Denver, CO — Republican U.S. Senate nominee Joe O’Dea issued the following statement calling on Senator Michael Bennet to demand the Biden Administration fully release the Pentagon after action report on the administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“President Biden’s premature withdrawal of all American troops from Afghanistan was one of the worst American foreign policy debacles in modern history. Michael Bennet sits on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and still supported Biden every step of the way. He received the intelligence reports, he should have been aware it would be a failure. Bennet's support for the withdrawal is part of a disturbing pattern of total allegiance to Joe Biden," O’Dea said.
"In light of reports that the Biden Administration is playing politics to conceal the truth, I call on Michael Bennet to immediately demand the public release of this after action report. For the sake of accountability and transparency, I hope Bennet sets aside his allegiance to Biden to do what's best for the American people.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly two dozen intelligence assessments from four different agencies have been compiled analyzing the military’s role in Afghanistan. The reports were drafted by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department’s intelligence bureau.
The WSJ story noted Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Sept. 1, the day after all American forces had pulled out of Afghanistan, that the Pentagon would conduct a full and fair after-action assessment.
“We want to make sure that we learn every lesson that can be learned from this experience,” he said. “But I want to take the time to do it the right way, and so we’ll do that in the days ahead.”
The Journal recently reported that top Pentagon officials asked for the initial combined report, which may have been critical of the Biden Administration, to be revised. A second draft was sent to the Pentagon, but there has been no word on when that report would be finalized.
The story quoted Seth Jones, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who stated “he hoped the need to keep some material classified wouldn’t get in the way of accountability and some form of public release.”
“If the government takes stuff out because it’s politically damaging, that would be a big problem,” Jones, a former military adviser in Afghanistan, told the paper.
Learn more about Joe O’Dea’s campaign here.
Original source can be found here
