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Sept. 3, 2021 - Sean Hannity Show
30:51
History of Afghanistan - September 3rd, Hour 3
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All right, news roundup and information overload on a Friday, 800-941 Sean.
If you want to be a part of the program, I I am still in a state of utter anger, shock, and dismay at all of the absolute lies told by Biden at his statement four or five question press conference, if even want to call it that.
Um this is Biden.
Um we haven't heard of anybody, you know, not being able to get to the airport.
We we we have secured the airport.
We haven't secured the perimeter, Joe.
We haven't heard of any cases at all of people not being able to make it to the airport.
Well, that's the exact opposite of what your State Department is sending out to people, Americans in Afghanistan, about we can't help you get to the airport.
Oh, and the airport gates may open or close without notice.
Oh, and use your best judgment about going, and we cannot ensure your safe passage.
That's what they're telling him on the other side of this.
We you know, we played the questions earlier.
But Biden just didn't complete the we've not we've not heard of any case of anybody not being able to get to the airport.
A complete and utter lie with all the video tape evidence to prove it.
Listen.
The military has secured the airport, as you mentioned, but will you sign off on sending U.S. troops into Kabul to evacuate Americans who haven't been able to get to the airport safely.
We have no indication that they haven't been able to get in Kabul through the airport.
We've made an agreement with the with the Taliban thus far.
They've allowed them to go through, it's in their interest in a go through.
So we know of no circumstance where American citizens are carrying an American passport or trying to get through to the airport.
But we will do whatever needs to be done to see to what they get to the airport.
We will see whatever needs to be done.
Meaning there's no control.
We have control of the airport, but we don't have control of one road to get to the airport.
Not one.
That is controlled by the Taliban.
And and they said they're gonna let Americans with passports through.
Any American that wants to come home, we will get you home.
I want you to hear me.
Uh now I can't promise any outcome on all of this.
I I mean, he's contradicting himself all over the place.
We made clear to the Taliban um that if they get in the way and in in any way that was going to be a forceful response.
No, there's not, Joe.
Because they've got 15,000 Americans they'll use as human shields and hostages, Joe.
They're terrorists.
No indication of of any people having difficulties getting to the airport.
No, well, the Taliban secures the perimeter, and there's tons of personal stories, images on the ground that contradict everything he's saying.
You know, I it's unbelievable.
No question.
Uh I've not heard anything about our credibility being um uh in any way uh that we've been criticized from from anyone around the world, nobody.
We they don't have any partners.
They've all been highly critical.
And this is the mess that they left.
Uh we bring in Jason Chaffetz, Fox News contributor, now a distinguished fellow at the Government Accountability Institute, and Peter Schweitzer, the president of the Government Accountability Institute, host of drilldown.com, um, which by the way is extremely successful.
You know, originally we we had a book for today to talk specifically about the 20-year war and this crushing defeat and you know everything else in between, and the the idea that the president of the United States is lying about the situation on the ground, but more importantly, Jason Chaffetz, I'll start with you.
Well, I guess I probably should start with Peter considering he's your boss, but I'll start with you.
Um but in all seriousness, the the they've had days.
They saw an advancing Taliban take over 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 percent of the country in record time.
This was happening.
They had all the time to prepare for extracting every American, the sixty to seventy-five thousand estimated Afghanis that if they're left behind that will be killed, they did nothing.
Now it's completely out of our our hands.
The control, the fate of our our fellow Americans and our allies is in the hands of the Taliban with reports that go in door to door to identify any Afghani who supported and helped and assisted America in any way in the last 20 years, And then they're brutally murdering them right on the streets for the world to see.
So it's not exactly as Joe portrayed it today.
We have no leverage at all because he gave that up.
He did.
We have the biggest, baddest military on the face of the planet.
We have an intelligence community that has satellite imagery and technology that nobody else has.
But Joe Biden and Kamala Harris made a conscious decision months ago to do it this way.
And remember, there's they're on tape, they're on audio saying, yeah, we have planned for every contingency.
This chaos was built into the plan that we had put forward.
But somehow the brilliant mind that is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris decided that they were going to close the Bagram Air Force base where we did have total control of the air space and the ability to move airplanes in and out.
They gave that up to protect the uh without extracting the Americans, the diplomats, the foreign service operators, the contractors, Americans with passports.
We gave all that up to go do something else, and now we gotta rely on the Taliban.
I have been to that Kabul Airport.
I have flown in and out of it.
It took a convoy, uh literally of army in an MRAPS to get me in and out of it.
It is exceptionally dangerous, and there is no way that Donald Trump would have ever uh allowed this to happen.
There is no way that that would be done under a different administration, except they made a conscious decision, Sean, to allow the Taliban to be in control of the fate of Americans who are doing America's bidding in the in Afghanistan.
It was a conditions based on the ground agreement, but it was started with a phone call with the leader of the Taliban and President Trump himself as part of this the deal that he had that Biden never followed up on.
And by the way, to get out before the quote war season, uh as war historically is more likely this time of year, which is why Trump had a much earlier date uh for a a drawdown withdrawal, but again, based on conditions on the ground, but also backed by this threat.
And I've talked to now numerous sources that were on the call that heard it, and that before we discuss anything, President Trump said, You saw what I did to the caliphate in Syria, did you not?
Yes.
Okay.
That will be nothing.
If nothing compared to if you do not abide by every comma and period and any agreement we might make that I will blow you into an entirely new century.
Do you understand me?
Apparently those words were spoken by Donald Trump.
He got back an affirmative.
We didn't lose an American in Afghanistan for what?
Almost 18 months, the last 18 months of Trump's presidency.
They weren't on the march or on the move because they feared and believed Donald Trump would do everything that he said.
That fear no longer exists, clearly.
Well, this is uh th this is the peace through strength.
If the example to me is Ronald Reagan, some of the most peaceful times we have were with Ronald Reagan because he knew he had the biggest, baddest military, wasn't a fail uh afraid of firing on it.
And Donald Trump took exactly the same philosophy.
Is there any doubt in anybody's mind that if somebody did something to even one American that Donald Trump wouldn't send every single asset in there to go take him out?
Compare that to uh Joe Biden and and Kamala Harris, and you gotta include Barack Obama who had some of these people in Get Mo and let him get back out on the bat on the battlefield when when uh Benghazi was happy, no assets were sent in.
Does anybody believe that Joe Biden would actually pull the trigger?
He didn't even want to go after Osama bin Laden, for goodness sake.
Peter Schweitzer, your reaction.
Uh yeah, I mean, I I agree exactly with what Jason said.
Um, but you know, Sean, if you look over the the the span of American history, I mean, we've had situations before where uh we've had American presidents, let's say, who uh were detached who are not completely there.
Um you think of Woodrow Wilson, you think of LBJ.
Um, but at least in those circumstances, we had people around the president um who had the capacity, the knowledge, and the will to do the right thing, to to sort of carry out and protect American interests.
What's troubling right now is you have uh Joe Biden who is detached either because uh because of age and because of a health condition that he has, or he's simply lying to the American people.
But there's no question he's detached From sort of the reality on the ground.
But the people around him, uh, the vice presidents, um, she is is uh uh not involved in any way, and you look at the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, you get the same kind of detachment.
So this is this is a very troubling situation that I would say is somewhat unique in American history because nobody seems to be wanting to step up uh and actually fix the problem in the situation that we're in.
And as Jason said, and as you mentioned, Sean, look, the world watches these events.
Um, you know, it is a uh a global uh society in the sense that if something happens in Afghanistan, people in Beijing, China are aware of what's going on, and weakness breeds aggression.
Uh, and we have seen nothing from Joe Biden on the international stage except for weakness since he became president.
Well, I mean, the the the fact that we saw them on the march, Peter.
We watched them, we witnessed this, we've seen this coming for weeks.
You know, at what point didn't anybody in our national security apparatus, intelligence apparatus, those around the president warn them.
Now, we're discovering that apparently the Pentagon did warn him that that intelligence agencies did warn him.
The State Department did warn him.
And now the question is why didn't he take their advice and admonition seriously?
You have any answer to that?
Because I can I can't figure it out.
No, it's hard to figure out.
Um, you know, what what I liken to sh it to Sean is imagine if you have a natural disaster like an earthquake.
An earthquake happens suddenly, nobody's prepared, you're kind of in reaction mode.
This was the equivalent of in 2018 we signed the peace agreement with the Taliban.
This is basically saying three years from now, on this date, there may be an earthquake.
And Joe Biden extended actually the uh the withdrawal that uh that Joe that uh Donald Trump had scheduled for the spring.
So the point is they've there's basically been three years of preparation, meaning the bureaucracies, but you have a new administration that comes in, they've got eight months.
They've got eight months to prepare for an earthquake that the State Departments in some of the cables.
We now know the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2020 was warning about this.
We know that the CIA was concerned about it.
They were all warning about this earthquake that was going to engulf with the uh uh withdrawal of American force from Afghanistan, and nobody prepared for it.
Nobody secured uh anything.
Um, and it is it is precisely the sort of terrible response from leadership um that is very, very hard to recover from.
Because remember, Sean, Joe Biden said two things to the world.
He said, first of all, well, you know, Donald Trump is unpredictable.
I'm gonna be the adult in the room.
I'm the guy that knows what he's doing.
The second thing that he said was I'm going to be the one that that that has better relations with our allies than Donald Trump with.
They're going to respect me more.
Both of those things were never true.
They are now both definitely not true because it's been demonstrated that the Emperor has no clothes.
Uh that Joe Biden does not have a competency to run uh uh the free world, uh, and he has lost the respect of allies that that really had been built up in the Trump administration and is now basically completely gone.
From the Wall Street Journal, uh Jason Chaffetz, about two dozen State Department officials serving at the embassy in Kabul sent an internal memo to Secretary of State uh Blinken, Anthony and Anthony Blinken, and another and other top State Department officials last month warning of the potential collapse of Kabul.
Now, this was sent on July 13th.
That is five weeks ago, that the Taliban was rapidly gaining ground, and the city was vulnerable to collapse.
They didn't listen, they didn't prepare, they didn't act, and this is now the result.
Basically, Americans held hostage, their lives hanging in the balance uh on the whim of the feelings of a terrorist organization.
Yet the warnings couldn't be any more clear, damning evidence the Biden administration was warned by its own officials of this disaster coming.
I I think we're gonna continue to see more of that.
I think you're gonna see State Department uh cables, I think you're gonna see intelligence reports that continue to stream out to show uh that the Taliban was gaining strength.
There was movement.
Uh and and just the very basics of what a leader should have been doing in securing the uh Americans that had passports and getting them out.
I I just I'm absolutely stunned that we would close our Air Force Base there at Bagram.
I've flown in and out of Bagram.
I've flown in and out of the Kabul um Karzai Airport.
I have been to all of those places, and I've got to tell you, one was secure, at least as secure as you could get it.
The other one, not so much.
And and they saw this march happening.
But this is exactly the time.
If you match it up, that Joe Biden was going out answering questions saying, oh, the likelihood, oh, near zero.
This isn't gonna happen.
We plan for every contingency.
They have this huge massive uh security force in Afghanistan.
Anybody who's been to Afghanistan knows that with all due respect, most of those people were illiterate.
And yet somehow we left tens of billions of dollars of American assets, military equipment, all back in the hands of terrorist.
We're worse off now than we were before we went in to take out the terrorist threat.
And if you look at the way Joe.
If we get if we get them out, and uh I'm just short on time, but if we do get them out, Jason, it's not gonna be because of anything that Joe Biden and his administration did.
It'll be in spite of it.
But it will be basically the terms will be dictated completely by the Taliban.
And and to put Americans in that that situation is just unforgivable.
Uh dereliction of duty that at a level I can't even imagine that we're even talking about.
Uh thank you both.
Peter Schweitzer, Jason Chaffetz, uh 800 941 Sean is our number.
We'll have a lot more on all of this tonight on Hannity.
When we come back, we'll get right to your calls straight ahead.
And uh that's uh coming up.
800 941 Sean, our number.
And you're listening to the best of the Sean Hannity show.
We'll have more of your favorite guest topics and memorable moments.
That's all coming up.
All right, 25 to the top of the hour, 800 941 Sean, our number uh one of the things we have highlighted is life uh in the previous regime of the Taliban, 20 years ago, for women, it was despicable.
And women now are being taken as sex slaves, even even young girls taken as sex slaves for Taliban fighters.
Women are not allowed to leave their house, they must dress a certain way, or they will be beaten.
Many have been beaten.
Some have been beaten because they didn't like the uh some Taliban fighters didn't like the way they cooked, or they wouldn't cook for them.
Anyway, once one female Afghan journalist, her life is on the line.
She has chronicled her many moves uh to avoid the Taliban.
They are after her.
After we play this, well, you'll hear an incredible story about rescue effort of uh of female judges from Afghanistan who will be murdered if they are caught by the Taliban.
I don't know what will happen to me because if they find me, they will kill me.
They are checking for the people who always talk against it.
Every day I'm changing my address to be sure that uh they can't truck me.
The Taliban can't truck me down, they can't search for me, they come find me, so I'm changing my address.
My friends are afraid because they think that they might be targeted because of me.
I can't trust my friends.
How sad is that?
Alison Renault is here to talk about her effort to save 200 female judges from Afghanistan who prosecuted the Taliban and Oklahoma mother of eleven flew to the Mid East earlier this month to help rescue ten members of the country's uh all girls robotics team is now hoping to save more as the Taliban has taken over Kabul.
Um anyway, a 60-year-old Harvard grad master's degree in international relations and U.S. space policy took it upon herself to save members of the Afghan girls' robotic team.
She flew into Qatar on August the 9th after making a Hail Mary call to a former roommate at the U.S. Embassy there to help the girls from uh ad the advancing Taliban, known for their oppressive treatment of women.
Alison, thank you for being with us.
What a courageous story.
And from what I can tell, you've been able to save lives of innocent people.
It's a pleasure to be with you, Sean.
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Uh I was on a one-way ticket to Qatar.
And when I encountered my former roommate in the embassy in Qatar, uh, she said, no need to travel.
Uh I've got this.
You need to stay on the ground and help these these uh ladies to freedom.
So it was falsely reported, and I just want to make sure that's clear.
Doesn't take away from the story and the miracle of getting 10 girls out of a city of eight million people in chaos.
So just that media coverage alone got into the heart of Afghanistan with Afghan women, and I began to receive cries for help night and day.
In particular, women Afghan judges, they have been fired.
They are in hiding.
They're being hunted, as you said.
Reports that two of them have been assassinated, one almost beat to death, and a video I received a couple of mornings ago of one of their colleagues being blinded.
So these ladies are desperate, and, you know, when they first reached out to me just to vet the situation, I said, please send me a list of names and their e-mails.
And I thought I would receive 20 Afghan women judges, and it ended up being 212 that are in hiding.
It quickly becomes Schindler's List.
They have children.
They have spouses.
And honestly, Sean, what worked for the robotic team, the Qatar government really stepped up, along with our officials on the ground in Kabul.
It's not going to work for this group.
So I was back at scratch again saying, you know, calling out to God, really, for let's start a new team.
I need some help.
And didn't put that really out on social media or anything, and suddenly I began to get text messages, one from a former NASA general counsel, a good friend of mine, a female, which then she tapped into her legal network.
Yale Law School got on board.
It helped us compress the data quickly.
Ambassadors to the EU.
Extraction teams on the ground.
Planes offered.
And, you know, suddenly the hand of Providence has given us a dream team.
So that's kind of the story of, you know, what's happening.
what's going on but um have more to share if you'd like to ask well uh it sounds like your efforts have have paid dividends and there are other people but I think now the situation has become quite untenable.
Do you have any people uh actively that you're working to get out now you're in contact with at Karzai International Airport people that have been there for the terror attack well we were warned uh through intel on the ground in um Kabul that the How come you have better intel it seems than Joe Biden because I seemingly have better intel as well because the CIA the DOD and everybody else in the world was trying to warn him to get out in April and May and nobody was paying attention apparently but anyway I digress.
That's okay.
Um we were warned that the uh the situation at the airport had been breached by ISIS a couple of days ago um Taliban had taken this is what I heard I I'm just telling you what I heard that uh Taliban had taken uh control of air traffic uh control tower on the uh civilian side and so we knew probably that that our plan A to get them out on airplanes was not gonna work but we we've been encouraging these ladies every day telling them to stay strong if plan A doesn't work we're going to plan B. Plan B doesn't work we're
going to C. We're going to D and when the Americans evacuate uh we're not leaving these ladies alone and we're gonna go after every single one of them.
We're not gonna leave one of them behind and by God's mercy he's gonna help us.
And we have um how how could you possibly if they're caught behind enemy lines of a terrorist organization in control of the country what is plan D?
There is no plan D there always is a plan.
I worked uh I was up at NASA headquarters in Washington DC and one thing I learned was the mantra of failure is not an option.
So we're not gonna quit.
I don't know how it's gonna work Sean but we have other options besides I admire you.
I'm grateful for your courage.
You know we had we had special ops forces on the ground for a week that wanted to go into Kabul and rescue Americans and they were told to stand down just like Benghazi again and again and again and I've confirmed that from five separate sources that were briefed on the situation.
I admire you Alison anything that we can do or any information we can we can you know pass on to you or you can pass on to us.
We'll gladly share it with this audience.
Thank you for all your efforts.
Thank you, sir.
Just uh prayer and just um I just want to say to Mr President if you can hear me we just need more time.
We need more time.
800 nine four one Sean is our number Nathan North Carolina you're on the Sean Hannity show.
Yeah hi Sean uh thanks for taking my call so my biggest thing that I don't understand is I I spent over thirty months in Afghanistan and over twenty of that was spent in Bogram Airfield.
And I feel like that's kind of bearing the lead because people aren't really talking about this part of the story.
We're trying to get all these people out through Kabul, and that's just an airfield inside of a city.
But what people aren't it's getting lost in translation is the size of Bogram Airfield.
This place is over almost 30 square miles large.
It has infrastructure.
We've built uh this place up.
It's almost a city at this point.
And we could have easily housed all the people that we needed to get out of there.
Civilians, military personnel.
We could have gotten our equipment out that way, and we just abandoned that before we even did the due diligence to get all of the other stuff that we need now there.
You know, obviously the human lives aspect is the most important part of this.
And e even even like the hundred thousand people that we've gotten out in the last week or two, that easily could have been processed in that one airfield.
It was our largest base in the entire theater.
It was also an area where we could protect the perimeter.
Um the Trump plan, it's fascinating you bring this up because I've had this discussion with numerous senators and congressmen and uh former Trump officials uh at the highest level.
That was part of the Trump plan, not just to never it we we were never giving that airfield back.
We built it, we own it, and we were gonna stay there for geopolitical purposes, uh, in case things got out of control.
And and remember the the number one threat of President Trump to the Taliban was if you move out of your area, we will obliterate you.
And that was said before any other discussion went forward, and it was said numerous times throughout any discussions.
And for the last 18 months, Donald Trump was president, not a single American died in Afghanistan.
I think that speaks volumes about how they believed him.
And like you were saying, like we had the perimeter established.
This wasn't just a chain link fence.
We had concrete barriers around the place.
We had guard towers every so often, multiple entry control points.
We had the C rams in place to protect from incoming enemy mortar and rocket fire.
Like uh, you know, we may have had to surge a little bit more troops back to that area, but it was a hardened location.
It would have been easily defensible a lot more so than just some random airport inside of a city that's already in a foreign hostile country.
You know what I'm saying?
Well, it it and all of it, as you know, was preventable.
All of it was preventable.
And you know, it's just to me, i uh I'm I'm kind of blown away that we've allowed America to disintegrate after 20 long years into this when the options were phenomenal for us in March, April, May, June, even late, even into July.
Right.
And with something like this, we we definitely would have had you know, there should have been more of a plan.
We could have been doing this for months.
We didn't have to leave 200 aircraft, seventy-five thousand vehicles, over six hundred thousand weapons.
Uh, you know, we could have convoyed C five galaxies into that place, and if you've ever seen those things, uh people be talking about the uh C seventeens that were loading up with people.
A C5 Galaxy, you can fit six buses inside of that thing, you know.
We don't have to cram eight hundred people on top of each other in C seventeens.
We could do that as well.
We have a very large fleet of those.
But our capabilities, when the military actually starts putting that rubber to the road, we can accomplish things that no one else on this planet can.
We could have been doing this for months.
The uh the intel seems like it has been there.
Uh, you know, this may not necessarily be 100% on Biden be but he is the decision maker in the end.
But in the end, somebody's gonna have to answer this for for this just complete lack of planning.
Because there was uh you seem to you know, do you seem more capable of being the commander in chief than our current commander in chief?
Anyway, I appreciate your call.
I wish I had more time for you.
Thank you for your service, sir.
Bernard Dettison, Long Island, New York, hey, Bernadette, glad you called.
I just wanted uh to say I have four boys, all four are currently serving.
I have two special forces.
I know where three of my boys are.
One I am is somewhere where I, you know, am not he was deployed, and he is not allowed to tell me where.
He is obviously uh, I'm sure in the midst Of all this.
Um, I just want to say that leave no one behind is very serious for these men and women in our military.
This is this is serious.
These are their brothers, their sisters.
And when we have a commander in chief, as we have now, it totally freaked me out.
I am telling you, I need the biggest bully in that white house.
I am begging for President Trump to get back because I did not worry when he was our commander in chief.
As soon as Biden got in, however he got in.
I am telling you, I've been worried about something like this.
He's a good thing.
Joe Biden is in charge of this.
He isn't currently the commander in chief of the United States.
Elections have consequences.
Yes, though I believe that laws were not followed, like partisan observers didn't observe.
Yeah, that's why I've been pushing for election reform so hard and saying it's so important.
But right now, this is Joe Biden's disaster.
He caused it.
Now, I don't know what ideas President Trump or anybody else for that matter might have, considering how dire of a situation they have now put us in.
It it's humiliating, it's disheartening, it's tragic.
It's all uh and it's tragic on a whole other level because we watched the march of the Taliban and we could have stopped them cold.
We did not.
And there's no good reason why.
There's never they've they've ever asked that important question.
Just a few important questions.
Why do you trust the Taliban?
Why didn't you, as the Taliban was on the march in April and May and June and July?
Why didn't you see this coming?
And while you had control, why didn't you immediately step up evacuation plans?
Why did you leave our military equipment behind?
$83 billion worth.
You know, why did you you're bragging about having total control of the airport?
Well, apparently not.
And we know the Taliban had control of the perimeter of the airport and the rest of Kabul that they had to admit.
Why did you let that happen?
I mean You're exactly right.
I mean, and now the question is and I don't have a answer.
Yeah, you're right.
And what do we do now?
There's the big question of the day.
If anyone has that answer, I'm all ears.
Because I really, really don't have the perfect answer because it's not a perfect answer.
Every option is extraordinarily dangerous, difficult, challenging, and and will likely result in American deaths.
But then what's what's plan B?
Just leave them behind, defend for themselves, and then we'll work on what diplomatic and economic options on the table.
What we're going to start paying ransom for the Americans they left behind.
Are we going to make them pay back for all the money and all the equipment we gave them left for them?
There were no provisions made for that.
We didn't extract black hawk helicopters.
Now we've got now we've got Taliban fighters flying Black Hawk helicopters.
God help us.
Quick break right back.
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All right, that's gonna wrap things up for today.
Hannity tonight, we have a sp a special interview we don't want you to miss nine Eastern on the Fox News channel.
We'll give you the very latest on the ground as this timeline that Joe Biden is adhering to approaches very quickly on Tuesday.
That'll be Monday, our time.
Um so we'll get into that.
But the vice president of Afghanistan, who didn't flee the country like the president, will join us exclusively for his first interview as they build the resistance in northern Afghanistan to take on the Taliban.
Can they defeat them?
And what can the U.S. do?
We'll get to that and much more news you won't get from the media mob.
Set your DVR.
Hannity tonight, Fox News.
We'll see you then.
Thanks for being with us.
Have a great weekend.
God pray for our fellow Americans in Afghanistan and others.
And we'll see you back here on Monday.
We'll see you tonight at nine.
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