Denver, CO — Political outsider, successful business leader, and Republican nominee for U.S. Senate Joe O’Dea issued the following statement on the one-year anniversary of the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan calling on Senator Michael Bennet to demand the Pentagon fully release their after action reports.
Today the O'Dea campaign also released the following video highlighting Michael Bennet's support of Biden's reckless withdrawal.
“One year ago President Biden prematurely withdrew all American troops from Afghanistan — one of the worst American foreign policy debacles in modern history. And Michael Bennet holds firm that Biden made the right decision. The public needs to learn what the Biden administration knew, when they knew it, and why Michael Bennet believed prematurely withdrawing was the right decision. Given his position on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I renew my call on Michael Bennet to immediately demand the Pentagon’s after action report be released publicly. I hope Bennet does not place Biden’s political interests ahead of what’s best for our nation,” O’Dea said.
The O'Dea campaign previously called on Bennet to stand up to Biden to demand transparency and to release the after action report.
Back in August of 2021, The Washington Post gave Joe Biden and Michael Bennet's claim that "the Afghan army has 300,000 people" three Pinocchios for misleading the American people.
“By repeatedly using this figure, the president is misleading Americans about the capabilities of the Afghan military — which has now demonstrated it could not defend Afghanistan from the Taliban offensive. He does not quite earn Four Pinocchios because “security forces” sometimes is broadly defined to include the police. But it’s close, especially when making a ridiculous comparison to the militaries of NATO allies.”
As a member of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Michael Bennet should have known that this was an inflated number and that the country was prone to collapse.
Reuters recently quoted an anonymous Biden administration official, “We are going to have to take a black eye on our performance over the past year.”
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 Journal recently reported that top Pentagon officials asked for the initial combined report, which was critical of Pentagon leadership, 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 O’Dea’s campaign here.
Original source can be found here
