long story. some clips below
In secret texts, U.S. military officials lamented leaving Americans behind in KabulPresident Biden declared to a puzzled country on Tuesday that the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan was an "extraordinary success," while his Pentagon portrayed a prosaic, workaday process to repatriate Americans still stranded in the war-torn country.
But text messages between U.S. military commanders and private citizens mounting last-minute rescues tell a far different story, one in which pleading American citizens were frantically left behind at the Kabul airport gate this past weekend to face an uncertain fate under Taliban rule while U.S. officials sought to spread the blame between high-ranking generals and the State Department
"We are ******* abandoning American citizens," an Army colonel assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division wrote Sunday in frustration in a series of encrypted messages that detailed the failed effort to extricate a group of American citizens, hours before the last U.S. soldiers departed Afghanistan.
The text messages and emails were provided to Just the News by
Michael Yon, a former Special Forces soldier and war correspondent who was among the private citizens working with private networks and the military to rescue stranded Americans.
Yon told Just the News that a group of Americans were abandoned at the Kabul airport, pleading for help as military officials told them they were finished with evacuations.
"We had them out there waving their passport screaming, 'I'm American,'" Yon said Tuesday while appearing on the
John Solomon Reports Podcast .
The heart-wrenching scenes unfolded this weekend as the U.S. military prepared to exit the capital city on Monday, leaving both the airport and most of the country under Taliban control.
"People were turned away from the gate by our own Army," Yon said.
After the episode ended and the Americans scattered to safe houses to avoid being captured, Yon wrote a stinging email to an Army major whose team had tried to coordinate the rescue before abandoning it.
"You guys left American citizens at the gate of the Kabul airport," Yon wrote Tuesday to the commander. "Three empty jets paid for by volunteers were waiting for them. You and I talked on the phone. I told you where they were. Gave you their passport images. And my email and phone number. And you left them behind."
Yon's account, backed by three dozen text and email exchanges with frontline Army officials in Afghanistan, stands in sharp contrast to the claims of the Biden White House that U.S. citizens would not be left behind in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
"I think it's irresponsible to say Americans are stranded," Whte House press secretary Jen Pskai said in an Aug. 23 press briefing. "They are not. We are committed to bringing Americans who want to come home, home." President Joe Biden earlier this month underscored that position, saying that the United States would evacuate every American who wanted to leave the country.
With the American military no longer in Kabul, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, John Kirby, acknowledged Tuesday that Americans in fact were left behind. He described a calm, diplomatic scenario for bringing those
people home.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) the top Republican on the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, first raised concerns in a letter Monday to the Pentagon that Americans had been knowingly and willingly abandoned. Reached late Tuesday, Johnson told Just the News the text messages confirmed his worst fears and raised questions about whether the Biden administration has been misleading the public.