The president has never uttered the names of their loved ones, and after
enough time had passed, proceeded to boast about his success.

‘Disaster’
A new book aims to remedy all that: “Kabul, The Untold Story of Biden’s
Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End,” by former Army
Capt. James Hasson and Washington Examiner reporter Jerry Dunleavy, is a forensic examination of the mistakes that led to the Abbey Gate attack,
advice ignored, cowardice and incompetence at the highest levels and a president’s stubborn insistence that he knew best.

It is hard not to read it without feeling anger, but also respect for the extraordinary courage and competence of members of the US military that
day at Abbey Gate at Kabul Airport.

“Biden did not receive a single military recommendation or intelligence assessment telling him that a full US withdrawal would be anything but a disaster,” the authors say.

The president was advised to keep a small contingent of 2,500 troops to
ensure stability and to keep Bagram Air Base open, but he rejected the
advice.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley “testified
that the military had created options for keeping Bagram open, but Biden
had rejected them.”

Biden and his close advisers were in denial about the untrustworthiness of their Taliban partners.

They were heedless to warnings that Kabul was being surrounded until the
bitter end when they gave the urgent order to evacuate Bagram in the
middle of the night, leaving behind what CNN reported was $7 billion of military equipment.

When bodies of desperate Afghans started falling midair from planes they
had clung onto, the optics panicked the president who then started micromanaging the evacuation, the authors say, changing the mission
midstream, from just getting the troops out to mission impossible,
evacuating basically anyone who showed up to the airport.

The ensuing chaos put our troops needlessly in danger and caused enormous suffering to Afghans who died of heatstroke or whose children were
trampled in the crush of bodies trying to get on the last US planes.

‘We were ignored’
Hours before the attack, there were specific warnings from the CIA of an
ISIS suicide bomber who would be targeting Abbey Gate on Aug. 26, with an accurate description of the man.

A sniper team in a tower at Abbey Gate was providing overwatch while their fellow Marines pulled Americans and Afghan allies to safety.

The sniper, Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, “spotted a suspicious individual
whose appearance matched the description of the bomber nearly verbatim.
[He] requested permission to engage the suspect several times, but his
requests were not granted.”

“Eventually the individual disappeared . . . To this day, we believe he
was the suicide bomber,” Vargas-Andrews said. “Plain and simple, we were ignored.”

The ISIS suicide bomber, Abdul Rahman al-Logari, “stood directly across
from the assembled Marines, and detonated a twenty-pound vest packed with hundreds of 5-millimeter ball bearings,” Hasson and Dunleavy say in their
book.

And who was al-Logari? He was a prisoner who had been released from a jail
at Bagram when the Taliban took over.

“The Biden administration has pointedly refused to say Abdul Rahman al- Logari’s name because of this embarrassing reality,” the authors state.

Biden’s incompetence is widely known — Robert Gates, a respected defense secretary who served in the Obama administration, once famously said, “I
think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Or as Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, reportedly warned his party
before it chose Biden as its 2020 presidential nominee: “Don’t
underestimate Joe’s ability to f—k things up.”

But until the debacle in Kabul, Biden’s callous indifference to the
suffering of other people was less well known.

His entire political career revolved around his supposed endless pool of empathy due to the tragedies in his own life.

‘Disgrace to nation’
But when it came to his inexplicable, ego-driven decisions leading up to
the Kabul disaster, and his reaction to the tragedy as it unfolded, he demonstrated a remarkable absence of empathy.

When Biden met with the families during the dignified transfer of the
bodies of their fallen loved ones at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware,
they were struck by his mawkish insistence on talking about his own son,
Beau Biden, who had not died on active duty but of brain cancer six years
after he came home from a yearlong deployment to Iraq.

Biden compounded his insensitivity by glancing at his watch multiple times
as he stood on the tarmac during the ceremony.

For two years, Schmitz’s anger has simmered, and last week he directed it
at Biden.

“You are a disgrace to this nation,” Schmitz said. “You have no business
having ultimate command over our military, and I regret not saying that to
your face when I had the opportunity in Dover. I felt it more important to
bite my tongue, but I also had more important things on my mind at that
time, like receiving my son’s lifeless body stateside.

“Well, as you can probably tell by now, I’m done biting my tongue. You,
sir, stole their lives, their futures, their dreams and have ripped apart
13 families. You cannot even man up and admit that.”

Patrick Mrowczynski
4 hours ago

81M people voted for VP Biden, and their decision put him into the WH and
in control of the military.

Military commanders told him what would happen with his plans to exit Afghanistan the way he, President Biden wanted.

But that man pressed on. To the death of 13 Americans, and numerous other Afghan allies who fought and basically died for their country.

Our President in response? Nothing. Those people who put him into
office? They're to blame, right?


--
We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.

Durham Report: The FBI has an integrity problem. It has none.

No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.

Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.

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