Exclusive: Leaked confidential documents: U.S. officials “lacked any training to identify fraudulent Afghan documents”

The security and vetting failures that allowed an Afghan man to allegedly plot an Election Day suicide attack are under scrutiny, according to a leaked confidential document, obtained by the Washington Reporter. 

“U.S. officials processing Afghans with ID cards stated they lacked any training to identify fraudulent Afghan documents,” the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs (HSGAC) Republican staff said in a previously unreported October 2021 memo. “Federal officials identified minimum requirements for an Afghan evacuee to enter or travel to the United States, even with no identification.”

Following Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, HSGAC staff interviewed “staffers with federal agency officials tasked with screening, vetting, or processing Afghan evacuees” in America, Spain, and Germany, the memo noted. 

Read the document HERE.

“It appears the standard security screening and vetting process that the U.S. Government conducts for refugee or visa applicants, which includes validating identification documents and an in-person interview by a trained official, is not being followed for the Afghan evacuees,” the memo said. “In fact, federal officials relayed information about the process to Committee staff that raised a number of questions about the adequacy of the screening and vetting being conducted.”

Would-be suicide attacker Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi is reported to have arrived in America in September 2021, under murky circumstances. The HSGAC memo, written the following month, detailed how easy it was for hostile actors to take advantage of the Biden administration’s desire to evacuate a large number of Afghans, while skirting typical vetting processes.

While Tawhedi received at least minimal vetting while working with the CIA in Afghanistan, the memo warns that, barring glaring red flags, a lot of evacuees escaped even basic scrutiny. “Federal officials, including an official representing the FBI, confirmed that in-person interviews were only conducted for evacuees who had derogatory information associated with their biometrics or phone records.”

After “losing Kabul and surrendering Afghanistan, the Biden administration opted against rescuing the Americans they abandoned and instead set about getting into the Guinness Book of World Records for Biggest Airlift Ever,” Jonathan Wilcox, the communications director for Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) told the Reporter. Issa’s office has played a leading role in holding the Biden administration accountable for the Afghanistan withdrawal. 

The HSGAC report confirms what Issa observed recently inn Qatar, where he was physically prevented by military personnel from viewing large groups of young Afghan men who were on the base. While there, Issa discovered that “thousands of young men without ID from the most terrorist-rich kilometers in the world were flown into America, with the American military ordered to serve as both their personal FedEx and AirBnB host once they got here,” Wilcox said.

“Federal officials logged Afghans into U.S. tracking systems based on the name and biographical data included in the identification document, or, if identification documents were not available, based on the evacuee’s stated name and date of birth,” the HSGAC report said. “Federal officials relayed that few Afghans know their birthday, which has resulted in a number of evacuees’ date of birth logged as January 1. This new record of the evacuee can serve as the basis for receiving a Real ID in the United States.”

Given the number of unvetted Afghans flown into America in 2021, Tawhedi is unlikely to be the only person of concern, foreign policy experts said. For months, the Biden administration kept thousands of Afghans on military bases in America, but “as soon as Republicans got power at the end of 2022,” the last of them were set free, Wilcox said.

“It’s a shame, and a signature failure, of the Commander in Chief to use the military as the executioner of one of history’s greatest policy blunders,” a U.S. Army Special Operations veteran and current executive director of the Special Operations Association of America, told the Reporter. “The military is meant to defend the nation, not import more than 50,000 Afghans who have no business being in the U.S. with no identification or proof they ever helped US military forces.”