Ex-UK commander: Biden should be court-martialed

FPI / August 24, 2021

Joe Biden, after the disaster in Afghanistan, claimed: “I have seen no question of our credibility from our allies around the world.”

Maybe his staff should read the British press.

A number of members of the British Parliament condemned Team Biden's departure from the country as “catastrophic” and “shameful,” the Telegraph reported.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson charged the West could not maintain a presence after U.S. air and ground forces abandoned the cause.

“The West could not continue this U.S.-led mission — a mission conceived and executed in support and defense of America — without American logistics, without U.S. air power and without American might,” Johnson said.

Col. Richard Kemp, a former British military commander in Afghanistan, said on Fox News's "Life, Liberty & Levin":

"President Biden has completely destroyed his credibility single-handedly… Al-Qaida and the Islamic State are strong in Afghanistan. They will operate freely. And they can operate more freely than before 9-11. Jihadists from around the world will train, flock to Afghanistan… There is no one more who is cheering this than Russia and China. They will now see they have pretty much an open field… In my opinion. I don’t say this often, and I don’t say this lightly. And I’ve never said this about anybody else. Any other leader in this position. People are talking about impeaching President Biden. I don’t think President Biden should be impeached. He’s the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces who has just essentially surrendered to the Taliban. He shouldn’t be impeached. He should be court-martialed for betraying the United States of America and the United States Armed Forces."

Tom Tugendhat, the Tory chairman of the foreign-affairs committee, who went into battle alongside Afghan fighters as a British soldier, repudiated Biden’s allegation that the Afghan army easily and willingly gave up the resistance.

“To see their commander in chief call into question the courage of men I fought with, to claim that they ran, is shameful,” he said to the chamber, according to the Telegraph. He added, "Those who have never fought for the colors they fly should be careful about criticizing those who have."

Johann Wadephul, a deputy caucus leader for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television: “Nobody asked us whether it was a good idea to leave that country in such a quick way. So, the very irritating situation we now have — the chaos we are facing in Kabul — is of course the result of this.”

Norbert Roettgen, the chairman of the German parliament’s foreign-affairs committee, said: “Things haven’t just gone wrong — it’s a catastrophe. It’s a moral failure of the West — and the geopolitical consequences are still difficult to discern. It’s a breaking point.”

Charles "Sam" Faddis, a former CIA operations officer with 30 years of experience in the conduct of intelligence operations in the Middle East, South Asia and Europe, wrote in an Aug. 20 op-ed for And Magazine that Biden "has not simply made some poor decisions. He has made absolutely catastrophic, perhaps even treasonous decisions."

Among the consequences of Biden's decisions, Faddis noted:

• We have thousands of Americans trapped in territory controlled by an Islamic terrorist group every bit as vicious as ISIS. We have no capacity to help secure their release given the constraints this President has put on our military.
• We have thousands of American soldiers surrounded in a militarily indefensible position. We will be fortunate to ever get them out.
• The Chinese government is already announcing its friendship with the Taliban. Their exploitation of this situation is underway. The mineral deposits they will gain as a consequence will – in and of themselves – change the balance of power on this planet.
• Every jihadist group in the world is re-energized and revitalized. We can expect at any moment that attacks will begin and areas we believed pacified will explode into violence anew.
• The Communist Chinese, already emboldened by the presence of their ‘lackey’, Biden, in the White House, are signaling fresh interest in seizing Taiwan and changing the entire balance of power in the Pacific.
• We have allowed the Taliban to seize incredible quantities of advanced weaponry and made no move to destroy it. This radical Islamic terrorist group now possesses armored vehicles, top-of-the-line weapons, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft. Thanks to this administration they also now have all the Afghans we trained to maintain and operate all of this.

"What we need is action. What we need is backbone," Faddis wrote. "Every Republican in Congress and every Democrat that remembers being an American is more important than partisan advantage ought to be calling on the principal officers of this administration to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove this morally bankrupt, hideously incompetent pretender from office. Articles of impeachment should have been introduced yesterday."

Faddis concluded: "It is not just our countrymen in Kabul who have been betrayed. We have all been stabbed in the back by a man and an administration that are working against us and on behalf of our enemies. The time for mild criticism has come and gone. There can be no more business as usual. The traitor in the White House must go."

Center for Security Policy senior fellow Stephen Bryen asked: "What does the country do with a president who is failing, self-contradictory, mentally confused, irritable, and angry when he is uncomfortable? Or when the President is guided by note cards written by White House staff – if he reads them out loud, he often appears not to grasp their meaning, and sometimes he forgets to read them and becomes incoherent."

Bryen continued:

"One way to help would be to make the National Security Council a full time, permanent operation.

"Remember that the NSC is a body authorized by law only in 1947. It includes, along with the President and Vice President, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Energy and Secretary of Treasury. It also includes the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Department of Homeland Security, and the CIA, plus the NSC staff.

"For Joe Biden to stay in office, Congress should demand, as should the Biden cabinet, that the NSC manage all foreign policy matters, not the President by himself nor the President with only his NSC staff advisor. Moreover, 'manage' means that all statements involving national security must be authorized by the NSC and can’t be issued by the President alone. And nuclear weapons decisions and policy must be vested in the NSC, not the President only.

"In short, a permanent NSC would change the role of the President as Commander in Chief and make it a Collective Commander in Chief. It is the only way to ensure rational decisions in this perilous time."

Free Press International