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Aug. 23, 2021 - Sean Hannity Show
31:20
Captain Sam Brown's Inspiring Story
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All right, news roundup and information overload our Sean Hannity show 800-941 Sean.
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Biden, for whatever reason, Americans, he's admitting, acknowledging a lot can still go wrong, a long way to go.
You know, keeps reiterating it.
There was no way to evacuate this many people without pain and loss.
That's where he and I part waves.
When they saw the Taliban was on the move, they had every opportunity and option to stop them and to begin the immediate extraction of every American and Afghan ally, you know, regardless of where they end up eventually.
We did guarantee them safe passage out of Afghanistan, if in fact this moment ever came.
And now again, we are where we are, and that is at the mercy of a terrorist organization.
And it is beyond any understanding I have to have allowed this to get to this point and not have had a plan in place.
And then the only guarantee is, well, the Taliban says guaranteed it would be safe passage.
And I'm going to be proven correct on this.
Biden is urging the Taliban to provide for the well-being of Afghans.
They're going door to door, Joe.
They're marking people for death, Joe.
I mean, what part of this are you not understanding here?
His plan to provide, you know, how do you urge a terrorist organization?
Why do you put your trust in them, period?
We had the opportunity to be the masters of our own destiny.
You squandered that opportunity.
That's you, your defense secretary, your national security advisor, and that dopey Secretary of State you have, you know, describing the Taliban as cooperative.
You're not reading the reports of Americans beaten because your own defense secretary is confirming that, among other things.
Anyway, so we, you know, basically hear very little from Biden all weekend, you know, claiming our allies aren't questioning the credibility.
Made this claim on Friday.
That's just a lie.
British parliament just excoriated him.
You know, his claim that Al-Qaeda is gone, we have all the reports to the contrary.
And ISIS has re-emerged also in the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan.
And any Americans that wants to get home will get home.
Okay, those are words, Joe.
The next words out of your mouth were, but I can't guarantee the outcome.
And even all weekend, we had his Joe Biden surrogates on TV saying over and over and over and over again, we can't guarantee safe passage to the airport.
Okay, every single American we get out of there, I'm very grateful for, but this never needed to happen.
Caught behind enemy terrorist lines.
Basically, hostage, this is now up to the Taliban to decide if they get out or not.
Anyway, here's Biden from Friday.
I have seen no question of our credibility from our allies around the world.
The fact of the matter is, I have not seen that.
Matter of fact, the exact opposite I've got.
The exact opposite thing is we're acting with dispatch.
We're acting committing to what we said we would do.
Let's put this thing in perspective here.
What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point with Al-Qaeda gone?
We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan as well as, as well as getting Osama bin Laden.
And we did.
My direction, the State Department continues to reach out to the remaining Americans we have identified by phone, email, and other means to ascertain their whereabouts and their plans.
We're executing a plan to move groups of these Americans to safety and to safely and effectively move them to the airport compound.
For security reasons, I'm not going to go into the detail of what these plans entail.
But I will say again today that I have said before: any American who wants to get home will get home.
Okay, we hope so.
Army Captain Sam Brown, now a Senate candidate out of the state of Nabata, he was deployed in Kandahar in Afghanistan in 2008.
And a few months into his deployment, his vehicle was struck by an IED blast.
That severely wounded him.
Upon immediate evacuation from the battlefield, he began a long three-year journey of rehabilitation and recovery.
He was medically retired from the U.S. Army as a captain in September of 2011.
And after more than five years of active duty service, our friend Tyler Merritt is back, CEO and founder of Nine Line Apparel and founded in 2013, member of the Army Elite's 160th Special Ops Aviation Regiment early 2013 after his West Point classmate, then Captain Edward Flip Klein lost three limbs fighting in Afghanistan.
He decided to do the same as he did as a soldier, and that was proactively look for solutions.
And in addition to personal support, he got permission from the NLA board to determining that a portion of all apparel purchases be donated to help defray the tremendous rehab costs of Captain Klein.
And in the process, as he began a journey to help severely wounded veterans in their lives, some important stories here.
Army Captain Sam Brown, now Senate candidate, we start with you.
I will never for the life of me understand how the greatest military might on the face of the earth, the greatest intelligence gathering capabilities on the face of the earth, ever allowed this situation to deteriorate to this level.
Well, Sean, it's not an indictment on our capabilities.
It's an indictment on leadership.
And unfortunately, what we have from the White House and then down through the Pentagon are leaders who are focused on political answers rather than real-world solutions.
We absolutely have the capabilities to go in and do what we need to do to rescue Americans and also honor the promises we made to our Afghan allies.
But at the end of the day, I think what America is seeing is the consequences of leadership failure.
And unfortunately, when politics gets too involved in military operations, it bleeds over and has severe consequences there as well.
Yeah, it really does.
And Tyler, I don't know if there's any other assessment that could be possibly made in terms of every American caught behind enemy lines now is at the mercy of the Taliban.
Not exactly an enviable position.
No, absolutely not.
And one of the core missions of the 160th is to provide the capability to put people on target plus or minus 30 seconds anywhere in the world.
If there's a hostage rescue, if there's Osama bin Laden that needs to be taken off this earth, that is that mission set.
And when I was forced to close down operations in Iraq, just before we left there in December of 2011, I was running missions with Delta, still hitting targets a couple months prior to.
And that decision to leave there was done in a relatively expeditious manner.
And it was done without any loss of life, without any major compromises in equipment and weapon systems once we left that country.
And it was possible to do it again.
The idea that we were incapable of taking our Afghan counterparts, the people that were willing to die for this initiative to free Afghanistan and our U.S. citizens out off the battlefield right now.
That's not a true statement.
My friends are over there in the Want Safety Athen.
They're being more scrutinized over pictures and videos that are leaking from Afghanistan showing exactly what's going on.
They're more concerned about persecuting those soldiers than they are about getting our citizens out of harm's way.
And there's nonprofits out there that I'm working with right now, such as nooneleft.org, that they've been coordinating civilian flights in and out of Afghanistan to get not only our citizens, but also those Afghan civilians, the ones that are being murdered in front of their family members as we speak.
We have a moral obligation.
Sam and I went to Westwood together.
We were classmates together.
The ideas of duty on a country and leadership are the tenets of everything.
And to have a commander-in-chief, whether or not he's working from Camp David or not, he's absent.
He should be in the Pentagon.
He should be leading this incredibly ridiculous situation we find ourselves in.
Sam, tell me your story.
Yeah, Sean, I was wounded, as you said, in 2008 in Afghanistan.
And what I saw then was that the Taliban was eventually always going to continue to be a very strong presence in that country.
The local villagers that I interacted with, the local leaders, were always very aware and scared of what the Taliban code and would do.
So in my mind, in the mind of many other soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines that I've talked to, this is always going to be something that we had to reckon with.
This is no surprise when we have General Milley the other day saying that he saw nothing to indicate a class of the government in 11 days, and he's shifting blame to the Intel services and the scenarios that they painted.
When we have a Secretary of Defense who says money doesn't buy willpower and money doesn't buy leadership as he throws the Afghan government under the bus, what we see is ultimately a leadership failure.
And this should be an expected outcome when we have weak leaders who don't understand what the conditions on the ground are.
And at the end of the day, Sean, what I'd like to encourage Americans, because we are a group of people who want to take action, is that we can and should be engaged today.
If folks say, well, Afghanistan's 8,000 miles away, what can I do today?
Well, we can get involved in groups like Tyler is talking about and others that are working as nonprofit capacities to get people out, like No One Left Behind.
There's nooneleftbehind.org.
There's also the Nazarene Fund, which is focused on religious persecution.
But there's also a call to action.
I'm asking for Americans to get involved in the political process again.
We must have leaders who know how to provide proper oversight and leadership.
And that's one of the reasons I'm running is because we have a political class that has failed us.
And if people say, well, hey, I'll get involved in 22 closure elections, that's not a good answer.
We need to get involved today because there are primaries seven to 10 months out where we'll really sift out who will be leading our country from 2022.
And so I'm asking people to join my mission and look in their local states to find others like me who will lead with honor.
And people can find me at captainsbrown.com.
Well, I think it's amazing.
What I'm having a hard time understanding is if you look especially at foreign media, you know, we're now being warned dramatically.
The Taliban is warning that there will be consequences if Biden tries to extend the evacuation deadline beyond August 31st.
Our own U.S. embassy overrules Biden telling Americans not to travel to the Kabul airport despite his advice.
You got news companies now.
They've just decided to send their own people in to successfully evacuate their journalists from Afghanistan.
You have a Daily Mail article about the Taliban is now, you know, women are being burned to death, forced to marry Taliban fighters and shipped overseas in coffins to be used as sex slaves.
One woman was set afire by Taliban fighters on Thursday last week in the north of the country because they didn't like the food.
They forced her to cook for them.
And still more women are being packed into these coffins.
It's, you know, videos emerging of gun-wielding Islamists beating people with rifles and confiscating Afghan national flags and shooting a police chief to death.
They're now filming executions of U.S. allies, like in the case of this horrifying video that emerged online showing the brutal execution of this police chief.
You know, I'll give you the final word.
Do you see, Tyler, any military option here for us?
There's always a military option, and that's what our enemies should be fearful of.
We have the ability and our warfighters, I can speak wholeheartedly for them, are willing and able to go do bad things to bad people.
And let's not mix words.
These are horrible people.
This is the modern-day Nazis.
They are happy to inflict atrocities on their people and will continue their actions now, and it will get worse unless we decide to actually band together and do what we're supposed to do as the leader of the free world.
And we put down tyranny, we put down oppression, and we set the standard for other people.
And if we don't do that, then we've just set an example that this can and will be allowed in other countries, and it will spread, and it will get worse.
And this isn't a doomsday conspiracy theorist.
Look at history.
If you really want to make a difference, as we did in, say, Japan, total war, we stayed there.
We had a persistent, and we still actually have a presence in Japan, and they are a current ally.
But if you asked my grandfather, he stormed the beaches at Igojima, he would have never imagined that they'd become allies.
And unless we have a habitual and consistent presence, and we have a very clear guidance that whether we're there or not, this type of atrocity will never be condoned, then it's going to spread.
Tyler, thank you.
And we're now getting more admonitions and warnings.
Even James Clapper saying the inevitable is going to happen as it relates to the rise of now these terror organizations once again, which pose a clear and present danger to the U.S. Tyler Merritt, thank you.
Army Captain Sam Brown, thank you.
800-941-Sean, our number.
We'll get to your calls next as we continue.
All right, 25 to the top of the hour.
I know a lot of you want to get your calls in here.
Let me go back to FaceTime, Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, admitting the Taliban control Afghanistan.
Listen.
Someone in our audience might listen to you, Mr. Secretary, and say, oh, so we have to ask the Taliban for permission for American citizens to leave.
True or not true?
They are in control of Kabul.
That is the reality.
That's the reality that we have to deal with.
They are in control because you allowed them to take control.
That's the failure.
So in other words, it's at their mercy whoever gets out of there.
That's ostensibly caught.
You deserted them behind enemy lines, knowing that this is an evil terrorist organization.
It is unforgivable.
This whole national security team, starting with the commander-in-chief themselves, needs to go in terms of the dereliction of duty.
We have a reporter at Fox, Trey Yangst, you know, got out of them the same thing.
There's no clear plan in place to rescue Americans from Afghanistan.
Well, it could have been done easily if they would have acted when the Taliban started moving all throughout the country and capturing larger and larger portions of the country, but they didn't lift a finger.
We had no idea.
Well, you did have an idea because we now know what parts of the Taliban took over and when.
And they were on the march for months, and you did nothing to expedite the extradition of the American people there on the ground.
Listen.
America has the air power on the ground that they need to secure the airport in Kabul, period, period.
The big question is, do they have the air support in the region to go and rescue Americans who cannot make it to the airport?
And you hear this over and over again from the Biden administration that there is a plan.
And the question we keep hearing, whether it's people reaching out online saying we have relatives or friends trapped in Kabul or elsewhere, they keep asking, what's the plan?
Have you heard anything?
Who can I contact to make sure that my loved ones get to the airport?
And while there is a limited plan to get countries, including the United States, on the ground here to evacuate those who can make it to the airport, there is no clear plan in place to save the thousands of Americans who are not only spread out around Kabul, but in other cities, Herat, Kandahar, smaller cities around the country.
And they have no way to get here.
This is the only way to leave Afghanistan right now.
And it is surrounded by the Taliban.
Imagine what the rest of the country looks like.
Unbelievable.
Americans caught, held, basically they're held there at the whim of the Taliban.
We may get them all out, but we don't know that.
We have no way to control this.
None whatsoever.
It's pretty scary times we're living in.
Let's get to our phones, 800-941.
Sean, if you want to be a part of the program, let's say hi to Angela's in Iowa.
Angela, you're on the Sean Hannity Show.
Hey, Sean, thank you for taking my call.
My question is, in that I haven't heard anyone address this, we have troops in over 150 countries providing support to these other countries and the people that are there.
Why?
Why couldn't we have left troops there in Afghanistan to provide the support that we've been providing prior to the future?
I'll tell you what, what was working was the small number of troops we had supported by airstrikes when necessary.
That was the Trump plan.
Remember, there were two distinct differences.
There's a reason why not a single American was killed there in almost a year and a half in the final years of the Trump administration.
And one was the strong worded, clear, unambiguous message.
If you harm one American, if you do not abide by any agreement we make, this was said straight up.
It's been confirmed by the president, by Mike Pompeo, by Mark Meadows, and numerous others.
There were many people on this call.
I hope they release it.
But they were told in no uncertain terms, they will be blown into, they will be obliterated immediately.
No questions asked and reminded of what we did to the caliphate.
And so that was part one.
Part two was any withdrawal was going to be troops, was going to be based on conditions on the ground.
The president had planned, President Trump had planned to do it before the fighting season.
There is a season, believe it or not.
It's now where to begin.
And third, there were known consequences.
The other big failure is, number one, the intelligence failure.
They saw the Taliban on the march.
Everyone else saw it.
They didn't react to it.
And then they stayed on vacation when it mattered.
And the next step is that you never take the military out last.
You take first, you take them out last after every American is rescued.
Other countries have sent in troops and special forces to escort their citizens to the airport successfully.
We apparently have not done that.
Again, I don't, there's no rhyme or reason to any of it.
So all of this is preventable, easily preventable.
And in terms of what America's presence on the ground would have ended up being and what was really necessary, I think we proved that just a few thousand troops, you know, offering the logistical air power of the U.S. would have probably been enough, at least in the short term, meaning a couple of years, to keep them at bay.
I don't know how long that would have, and it probably would have created a cohesive military on the part of the opposition or the government's 300,000-strong army that Joe Biden kept bragging about that ran for the hills.
Yeah, I agree.
I just, it doesn't make any sense.
We have over 23,000 troops in South Korea, everywhere.
So I've just, I've been wondering why nobody has asked that question.
Nobody's asked that question.
I do agree in principle with the concept.
We can't be fighting forever wars.
We just but there's a right way and a wrong way to withdraw.
And Trump had the right plan.
They abandoned that plan.
Absolutely.
I am with you there all the way.
I couldn't agree more.
It's discussing what's going on.
I feel as everyone else out there.
So that was really my question that I've been just wanting to answer.
And I know that we took away the air support.
I know that we took away any sort of surveillance and those things, the pay that they were needing for stability in that nation, but we're providing it elsewhere.
So that was my thing.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
All of this was easily preventable.
And I agree with you.
And we don't have many good options left at this point.
No, we can't get to other colours.
Now we're being threatened, too, by the Taliban if we don't make the March 31st, the August 31st deadline.
Angela, thank you.
Good call.
Clayton, North Carolina.
Hey, Clayton, how are you?
Glad you called.
Doing great, Sean.
Just had one question.
I've got a bunch of questions.
My main question, though, is how do these Taliban folks have a list of names of the people that helped us?
And why do we not have a list of names of the people that helped us while fighting the fight over there?
You know, you ask not only a good question, it's a great question.
You know, we could ask a billion good questions, can't we?
How is that possible that we don't know who, and all we're telling people is we think you should make it to the airport, but we can't guarantee your safe passage.
We haven't identified every American over there.
We don't know how many.
We don't know where they are.
You know, we just have the story.
I don't have a idea how many people are there.
No, we don't.
And, you know, one has to worry: are we going to leave Americans behind?
And what those images are going to look like.
We're not worried about that one bit.
They showed that when they did the withdrawal.
Yeah.
And then what's going to happen?
We already see that they have been going door to door.
And apparently they've got some, apparently they have some intelligence of who helped the Americans.
Apparently some computer they've been able to acquire, just like they acquired all of the billions in our military equipment now.
We've not only left our equipment, we've now armed the Taliban.
Just leave it behind.
Yeah, just let them have it.
What is it?
Yeah, leave it behind.
Let them have Black Hawk helicopters.
That's genius.
It's making this country and everybody in these borders within these borders look like total idiots.
It's humiliating.
Making us look weak.
And that's one thing we are not.
So one thing we don't have to be.
Actually, Joe Biden is weak.
His plans, national security team, is a disaster.
They are weak.
They are.
Not America.
Thank you, Clayton.
Sharon in Texas.
Sharon, you're on the Sean Hannity Show.
Glad you called.
Hi, Sean.
Thanks.
I would just like to say we never should have given up the Bogam Air Force Base, and we could easily take it back.
And we don't have to be kowtowing to these barbaric Bedouins over there who call themselves Taliban.
We can go over and take that base back, say, change of rules of engagement.
We're taking our base back.
We built it.
We paid for it.
This is our equipment.
Now get out.
And then take control of the Air Force Base.
We should maintain that base.
We need it for its very strategic place in that whole region.
We need it.
We need to have it.
It's ours.
We need to go take it back.
And there's not anybody that would not, nobody in our troops would say, no, we can't take it back.
But of course we can take it back.
And also, I'd just like to say that this plan that Biden has executed is not a failure in his eyes.
He did it on purpose.
And he's paying back the people who helped put him in office.
And that's why he's doing it.
Same thing down on our southern border.
Not too much is talked about down there right now, but here in Texas, we're very aware of it.
And we've got thugs and criminals coming into our cities.
We've got property owners down there in South Texas.
They are under humiliating, horrible circumstances.
And so is our border patrol.
And it's a mess.
And same thing.
Joe Biden did it on purpose, along with Kamala Harris.
They did it on purpose.
This is their plan.
Open borders and humiliate America all around the world.
And we just need to get, we need to get our troops over there and say, we're taking our base back.
It's ours.
Now get out.
And then get our people out.
You know, get them back to the base.
And whoever wants to stay in Afghanistan, the interpreters, the helpers who worked with our troops, fine.
But let them stay in Afghanistan and do it there.
In fairness, we did promise them safe passage out of Afghanistan should it ever come to this.
Now, that does not mean necessarily the United States.
And are there people that play both sides to the middle as part of that group?
I'd be absolutely certain of that.
Do we have a means of vetting people before we let them into this country?
I doubt it.
And if they don't have it, then we have to act accordingly.
And other countries will have to absorb some of that population.
That's just, if we in any way, if we cannot validate and verify the loyalty of people, you know, we can get them out, but Qatar could absorb them.
And there are so many other countries that they can assist in absorbing that population that is headed for certain death and marked for death now.
But we did tell them we'd get them out.
I'm not saying that they all have to come here.
I think anyone that comes here must be fully, completely, 100% vetted and secure.
Otherwise, it's not an option to me.
Anyway, appreciate the call.
800.
Justin is in Texas.
Hey, Justin, how are you?
I'm doing very good, Sean.
Thank you so much for what you and your team do for America and for the conservative voice.
I wish I could do more right now, to be honest.
And we wish you could, too.
Real quick, I just really wanted your comments on the fact that only after eight months as president with this administration, we have higher gas prices.
Inflation is up.
Millions of immigrants, illegal immigrants are pouring across our border.
They're unvetted, and they're not tested for COVID as much as the left loves to harp on that.
And they're using fear and threats against red states and their governors to take away our civil liberties for the choice of mask mandates and vaccines.
And now after the embarrassing debacle of this withdrawal from Afghanistan, where his generals and diplomats warned him of rapid collapse and led to an unknown number of Americans being trapped in Afghanistan with no way to get them to an airport and millions and millions of dollars of weapons and technology left in the hands of the Taliban.
Meanwhile, Biden was on vacation in Camp David.
The VP, nobody heard from her for six or seven days other than a tweet.
And then Biden took another long weekend in Delaware.
It's a systemic failure of the entire Biden administration.
Everything this president touches turns to failure.
And not one of them.
I can't point to a single success on COVID, on the borders, on energy policy, legislatively, inflation, the economy, foreign policy.
I can't cite one.
This is what I do every day.
It's bad.
Elections matter.
Election integrity matters too.
Quick break.
We'll come back and we have a great Hannity 9 Eastern tonight on the Fox News channel as we continue.
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All right, exclusive coverage.
Hannity tonight will introduce you to one American that escaped the Afghans, one that negotiated in the past with the Taliban.
You'll meet a Medal of Valor recipient trying to get former colleagues out of Afghanistan, Colonel North, Sarah Carter, Dan Hoffman, Ron DeSantis, Newt Gingrich, and much more.
Coverage, I promise you won't get anywhere else.
It's, yeah, our fellow Americans held hostage behind enemy lines edition.
That's 9 Eastern on Hannity on Fox.
We'll see you then and back here tomorrow.
Thank you for being with us.
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