A newly released document is raising questions about the extent to which the Biden administration vetted those individuals that it has evacuated from Afghanistan.
The document was released on social media this week by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who says that he received it from “an American official present in Afghanistan during the evacuation who was shocked by Administration’s failure to vet Afghans before they were evacuated.”
The document is an email that was written on August 18th, 2021, by Gregory A. Floyd, the consul general at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. The recipients were members of Floyd’s team.
“Err on the side of excess”
In the email, Floyd relates to his team a directive that he received from the Biden administration. The directive gives instructions detailing who to allow onto the evacuation flights that were being conducted by the United States.
The first of three orders states:
Anyone with a valid form of ID should be given permission to go on a plane if the person plausibly falls into the categories we will evacuate U.S. citizens and [legal permanent residents] plus their immediate families, [local embassy staff] plus their immediate families, those entitled to an [Special Immigrant Visa], and Afghans at risk.
The directive’s second order states:
Families including women and children should be allowed through and held to fill out planes.
And, the third and final order from the Biden administration states:
Total inflow to the U.S. must exceed the number of seats available. Err on the side of excess.
Hawley on the attack
This email would seem to confirm the concerns of many that the Afghan evacuees who have been brought to America by the Biden administration were not properly vetted. Hawley, on Tuesday, confronted Colin Kahl, a Pentagon official, about the contents of the email.
Kahl claimed that although security vetting was not taking place at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan, it did take place at the “lily pads” where these Afghan evacuees were taken before being moved to the United States and other countries. Kahl said:
Teams of DHS, CBP, DOD would collect biometric information, fingerprints, etc., biographical information, and then that information would be fed through the NCTC, CBP, and FBI databases, and only people who had cleared that vetting so that they didn’t have contacts with the Taliban or the Haqqanis or Al Qaeda or ISIS were to be manifested and brought to the United States. And people who required further processing were not brought to the United States.
Hawley, though, wasn’t convinced. He told Kahl that this just seems like “screening” rather than actual “vetting.” So, he asked Kahl if anyone ever sat down with any of the Afghan evacuees to ask them questions.
Kahl said in response that there were follow-up interviews and additional vetting for those Afghan evacuees with questionable backgrounds. Hawley, however, immediately disputed this saying that a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official told him that no vetting was done anywhere.
The Washington Examiner reports: “Although some of the evacuees are in the process of that additional vetting, not one has been denied entry to the United States and they have not deported anyone back to Afghanistan, according to a familiar source.”
The post Whistleblower document raises questions about the Biden admin’s vetting of Afghan evacuees first appeared on Conservative Institute.
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