Ret. Lt. Col. Oliver North on Sunday asserted there are “over hundreds” of Americans left behind in Afghanistan.
In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” North noted the promise by President Joe Biden at the beginning of the withdrawal was that no Americans would be left behind.
“It was a blatant lie,” he charged.
“We're being told by the State Department and by [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken himself that there are Americans being rescued coming out on those flights” from Afghanistan, North said,.
“In fact you see the airplanes flying off of the airfield…. If those flights had Americans on them, who were they and what are their names,” he asked.
“We have yet to hear anybody who was on one of those flights. Many of us suspect we'll get at some point the so-called business-like Taliban are going to give us the names of people who they sent out who … will say nice things about the Taliban, nice things about how the State Department got them out.”
North said those people will likely be victims of the so-called “Stockholm syndrome.”
“There are over hundreds, hundreds of Americans left on the ground inside of Afghanistan,” North asserted. “We don't know all their names. We don't know all of them. They keep saying if they wanted to get out they could have gotten out. That is not true. There were Americans around the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport who could not get out, still trying to get out.”
According to North, there also needs to be accountability on why Bagram Air Base was “given to the Taliban.”
“Hopefully there will be accountability as why they gave away Bagram, one of the best military bases in the world,” he said.
“I know the engineer who built it,” he said. “The Russians started it, we finished it. It was one of the finest military operations, installations in the world. There was intelligence collection, there was a main base, easily defended, all the kinds of surveillance you need to protect it with a relative modest number of troops. Why did they give it away? It wasn't taken by the Taliban. It was given to the Taliban.”
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Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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