On the Fifth Anniversary of the Disasterous Biden Bug-Out of Kabul, Pete Hegseth Upgrades the Honors for Three Heroes of Abbey Gate

He didn't just give them new medals.

He also said that the Biden Administration downplayed their heroism, because Biden, and his corrupt media allies, didn't want the public to know how very bad the terrorist attack at Abbey Gate really was.

Fox News Politics @foxnewspolitics

5 YEARS LATER: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth upgrades valor awards for three Marines who risked their lives during the Abbey Gate bombing, saying Pentagon leadership "inappropriately" downgraded their original submissions for half a decade.

Gunnery Sgt. Jonathan Eby took command after his platoon commander and half his platoon were killed or wounded. Lance Cpl. Jordan Houston was knocked unconscious 10 meters from the blast, woke up with shrapnel wounds, and stayed in the fight -- concealing his injuries so he wouldn't be pulled from the line. Cpl. Michael Gretzon applied his own tourniquet to a shrapnel wound, got bandaged, then immediately returned to his squad until his platoon sergeant physically ordered him to the casualty collection point.

Hegseth also revealed that a special review panel recently recovered "highly relevant classified documents" that were "stashed and hidden away in safes where they would not be found." A full report is expected by year's end.

Marine Corps Times:

Five years after a suicide bombing killed 13 U.S. service members and around 170 civilians at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Afghanistan, the Pentagon upgraded the awards of three Marines who survived the blast and then worked to save others in its immediate aftermath.

The service members, assigned to 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, were at the then-Hamid Karzai International Airport as America's decades-long war in Afghanistan drew to a tumultuous close. Outside of the gate, where enormous crowds had frantically gathered in hopes of a safe evacuation from the country, an Islamic State bomber detonated the explosives on his body.

During a Wednesday ceremony at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth presented the Bronze Star Medal with Valor to retired Gunnery Sgt. Jonathan Eby and retired Lance Cpl. Jordan Houston, and the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with Valor to retired Cpl. Michael Gretzon.

Eby secured the area before helping to evacuate wounded Marines, Houston -- who was injured himself -- assisted others to safety despite gunfire and tear gas and Gretzon helped control the crowd from a vulnerable position after the blast, according to the department.

Hegseth used biblical language when describing the service members' actions. "These three Marines embody a timeless truth written in the book of Proverbs: 'The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion.' On that chaotic day, you men were as bold as lions," he said, adding, "When the wicked sought to sow terror, these men stood as lions at the gate -- bold in their purpose, fierce in their resolve and unbreakable in their courage."

Videos of Hegseth stating that these Marines' valor awards were downgraded to spare the Biden Administration the pain of admitting what a hellish nightmare they created, below the jump.

If you're pretending everything went swell, you can't decorate heroes who stood up when things didn't go swell at all.

Sean Parnell, charged with investigating the Abbey Gate bombing, says that -- sit down, you're not going to believe this -- Biden officials hid key documents in safes to keep anyone from discovering the truth.

A Pentagon official on Wednesday claimed to have discovered classified documents that concern the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan five years ago, but the official declined to offer further details.

Sean Parnell, who leads the Pentagon's special review panel examining the 2021 withdrawal, said in a video statement that his team recovered "highly relevant classified documents" that were "stashed and hidden away in safes where they would not be found."

He has not said what the documents actually say, yet. But I assume that is coming:

"You deserve the truth of what happened about what happened in Afghanistan, told fully and told straight," Parnell said.

This might be some of what has been kept hidden: CIA-trained Afghan units executed civilians during Joe Biden's catastrophe.

This may not have been out of malice, but just due to the extreme chaos Biden created.

Afghan special forces units trained by the CIA mowed down civilians with their cars and shot innocent people to clear the Kabul airport during the Biden administration's chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, according to first-person accounts in a new documentary.

Eyewitnesses in the documentary for The Wall Street Journal, titled "The Path to Zero," say atrocities were also perpetrated against U.S. military members at Kabul International Airport -- in the closing hours of the administration's final withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Multiple people say in the documentary that they witnessed the Afghan special forces, known as Zero Units, murder members of the crowd in a CIA-directed mission to clear the airport. Those who committed the murders were then rewarded with evacuation, courtesy of the U.S.

"They straight up executed people, ran them over," retired U.S. Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. Edward Gonzalez says in the film, telling the documentarians that he witnessed these atrocities firsthand. "I literally saw trucks running over people," he said when told that some people have denied that such events occurred.

Josephy Laude, a retired sergeant with the U.S. Marine Corp, also described what the Zero Units did to clear out the airport.

"They would use vehicles, they would run people over, they would execute people," Laude says in the film. "They'd shoot them, shoot into the crowds bearing witness to atrocities, to war crimes."

The US commander claims that he's heard no such reports:

Peter Vasely, a retired rear admiral with the U.S. Navy who served as the commander of U.S. Forces Afghanistan Forward at the time of the withdrawal, claimed in the documentary that "no reports" of the Zero Unit's actions ever made it to him. He said he did not doubt what the Marines on the ground said, just that he never received any official reports of the conduct.

But you know, documents you'd rather not acknowledge sometimes get "lost," like buried in unmarked safes for years and years, you know?

This is why I say the "executions" and "murders" might not have been perpetrated with malice: Suppose you're a Secret Service driver. The presidential limo comes under serious attack. There are crowds of people in your way.

What do you do? I don't know what the Secret Service is trained to do, but I imagine that if the president's life is in danger and there are civilians inadvertently blocking you from carrying him to safety, you hit the gas and hope they get out of the way in time.

I don't know that. I can imagine such a terrible choice, though.

That's what one witness says the choice during the chaotic bug-out was:

Gonzalez also said that had the Zero Units not taken the steps they took to clear the airport, he and his fellow Marines would not be alive today. Kenneth F. McKenzie, a retired Marine Corps general, also said that not only would the U.S. not have been able to clear the airport without the Zero Units, but they wouldn't have been able to hold it either.

"They were vital to the success of our mission," McKenzie said in the film.

The documentary alleges that to get the Zero Units to open fire on their own countrymen, the CIA had to promise that they and their entire families would be evacuated from Afghanistan.

...

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., best known for his congressional investigations into Obama-era scandals such as Operation Fast and Furious and the IRS' targeting of conservative organizations, said during an interview on "Just the News, No Noise," Wednesday night that the cover-up of the withdrawal will soon be revealed. U.S. Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Sean Parnell, who is chairing the Afghanistan Withdrawal Review Panel, is working to release that information.

Darrel Issa says that many "Afghan allies" were never vetted before being given free passes to the US, and that's all part of this "cover-up."

"I mean, the two great cover-ups in Abbey Gate obviously was the lead-up to that tragic loss of our military personnel and many other civilians around them, and then the incredibly inept withdrawal of bringing into our country people who shouldn't be, or leaving behind many who should be here, and the Trump administration is still cleaning up for that by finding people around the world who are entitled and who really have earned a right," Issa said.

...

Former Deputy Chief of Staff to the Secretary of War, Darin Selnick, said on the same program that criminal referrals could be coming for those responsible for the withdrawal.

"But I think we have to be patient because it's going to maybe take another year to really dig these things out, do the right interviews, find the right people, get collaborative statements, and really find out, you know, with the criminal referrals, what was done that was done illegally, what was done that was immoral, and what's criminally referable," Selnick said.

Update:

Remember the Afghani who shot two National Guard troops in Washington, DC?

He was in a Zero Unit in Afghanistan before we idiotically brought him and others here. Ticking time bombs. They are trained assassins and from what I've read about them they love to kill. I doubt there was anything accidental about the killings they did in Afghanistan.

Posted by: JackStraw

Cite?, Fake Tapper asks.

Jack Straw delivers:

WASHINGTON – The Afghan man accused of shooting two National Guard soldiers blocks from the White House last week served with CIA-backed "zero units" in Afghanistan, paramilitary groups that carried out secret raids against suspected terrorists and U.S. enemies as part of the CIA's counterterrorism program.

Tony Seruga @TonySeruga

The Abbey Gate attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 26, 2021, killed 13 U.S. service members--11 Marines, one Navy corpsman, and one Army soldier--in the final days of a withdrawal that had already spiraled into chaos. You're right that the families have channeled unimaginable grief into action: the Gold Star mothers and fathers built foundations, named K9s after their sons, lobbied Congress, and sat through hearings that produced a lot of theater and very little accountability.

What they got instead of an accounting was a process--and a process is not the same thing as an answer.

The Shape of the "Accounting" So Far

- The After-Action Reviews produced classified and redacted reports that described the withdrawal as "flawed" and "poorly planned" but pointed fingers in a circular way: the military blamed State, State blamed the collapsed Afghan government, everyone blamed the Trump--Taliban Doha agreement, and the buck stopped nowhere.

- The Abbey Gate investigation concluded the bomber was a lone ISIS-K operative who slipped through screening--a finding that satisfied the chain of command but answered almost none of the families' questions about why evacuation was happening at all, why the gate was so exposed, or why intelligence warnings weren't acted on.

- No senior official has been fired, demoted, or held personally responsible. Not the generals, not the National Security Council staff, not the people who signed off on the drawdown timeline. In several cases, the people who made the decisions have been promoted or moved on to lucrative private-sector roles.

Why No One Has Been Held Accountable?

The uncomfortable reality is that accountability within the national security apparatus is largely self-policing, and the institution's incentive is to protect its own. When the Pentagon investigates itself, the goal is rarely to assign individual blame--it's to produce a document to point to as "we looked into it." Because most of the underlying material is classified, the public (and even Congress, in practical terms) can't verify what was actually known and when.

There's also the political dimension: the people who would have to be held accountable are the same people who staff the next administration's transition teams, sit on think-tank boards, and write the op-eds. Washington is a revolving door, and no one inside it has much interest in establishing a precedent where catastrophic strategic failure ends a career.

What the Families Actually Asked For

- The names of whoever made the final call on the withdrawal timeline.
- An unredacted accounting of the intelligence failures.
- Designation of responsibility, not "lessons learned."
- Some acknowledgment that the decision-making, not just the tactical execution at the gate, is what killed their children.

None of that has been delivered in any meaningful form. The hearings generated soundbites, the Gold Star families were used as props by both parties, and the actual answers remain buried in classification and institutional self-protection.

The service members themselves--the 13 at Abbey Gate and the roughly 170 Afghans killed alongside them--did their jobs. The failure was never theirs.

It belonged to the people who put them in that position and then quietly moved on. That's the accounting that's never come, and at this point, probably never will in any form that satisfies the people who lost children.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 01:42 PM

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