'The Five' question if Biden lied during 'disturbing' national address
The president claims Americans are not having trouble getting to Kabul airport as Pentagon responds to claims Taliban is beating Americans
Will President Joe Biden’s matching calamities — in Afghanistan and at the US-Mexico border — merge into the mother of all epic fails? Cross your fingers, cross your toes, and hope otherwise.
Biden inherited from President Donald J. Trump a tough, terrorist-shredding nation at peace, through strength. Seven months later, Biden’s breathtakingly bungled Afghan retreat has imperiled some 15,000
Americans now trying to slip the Taliban’s toxic grip on the Hamid Karzai International Airport. Biden’s feeble, aloof fumbles have shriveled America into a paper kitten.
Meanwhile, "the Taliban has released thousands of prisoners from detention facilities, including the Pul-e-Charkhi prison in Kabul and at Bagram Air Base," congressmen John Katko of New York, Texas’ Michael McCaul, and Alabama’s Mike Rogers wrote National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Tuesday.
The ranking Republicans on, respectively, the House committees on Homeland Security, Foreign Affairs, and Armed Service added: "Prisoners reported to have been held in these detention facilities include thousands of Taliban fighters, senior Al-Qaeda operatives, Islamic State Afghanistan (ISKP) members, and former Guantanamo Bay detainees — all of whom pose serious concern to the security of the United States."
The way that this terrorist release unfolded instills zero confidence in Biden as a military planner or tactician.
"In the early hours of July 4, the Americans pulled out of Bagram base unannounced, leaving it open to looters," The Times of London’s Catherine Philp wrote Sunday. "Afghan guards on the perimeter had no notice that they were about to leave, a decision Washington defended as security-led."
Biden’s Irish-exit strategy left America’s Afghan partners confused and demoralized. This instability made Bagram that much easier for the Taliban to seize. This triggered the instant-clemency program for terrorists that has set hands wringing around the world.
Hard facts on those now free are elusive: Relevant documents tend to be secret. If declassified, they are heavily redacted or maddeningly dated.
Also, critics such as investigative journalist Andy Worthington argue that bitter rivals falsely accused some inmates, while innocents got vacuumed into custody with the guilty.
Still, available details about these just-liberated terrorists and suspects should keep Americans sleepless in Seattle — and beyond.
•Mohammed Amin al-Bakri is a Yemeni captured in Thailand. A U.S. Detainee Review Board urged his incarceration as an "Enduring Security Threat."
•Abu Ikhlas al-Masri of Egypt was "al Qaeda’s operations chief for Kunar province," The Long War Journal reports.
•Gulam Rabbani Abu Bakr, according to the UK’s Birmingham Post, led the al Qaeda-tied Hizb-e-Islami Gulbeddin and is "believed to have been behind a series of car bombings in Kabul."
•Irek Hamidullan, a Russian Tatar Muslim, practiced jihad in Chechnya before allegedly supporting multiple attacks in Afghanistan that injured and killed American GIs.
•Abdul Jabbar, per The State of the Taliban, is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan’s "Deputy Commander Kunduz Province."
•Fazel Karim allegedly helped kidnap and behead the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl.
•Haji Pacha Wazir reportedly laundered millions of dollars, pro bono al-Qaeda.
•British Army Gurkhas caught Malang Zafar after he tried to ram them with a truck. This "chief of operations" for an Islamofascist terror group is suspected of masterminding a bus-bomb attack that murdered four German soldiers.
These could be distant distractions, notwithstanding that al Qaeda hatched and nurtured the September 11 conspiracy while guests of the Taliban. But the now-freed boys of Bagram are a clear and present danger to America, thanks to the president’s other mega-catastrophe: Biden has transformed Trump’s largely controlled southern frontier into an immigration superhighway.
Illegal aliens are racing through gaps in the wall whose construction Biden ordered stopped on Day One of his tenure. Things have rocketed downhill since.
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Last month, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered 212,672 illegal aliens at the southwest boundary — a 21-year high — up 419.6 percent versus July 2020.
Since February, 1,035,352 illegals were nabbed at the US-Mexico line — up 458.2 percent versus a year ago, under Trump. In Texas, 40 percent of illegal aliens reaching Laredo are COVID-19 positive.
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Dr. Ivonne Lopez-Lopez reports that 80 percent of COVID patients at her McAllen Medical Center are illegals. CBP officers have been shot at from Mexico in four separate incidents since August 6 — two each near El Paso and San Diego.
Afghanistan’s freshly sprung jihadists likely are prowling Priceline for cheap flights to Ciudad Juarez, Mexicali, and Nuevo Laredo. Their terrorist pals around the world, buoyed by the same news that has sunk hearts in the civilized world, now dream of the US-Mexico front. With nearly 200,000 illegals cha-cha-cha-ing into America every month since
March, why not race to the Rio Grande and join the conga line? And, if they can slaughter infidels to boot, then, indeed, Allah is merciful.
"The policy decisions enabling war criminals to resume their terrorism and enter America through our southern border reflect a naïveté, willful blindness, and refusal to acknowledge the existence of evil," John Lenczowski, Chancellor of The Institute of World Politics, told me. "They are a symptom of the current crisis of national security leadership and amount to diplomatic malpractice of the highest order."
The congressional Republican view is equally ominous.
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"The very governmental agency tasked with tracking foreign terrorist travel is overwhelmed processing the record-breaking number of migrants entering our country at President Biden’s encouragement," said Rep. Katko invoking CBP.
"President Biden’s botched foreign policy agenda and open-border policies have created a perfect storm that will put impending threats at the doorstep of our homeland just weeks away from the anniversary of September 11th."