“This is an attempt to save face by the administration for the Americans they left behind. This is a woman with three children from age 15 all the way down to two years old. And they did nothing to try to expedite this,” Senator Blumenthal said referring to an American who had been left behind. She was eventually rescued thanks to private efforts.
“There will be plenty of time to seek accountability for the inexcusable bureaucratic red tape that stranded so many of our Afghan allies,” Blumenthal said. “For now, my singular focus remains to get these planes in the air and safely to our airbase in Doha, where they have already been cleared to land.”
Private Rescue Efforts
Eric Montalvo, a private rescue organizer, shared an email he received from the State Department after his efforts were blocked — not by the Taliban, but from State.
“No independent charters are allowed to land at [Al Udeid Air Base…] In fact, no charters are allowed to land at a [sic] DoD base, and most if not all countries in the Middle Eastern region, with the exception of perhaps Saudi Arabia, will allow charters to land,” the State Department official wrote in the email to Montalvo.
“You need to find another destination country, and it can’t be the U.S. either.”
In the email, the State Department official noted that landing in third countries will require State Department authorization noting, the department “will not provide” that approval.
Although the State Department is holding up private rescue efforts it quickly tries to claim credit for getting people out when such private rescue efforts are successful.
Cory Mills, founder and CEO of PACEM Solutions International and PACEM Defense LLC, and a team of former Special Forces veterans with funding from private sources helped the woman and her three children, to whom Senator Blumenthal referred, escape Afghanistan after they were left behind. They attempted several times to access the gate at Kabul’s airport only to be turned away by Americans, stating that they were no longer allowing people through the gates.
The woman and her children were evacuated by the team to a safe house outside the city and then by vehicle through the border of a neighboring country. The country wasn’t specified to prevent the Taliban from stopping further evacuations.
Mills called the State Department’s version of facilitating the family’s evacuation as “absolute nonsense.”
“This is an attempt to save face by the administration for the Americans they left behind. This is a woman with three children from age 15 all the way down to two years old. And they did nothing to try to expedite this… But at the very last minute you have these ‘senior officials’ at the State Department trying to claim credit for this like ‘oh yeah look what we’ve done,'” Mills said.
“It’s like we carried the ball to the 99-and-a-half yard line and them taking it that last half yard and being like ‘look what we did.'”
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