I am absolutely shocked that the Biden administration has covered up what really happened during and after the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport.
Shocked, I tell you! Who could have guessed that they are a bunch of ass-covering liars?
This is starting to look like a full-scale cover up by the Biden administration. This video, and all other evidence, should have long ago been made public. Shame on them for the failure to be transparent. https://t.co/UkhR51NhwV
— Pradheep J. Shanker, M.D. (@neoavatara) April 24, 2024
CNN has obtained a GoPro video worn by one of the Marines who was guarding the airport on that fateful day, and it doesn’t begin to match the claims of the 2! Pentagon reports on the incident. Footage from that video was used by the Pentagon, but they only released the few seconds in which the bomb exploded.
The story is an exclusive from CNN, and they deserve full credit for uncovering and reporting on the story. In fact, they have reported on the incident several times, showing that the Pentagon has conducted a full-scale coverup. This story brings the receipts.
CNN —
New video evidence uncovered by CNN significantly undermines two Pentagon investigations, the latest of which was released last week, into an ISIS-K suicide attack outside Kabul airport, during the American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
The incident was a gruesome coda to America’s longest war, leaving dead 13 United States military service members and about 170 Afghans who were desperately seeking US help to flee the Taliban takeover of Kabul. For two years, the US military has insisted that the loss of life was caused by a single explosion, and that troops who reported coming under fire and returning it were likely confused in the chaotic aftermath, some suffering from the effects of blast concussion.
But video captured by a Marine’s GoPro camera that has not been seen publicly in full before shows there was far more gunfire than the Pentagon has ever admitted. A dozen US military personnel, who were on the scene and spoke to CNN anonymously for fear of reprisals, have described the gunfire in detail. One told CNN he heard the first large burst of shooting come from where US Marines were standing, near the blast site. “It wasn’t onesies and twosies,” the Marine said. “It was a mass volume of gunfire.”
An Afghan doctor who spoke to CNN on the record for the first time said he personally pulled bullets from the wounded, and with his hospital staff counted dozens of Afghans who died from gunshot wounds.
Never having been in any situation nearly as chaotic and stressful as these Marines, I don’t for a second believe that they acted out of malice or deserve any punishment for their actions. Anybody who had a bomb explode in their midst and then faced a surging crowd coming at them can be forgiven for reacting this way.
The Pentagon cannot be similarly forgiven for lying about it, or Biden for continuing to insist that he get credit for a successful pullout from Afghanistan.
The Pentagon has insisted all deaths and injuries were caused by the explosive device and the ball bearings it fired into the crowd. Though it has acknowledged there was gunfire from American and British forces, it says that was limited to three bursts that were near-simultaneous – one of 25 to 30 warning shots from UK troops, and two bursts of fire from US troops aimed at suspected militants, which did not hit anyone.
The US Central Command ordered a supplemental review into the incident in September 2023, after criticism of its investigation’s conclusions, particularly around whether the bombing could have been prevented – in harrowing emotional testimony from survivors on social media and to Congressional hearings.
Those results, which were released on April 15, reaffirmed that a lone ISIS-K bomber carried out the attack, and found that “new information obtained during the review did not materially impact the findings in the November 2021” investigation, and the review “did not recommend any modifications to those findings.” The review did not pursue numerous reports from Afghan survivors of significant gunfire in the wake of the blast.
The Pentagon is lying, of course. They had access to this video, and the video clearly demonstrates that Marines fired on and off for minutes, other reports from doctors make clear that many civilians were wounded or killed by bullets, not the ball bearings that came from the bomb.
A doctor who treated the wounded reports having been threatened to keep his mouth shut and destroy data related to the incident.
In 2022, Dr. Sayeed Ahmadi, director of the Wazir Akhbar Khan hospital in Kabul, spoke to CNN anonymously as he feared for his safety. He now has asylum in Finland, where he agreed to speak on camera about the harrowing scenes that night in his trauma unit.
“Explosion injuries come with severe injuries and lots of holes in the bodies,” he explained. “But people who were shot had just one or two holes in the chest or head.”
Ahmadi spent many years treating injuries across war-torn Afghanistan. “Of course, when you see the bullets, it’s totally different from the ball bearing. Everybody knows if they are a soldier or a doctor.”
Video obtained by CNN shows bodies piling up outside the hospital on the night of the attack. As they treated patients, Ahmadi said he received a threatening phone call telling him to stop his team from recording which patients had been shot and who had been killed or injured by the blast.
“He spoke fluently Dari,” he said. “He told me, ‘What are you doing, Doctor? You love your life. You love your family. This is not good when you are collecting that data. It would make a big dangerous situation for you. You should stop that as soon as possible.’”
The man called another time to repeat the warning, and Ahmadi advised his team to stop recording data and destroy the evidence they had collected.
Marines, too, report that things happened very differently than how the Pentagon described the incident.
The Marine calmly described key details of blast and its aftermath, but became emotional when discussing the Pentagon’s investigations, including what he described as a lack of transparency about what happened, and the possible role Marine gunfire played in raising the Afghan civilian death toll.
But he defended the immediate response of his colleagues under attack. “The reaction that the Marines had was a reaction that I believe anybody trained to do in that scenario would have had,” he said, suggesting they were in the first phase of the three-stage practice of RTR – Returning fire, Taking cover and then Returning accurate fire.
“You’ve got to think, these are kids,” he said. “They’re young. And they’ve only been taught what they’ve been taught. Some of these kids had been with the unit for quite literally two, three months prior to deployment. They didn’t have the training to be able to recognize some of the things that, you know, might have occurred – nor could you have the training for what had happened on August 26. Or really what happened in Kabul.”
He said the significant gunfire response from Marines after the blast was common knowledge among Marine survivors, even though it was not spoken of publicly. “It’s incredibly weird,” he said. “It’s frustrating, you know? Why hide from what happened?”
The Pentagon report never had the ring of truth, of course. It is insane to believe that any group of young soldiers wouldn’t react to the attack. Not one Marine fired?
Nope. Of course, they did, and who can blame them?
This fits the pattern of missteps and coverups related to the Afghanistan pullout. The drone strike on ten civilians was a disaster, and the Pentagon insisted for quite a while that it was justified.
It turned out to be an Afghan aid worker and his family. The Pentagon couldn’t cover that up because all eyes were on the strike and killing an aid worker and his children is pretty hard to cover up.
But the chaos after a suicide bombing in chaos is easier to cover up, and so the Pentagon did.