Three major State Department officials with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, according to records from interviews, were escorted to Afghanistan with little time to prepare for the U.S. removal. Furthermore, the officers admitted there was no established emergency evacuation program in place , when they arrived.
According to CNN, John Bass, Jim DeHart, and Jayne Howell, three officers, “were all taken from related projects and rushed into Afghanistan in the days after Kabul fell to the Taliban because of their extensive experience there.”
The transcripts “are the latest batch of more than a few interviews conducted by the council as , a , essential piece of Republican Chairman Michael McCaul’s ongoing research into the , 2021 removal that involved the deaths of , 13 , US service members”.
CNN reviews of the records, it says was entirely obtained by the media shop:
Major US military generals speculated that the panic outside the Kabul airport and the ad-hoc character of the evacuation could have been avoided if the State Department had called earlier for a “noncombatant removal operation” – known as a NEO – for the remaining US citizens in Afghanistan.
” I cannot emphasize much to you that minute to minute, what was happening was changing”, He said in her July 2023 meeting.
DeHart argued that they had to” create military activities that would get our concern people into the airport from scratch.” He added:” we were almost as powerful as we could be under the conditions”.
Bass, who served as the major State Department representative on the removal attempts on the ground, echoed those views.
” We were already in the throes of executing an evacuation that greatly exceeded I think the scope and scale of what had been contemplated”, explained , Bass.
