On Sunday, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) said that the testimony from Marine Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews about President Biden’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan was “devastating and damaging to the administration.”
Vargas-Andrews was one of the many individuals injured in the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members on August 26, 2021. Vargas-Andrews said the tragedy and the withdrawal were a “catastrophe” and result of the Biden administration’s “inexcusable lack of accountability and negligence.”
McCaul discussed the testimony during an interview on CBS News’s “Face The Nation.”
“Well first of all, very powerful testimony, very emotional, but very devastating and damaging to the administration,” McCaul said when asked by host Margaret Brennan to respond to the testimony. “These snipers and troops were put at [Hamid Karzai International Airport], surrounded by the Taliban … who were put in charge, and that was the first mistake in the chaos that we heard that happened that day, and the State Department [was] virtually non-existent.”
“I think the most dramatic thing was the fact that this sniper had the suicide bomber in his sights, and an intelligence bulletin went out, you know, describing him,” he continued. “He said this meets the description, meets with the team, psychological operations, get together, they run this up the chain of command, and the commanding officer says, ‘I don’t have the authority.’ And then they said, ‘who does have the authority for permission to engage?’ And the commanding officer says, ‘I don’t know.’ And he never got back to them.”
“The point is, they could have taken out this threat,” he said. “That then when the suicide bomber went off, not only did Marine Sgt. Vargas-Andrews have his leg blown off and his arm, but we had 140 Afghans killed, 13 servicemen and women killed. I talked to the mother of one of the marine sergeants, I gave her just a hug. She was so devastated. In addition to 50 injured, including Marine Sgt. Vargas-Andrews, and it could have been avoided.”