to which they say and i m sure you haven t had a chance to read the book yet you said i agree with you on everything. if you re the principal advisor to the president and she said that to you do you think you were doing service to a president by agreeing with the speaker that your commander-in-chief in crazy? i actually said i m not qualified to assess the mental health of the president. what i m agreeing to is we have to have a secure nuclear system. so bill: any of our foreign leaders about our current president s mental capacity? we have a physician on the panel who is the personal physician to the prior three presidents who said president biden should take a mental competency test. have you had any conversations with anybody concerning his afwoilt carry oust a nuclear order or any other serious engagement? no. my answer would be the same. i m not qualified to evaluate a president s mental health or
afghanistan. on april 14th president biden announced his intention to continue the withdrawal all regular u.s. troops by september 11th. four months after the pre-planned may 1st deadline. on july 2nd italy and germany withdrew their troops on july 17th we have had specific testimony here on what then happened from july 17th on. and if i recall correctly, the afghan government completely collapsed on the 20th of august. wasn t there any longer and from there the evacuations commenced. general mckenzie, were the 2500 troops on the ground sufficient as agreed by with the taliban, were they there in
suicide bombing that took the lives of 13 service members on august 23. secretary austin, is it true the suicide bomber who attacked the kabul airport on august 23 was a c.i.a. prisoner at the bagram air base who the taliban released after biden s administration left bagram in july? let me just say a couple of things. first on why the president selected me or nominated me to be his secretary of defense, you would have to certainly go back to the president and ask him specifically why he did that. but it wasn t i m sure solely based upon my oversight of the evacuation of iraq. i would point there is a government in iraq right now that is holding elections. the united states military is in iraq. could you answer my question?
now, the reason that the afghans had the equipment they had is because we wanted them to be successful and they could not be successful without the appropriate equipment. watching these hearings today and yesterday they probably feel they were played as fools. you said you knew they were going to fail. here we have an army we built up and used them until we didn t need them anymore to accomplish biden s and trump s objective of getting out of afghanistan however it went horribly wrong as we can probably all agree to. general milley, you started today and talked about your commitment to your office. you are the principal military advisor to the president, correct? that is correct. that s to president trump and president biden. that s correct and the secretary of defense and the national security council. and senator blackburn yesterday asked you about your conversations with several book writers and you were fine with giving them your opinion and i
from an incident that could escalate. i understand your intent but i think you articulating that, that you would tell him and give him a call i think is worthy of your resignation. i think that s against our country, that you would give our number one adversary that information and tell him that. but i would like to go on to general austin and ask you a question. according to president biden, he chose you to serve as his defense secretary primarily because you oversaw the full withdrawal of u.s. forces in 2011 from iraq. but ironically the 2011 iraq withdrawal left similar conditions of government failure, empowerment of regional terror organizations, isis, and humanitarian of refugees and people in need of national emergency assistance. the exit from iraq with short lived with president obama redeploying u.s. forces into