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CNN journalist calls out Biden: ‘If this isn’t failure, what does failure look like exactly?

August 19, 2021 | | Print Article

CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward eviscerated President Biden on Thursday while reporting live from Afghanistan, bluntly calling his botched troop withdrawal an unmitigated failure.

“I think a lot of people outside that airport, particularly those taking the kinds of extreme actions we’re talking about, would like to know if this isn’t failure – what does failure look like exactly?” she bitingly commented referring to Biden’s wildly unrealistic assertion that the Afghanistan debacle was not a failure.

Ward was discussing the desperate straits that Afghans find themselves in as they panic, trying to find a way out of the Taliban’s clutches before it is too late. “We have seen and heard these reports,” Ward commented, of “people so desperate they are passing and throwing their babies over the razor wire to try and get them into safety.”

She described the sheer terror in the streets of Kabul as “an absolute mess” where rumors swirl and people wonder what will become of Afghan families who helped support Americans during their time in Afghanistan. CNN is citing reports that the Taliban may have a list and be actively searching door to door for those families. If they find them, the women could be raped and taken as slaves and the men could be executed. Currently, preferred execution methods reportedly include burning at the stake, crucifixion, beheading, or being burned alive.

In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, the President got his hackles up when asked if the withdrawal was a failure. “When you look at what’s happened over the last week,” Stephanopoulos asked, “was it a failure of intelligence, planning, execution, or judgment?”

“Look, it was a simple choice, George,” Biden replied. “When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government, get in a plane and taking off and going to another country; when you saw the significant collapse of the Afghan troops we had trained, up to 300,000 of them, just leaving their equipment and taking off — that was, you know, I’m not, that’s what happened. That’s simply what happened. And so the question was, in the beginning, the threshold question was, do we commit to leave within the timeframe we set, do we extend it to Sept. 1, or do we put significantly more troops in?”

Ward’s latest comments follow her claim that she was screamed at by Taliban fighters to cover her face and her producer was nearly pistol-whipped in Kabul at the airport. Two Taliban fighters assaulted her producer for taking a video on his iPhone according to Ward. She said the producer only managed to escape a beating because another insurgent stepped in once he realized they were journalists.

“The most frightening moment for our team came when our producer Brent Swails was taking some video on his iPhone. Two Taliban fighters just came up with their pistol and they were ready to pistol-whip him. We had to intervene and scream and it was actually another Taliban fighter who came in and said ‘No, no, no. Don’t do that, they’re journalists’ … I’ve covered all sorts of crazy situations. This was mayhem. This was nuts,” she reported concerning Afghans as well as Americans trying to get to the airport.

“This was impossible for an ordinary citizen, even if they have their paperwork … no way they’re running that gauntlet, no way they’re going to be able to navigate that. It’s very dicey, it’s very dangerous and it’s completely unpredictable,” Ward adamantly asserted.

When you’ve lost CNN…

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Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
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