Citing a whistleblower from Fort Pickett, Virginia military base that hosts Afghan evacuees who are not fully vetted, Tennessee GOP congressman Mark Green warned that those Afghans have allegedly been leaving the base using Uber without restraint from officials, Fox News reports.
Green, an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran, demanded answers in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken after a source informed his office of the Afghan evacuees having free rein of the campus and using ride-hailing apps despite not having completed the vetting process.
Calling upon his combat service in Afghanistan to request confirmation or denial from Blinken, he stressed they pose an obvious national security risk.
The Republican claims his source has made shocking allegations that Fort Pickett soldiers have no authority to “arrest or stop” any of the evacuees from leaving the base on their own free will, regardless of vetting status.
Green told Fox News that these issues are happening elsewhere than just Fort Pickett, pointing the Pentagon is not necessarily to blame because they are essentially taking direction from the State Department that failed to give them adequate information on people transferred to the base.
The State Department lacks of communication leaves the bases withouth the exact number of evacuees and biometrics on lot of them to check their background as interpreters who aided the US military, SIV holders or simply Afghan citizens that escaped the Taliban rule since they refuse to provide names.
Although he noted that evacuees are going through several levels of databases to determine their validity for transportation to America, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army, Gen. Mark Milley called this State Department a complete failure due to the lack of guidance and communication.
He have an example in the context, noting that they tried to learn the number or evacuees by requesting it through the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) but to no avail, stressing that they won’t even tell them how many American citizens were evacuated.
Milley said that some people warned them they know Taliban is in some of these flights with evacuees, which represents one of the greatest security risks to the US, and that the president and this State Department don’t seem to care.
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