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OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
11:42 AM – Wednesday, September 4, 2024
Secretary of State Antony Blinken was subpoenaed on Tuesday by the House Foreign Affairs Committee to testify later this month over the committee’s report on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“The Committee is holding this hearing because the Department of State was central to the Afghanistan withdrawal and served as the senior authority during the August non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO),” Republican Chairman Michael McCaul wrote of the hearing, which is set for September 19th.
McCaul said in his letter that Blinken had turned down requests to testify before the committee in the past.
A day later, in a statement released on Wednesday, the State Department claimed that they have options and that Blinken is not able to testify “on the dates proposed by the committee.”
“It is disappointing that instead of continuing to engage with the department in good faith, the committee instead has issued yet another unnecessary subpoena,” said Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the State Department.
McCaul has demanded time and time again that the Biden administration answer for the way the withdrawal from Afghanistan was carried out. In the final chaotic days before the evacuation, 13 U.S. service members were killed in the Abbey Gate bombing.
On September 9th, McCaul is scheduled to release the committee’s report, which includes the conclusions of its three-year probe of the pullout from Afghanistan.
The report “will serve as an indictment on the administration’s reckless refusal to properly prepare for the withdrawal, their cold indifference to the safety and security of U.S. personnel on the ground before and during the emergency evacuation, and their culpability in the deaths of 13 U.S. servicemembers who perished in the terrorist attack at Abbey Gate,” McCaul said in his statement.
The Afghanistan After Action Review study, which was made public by the U.S. State Department last year, concluded that the decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan had extremely negative effects, which came as no surprise to many Americans.
“The decisions of both President Trump and President Biden to end the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan had serious consequences for the viability of the Afghan government and its security,” the unclassified report stated.
“Those decisions are beyond the scope of this review, but the AAR (After Action Review) team found that during both administrations there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow,” it added.
In its examination into the evacuation in 2021, the committee has taken part in over a dozen interviews. In late July, the committee also heard a transcribed interview with Jen Psaki, the former press secretary for the White House and current MSNBC host.
Additionally, in the hours of testimony given to the committee behind closed doors, three senior State Department officials provided additional details on the “unprecedented” circumstances in the closing days of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
Those officials, John Bass, Jim DeHart, and Jayne Howell, rushed to Kabul in the days following the Taliban’s capture of the nation’s capital and immediately got to work developing new systems with the U.S. military while taking into account the shifting information from Washington, D.C.
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