General Milley inspects tent city for evacuees built in 48 hours at Ramstein: "This is America"

(AP Photo/Lucas Jackson, Pool, File)

General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, landed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany Saturday. I’ve been following the trip this morning by keeping an eye on FNC’s Jen Griffin’s Twitter account. She’s on the trip and tweets that she will have an exclusive interview with Milley. So far her tweets are not exactly being met with warm and fuzzy reactions from her Twitter followers.

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Milley was last seen and heard from on Wednesday when he and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin held a joint press conference at the Pentagon. Watching that press conference, frankly, made me angry. Instead of providing real information that would answer questions that Americans have since the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, their remarks were filled with Biden administration talking points and references to feelings. These two men are more interested in woke progressive statements than in leveling with Americans, it appeared. At the end of the press conference, only three questions were taken, with Austin using a pre-selected list of reporters to call on. CNN’s Barbara Starr asked about the feelings Milley had, since he served in Afghanistan. FNC’s Jen Griffin, a longtime Pentagon reporter, was not one of the three reporters Austin called on. She tried to ask a question about Biden’s phone conversation with the Afghan president before the withdrawal went so horribly wrong. Biden asked Ghani to lie about the situation on the ground if things went as badly as the Biden administration privately thought they would. He wanted Ghani to say that everything was going well, as planned. We all know now that things went very badly, 13 American service members were killed at the Kabul airport, and there seems to have been little advanced planning on just about everything.

It’s interesting now that Jen Griffin has been granted an interview with Milley. We’ll see what happens as the trip progresses. In the meantime, her tweets point to the fact that Milley spoke with his own Afghan translator from his time there in 2004. That translator is one of the evacuees being processed at Ramstein. Thousands of Afghan translators and other helpers haven’t been so fortunate. They’ve been left behind by Milley and Austin and Joe Biden.

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It turns out that Col. Glisson only had 48 hours’ notice to organize a tent city at Ramstein for the more than 20,000 refugees who have landed there. Does that sound like there was adequate advance planning? The evacuees include children and families, SIV families, US Embassy staff, and those who worked for the DEA. Originally only about 5,000 evacuees were expected.

“This is America,” Milley said as he inspected the area.

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There are plenty of challenges going forward to resettle those who successfully complete the vetting process. It hasn’t been easy, as a piece in the New York Times published on Wednesday showed. First and foremost has to be the safety of Americans and our military members. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has created a humanitarian crisis and likely will also create a public health crisis. Also, babies are being born.

The focus of the evacuation mission is to get U.S. citizens and their families home and Afghans to safety while also ensuring the security of the air base and U.S. borders. That means all arrivals undergo a health screening before they meet with U.S. border officers, who carry out biometric checks on all passengers.

“Nobody who is not cleared gets on a plane,” Ms. Horst said. As of Wednesday, about 11,700 people had been flown to the United States, or another safe location. So far, none of the evacuees have been rejected for entry into the United States, she said.

Not everything has been seamless. After enlisting base personnel and volunteers to set up cots in the tents, many of the Afghans who arrived said they preferred to sleep on blankets on the floor as they did in Afghanistan. Others did not know how to use the portable toilets set up in long rows and which are cleaned six times each day.

“Sanitation is a constant battle,” said Lt. Col. Simon Ritchie of the 86th Medical Group, who is responsible for the initial screening of all new arrivals. Before passing through the biometric screening, people have their temperatures taken and are checked for illness and injury.

Many of the families include more than a dozen members and others have grown since touching down on the base. Capt. Danielle Holland, an OB-GYN with the Air Force, said she had sent three mothers in labor to a nearby Army hospital, but three other babies were coming so quickly they were delivered in the emergency medical tent set up on base.

“Pretty much any reproductive-age woman is either pregnant, breastfeeding or both,” Capt. Holland said, adding that one Afghan mother had told her that giving birth in the tent had been the most pleasant of her eight deliveries. “These women are very stoic,” she said.

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America is the most compassionate and generous country in the world. We are a nation of immigrants. However, we have to be smart about the vetting process. We know the Biden administration wasn’t prepared for the thousands and thousands of refugees they evacuated and the SIV process was not made ready to accommodate them, either. Of the thousands of people evacuated, we still do not know how many of them are Americans or green cardholders. Joe Biden promised to have the most transparent administration ever, yet it is regularly exposed as not transparent at all. Some of the evacuees are being turned away. How many others slipped through the cracks in all the chaos and confusion of the withdrawal? Some who have already arrived in the U.S. are being sent away. Apparently, Kosovo is taking them.

An estimated 100 Afghan refugees from Afghanistan to the United States have been flagged for potential ties to terrorist organizations, including the Taliban, according to a new report.

Of more than 30,000 evacuees from Afghanistan to the U.S., about 10,000 needed additional screening as of Friday,” NBC News reported, citing two sources familiar with evacuation efforts. “And of those about 100 were flagged for possible ties to the Taliban or terror groups.”

The report stated that two of the flagged Afghans “raised enough concern for additional review” and are being sent to Kosovo for further review amid security concerns.

“A lot of people were moved very quickly and the intelligence community has been working hard to evaluate whether any of them pose a threat,” said a senior federal law enforcement official, according to the report. “Some of the vetting occurs while they are overseas, and some of it occurs here … We are not going to allow people to intentionally be released into the community if they have unresolved derogatory information.”

Other Afghans who fled to America and who raise security concerns will also be sent to Kosovo, according to the sources, who said evaluations are currently underway in the Washington, D.C. area after some evacuees were found to have been previously deported from the U.S. for past criminal offenses.

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It’s a mess created by Joe Biden’s incompetence. Heads must roll over all of this. Sadly, it won’t be Biden’s but certainly, those further down like Austin and Milley have to be held accountable, as well as Tony Blinken at the State Department.

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David Strom 5:20 PM | May 01, 2024
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