(Corine Gatti, Headline USA) A recent investigation by the House Foreign Affairs Committee revealed that President Joe Biden’s administration was given numerous warnings by U.S. State Department officials about the dangers of withdrawing from Afghanistan too quickly.
However, committee chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said these warnings went unheeded, according to Fox News.
McCaul spent months battling the State Department to access a document known as the “dissent channel cable“—and when he finally read it, he was stunned.
The cable, authored by U.S. diplomats at the embassy in Kabul, warned of the very things that have come to pass: a rapid collapse of the Afghan government, chaos at the airport, and a Taliban takeover that killed 13 American service members in August 2021.
The move also pulled military personnel out before 170 Afghan civilians were evacuated, also leaving Americans stranded at the mercy of the Taliban.
McCaul was quick to praise the authors of the cable, calling them heroes who deserve recognition for their prescience and courage.
“They were right about everything, and the fact that their warnings were ignored is a tragedy,” McCaul said in a recent interview with Punchbowl News. “Unfortunately, the administration didn’t heed all their warnings and we got what we got.”
McCaul viewed a version of the document that had the names of the dissenters redacted. He and Greg Meeks, D-N.Y., the ranking minority member of the committee, were the only lawmakers to read the document.
Meeks ducked the evidence and said the document ultimately did not reveal anything groundbreaking and said it “puts to rest this whole thing about having a subpoena and the president is hiding something or whatever it is.”
McCaul, who had been seeking access to the document, had been stonewalled by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who had failed to comply with multiple subpoena deadlines—until earlier in May when he threatened to hold Blinken in contempt of Congress for blocking access.
McCaul also asked for every member of the Foreign Affairs Committee to gain access to the cable, but that remained uncertain, according to Fox Digital.
McCaul was given the option to only look at the briefing of the document, not the actual document, until Tuesday.
