The Washington Post has been exposed for a ridiculous ‘fact check’ of a claim showing how dangerously incompetent the Biden administration has become.
The headline appears to say it all: “No, the Taliban did not seize $83 billion of U.S. weapons.” But what actually happened? Did the Taliban seize anything at all?
Knowing how headlines are abused on social media, the WaPo’s ‘fact check’ is obviously political cover for an administration that is already on the ropes. While Kessler gives the claim ‘three pinocchios,’ he should actually award it to himself, based on the substance of the fact check.
It wasn’t $83 billion, you see, it was “only” $65 billion worth of high-tech military hardware, which will undoubtedly be exploited by the Taliban and reverse-engineered by America’s enemies around the world. Not so bad, according to WaPo.
“We don’t normally pay much attention to claims made by the former president, as he mostly just riffs golden oldies. But this is a new claim,” Kessler writes. “A version of this claim also circulates widely on right-leaning social media — that somehow the Taliban has ended up with $83 billion in U.S. weaponry. (Trump, as usual, rounds the number up.)”
“The $83 billion number is not invented out of whole cloth,” Kessler admits. “But it reflects all the money spent to train, equip and house the Afghan military and police — so weapons are just a part of that. At this point, no one really knows the value of the equipment that was seized by the Taliban.”
Short story long, the estimate is closer to $65 billion, which the fact checker doesn’t say outright in his “three pinocchios” article. The real figure was pointed out by several conservatives who were waiting to “pounce” on the story:
Did you see this? China wants your family, too
The videos of Taliban fighters confiscating out military hardware and using it has outraged U.S. taxpayers whose money was spent to arm and equip an Islamic terrorist state.
The Pentagon claims that the military equipment left at the Kabul airport has been disabled or ‘demilitarized.’ As the videos clearly show, there is a substantial amount of usable military equipment that did fall into enemy hands.
h/t: TrendingPolitics