In addition to the question of whether Joe Biden is actually rescuing the people who need to be rescued in Afghanistan — Americans and Afghans who actually helped the U.S., to whom we owe an obligation — there are other, complementary questions. If only 5,400 of the 122,000 people are Americans and by some reports, only 7,000 are SIVs, who are all those other people, what kind of vetting did they get, and were they legitimately on the planes?
But the Biden Administration is incompetent so they can’t even begin to tell us how many SIVs were among the group as we reported previously — something which should have been the primary part of putting people on the planes.
REPORTER: "That leaves more than 80,000 SIV's and their family members left behind. Does the Pentagon see that as a success? Leaving 80,000 people, SIV's who worked alongside our troops, behind?" pic.twitter.com/RdwOUJxq3m
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 30, 2021
Now, the SIV number can be a little deceptive in that those are the most vetted people and the ones who, along with Americans, should have been the ones they were trying to get out. There also would have been a number of Afghan allies who may have been contractors, embassy staff, interpreters who didn’t have SIVs, who still needed legitimately to get out with us because they helped us and that likely would be a big number.
Unfortunately, because it’s the Biden Administration, lying and incompetence go hand in hand with each other so it raises the real question of whether people on the planes were adequately vetted or just packed onto the planes to bump the numbers. I put nothing past the Biden team at this point.
This latest story confirms that not everyone was vetted sufficiently
According to the Washington Times, a convicted rapist who had previously been deported from the United States was one of the people who made it on an evacuation flight all the way to the U.S., until he was flagged by border officials when he arrived at Dulles Airport. He’s now being held at a detention facility in Virginia.
But the airlift has turned into a bit of a free-for-all, with relatively few of those brought here actually approved for SIVs or cleared as refugees. Most appear to have been brought under Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ power of parole, which is a special permission to enter, supposed to be reserved for exceptional humanitarian cases.
As of Monday morning, the administration said it had evacuated about 116,700 people since Aug. 14, though not all of them have been brought to the U.S.
Rep. Tom Tiffany, who toured Fort McCoy in Wisconsin on Friday, where 2,000 Afghans were being held, and said not a single one was an SIV holder.
“I still do not have a clear idea of the vetting process. They say that people are fully vetted, but we ask what does that mean? We take biometric data, those type of things, but I said what do you tie it back to?” the Republican congressman told The Washington Times. [….]
“We want to know what people’s history is, and I get the sense they’re just pushing these people through,” the congressman said. [….]
Some potential security risks among the Afghan evacuees have been spotted by authorities.
More than 100 prospective SIV recipients were flagged as potential matches to names on U.S. intelligence watch lists, Defense One reported.
And one man evacuated from Kabul has potential ties to the Islamic State terrorist organization. That person was evacuated from Afghanistan to another country to undergo vetting, and unlike Heydari was not on U.S. soil.
So we had thousands who legitimately deserved to be saved, many of whom seem to have been left. But now we have to keep asking — were the people the Biden team got out the people they were supposed to get out and was everyone adequately vetted — because we know the answer is no, as this case