The Department of Defense’s inspector general laid out flaws in the United States’s vetting process for Afghans who left their home country in the midst of the military withdrawal in August.
The National Counterterrorism Center did not use all of the DOD data to vet the evacuees, roughly 120,000 in total during the month of August, prior to their arrival in the continental U.S., according to the inspector general report, which was released this week.
Specifically, the NCTC did not have access to biometric or contextual data within the automated biometric identification system database because the National Ground Intelligence Center has agreements with foreign partners that bar the sharing of some of that data with other U.S. agencies, per the report.
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The NGIC reviewed Customs and Border Protection records to complete checks despite saying it wouldn’t have the time to compare that information with the ABIS database before an impending deadline. It “identified Afghans with derogatory information from the DoD ABIS data who were already in the United States.”
The report also said some of the Afghan evacuees later found to have backgrounds that made them ineligible to enter the U.S. could not be located. Specifically, the NGIC identified 31 Afghans in the U.S. who had “derogatory information” found against them as of September 2021, but only three could be located.
“Afghan evacuees undergo a multi-layered, rigorous screening and vetting process that begins overseas and is conducted by intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism professionals from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and State, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and additional Intelligence Community partners,” a Department of Homeland Security official told the Washington Examiner. “The federal government is leveraging every tool available to ensure that no individuals who pose a threat to public safety or national security are permitted to enter the United States.”
The State Department announced a noncombatant emergency operation once the U.S.-backed Ghani government fell to the Taliban in mid-August, only weeks ahead of the U.S. military’s impending withdrawal following two decades of war. The U.S. began a full-scale evacuation effort along with Western allies and was able to help more than 120,000 people depart, though thousands of foreign nationals and at-risk Afghans with ties to the West were left behind.
Those who required additional vetting before reaching the U.S. were sent to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, while fewer than 10 of the evacuees were deemed ineligible to come to the U.S., according to the Wall Street Journal. Some of the people who ended up at Camp Bondsteel were family members of those who were flagged but didn’t want to get separated.
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More than 74,000 of the evacuees came to the U.S. and were temporarily housed at one of eight military bases. Only 1,200 remain on one of the bases, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
The director of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence disagreed with the inspector general’s findings, arguing that the NCTC used all of the available data it had to vet evacuees, even though that didn’t include the biometric data within the ABID database. The inspector general made “minor changes” to the report to clarify comments based on the criticism from the director.
