CBS' O'Keefe: Afghanistan report "is a whitewash"

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Reporter: “Did they take any responsibility or acknowledge any mistakes made by the Biden Administration?”

O’KEEFE: “The word ‘mistake’ appears once in this 12-page report, Nancy, noting that when — in essence recounting that strike that occurred in central Kabul, that was intended to kill an ISIS-K operative and they ended up killing 10 civilians, they say, ‘To counter the immediate perceived threat, the U.S. military launched a drone strike in Kabul that mistakenly killed 10 civilians. Among the causes of this tragic error was the high-risk dynamic threat environment led the team to inaccurately assess that the target had posed an imminent threat to those on the ground.’ That is the one time we see the word ‘mistake’ on an incident in all of this. Of course, it has been well-documented, for which the U.S. has apologized before. But it spends 3 1/2 pages laying it out and saying it is the Trump Administration’s fault for negotiating with the Taliban, for inviting them to Camp David, for withdrawing U.S. forces at such a level that you would have had to send more in rather than keep it at those numbers, and for not allowing the Biden Administration to see those plans during that botched transition you’ll recall in late 2020, when the Biden transition team was trying to get information from agencies and the Trump Administration was blocking them from doing so. But this is — they called it, or National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said they were going to do a hot Wash, which is a fancy bureaucratic term for a deep dive into what went wrong. This 12-page document is a whitewash. It is narrative. It is light on specifics. It is devoid of citations. And it is in essence their version of events. As the classified reports conducted by the State Department and the Pentagon are being sent to lawmakers on the relevant committees for their full review, White House saying it will not release those classified reports to the general public, although, inevitably, details of those reports likely will ultimately somehow get out there in the public severe sphere. We’ll wait to see how and when.”

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