Leaders avoid partisan blame in Capitol Rotunda event
Home Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell hand medals to relative of the servicemembers eliminated in the 2021 terrorist attack at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, throughout a Congressional Gold Medal event in the Capitol Rotunda on Tuesday. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
Published September 10, 2024 at 1:39 pm
Home and Senate leaders on Tuesday honored 13 U.S. servicemembers eliminated by a suicide bomber 3 years earlier at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan, stopping briefly for an hour the continuous partisan blame-casting over the attack.
The 4 leaders headlined the solemn event in a jam-packed Capitol Rotunda at which the sacrifice of each of the fallen servicemembers was memorialized with Congress' greatest honor, the Congressional Gold Medal.
The event took place amidst a governmental election project in which the oversight of drawing out U.S. soldiers from Afghanistan, not simply in 2021 however likewise in the years leading up to it, has actually drawn extreme analysis. The matter might occur Tuesday night when previous President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris take on in a televised dispute.
The majority of the remarks at the event mirrored those of Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., who called the 13 servicemembers “heroes, guardians and heros who were defending a cause far larger than themselves.” Schumer likewise kept in mind that some were “more youthful than the war in Afghanistan itself.”
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., made one of the only indirect recommendations that a dispute was raving outside over stewardship of the 2021 Afghanistan pullout, informing the households of the servicemembers: “We are sorry. The United States federal government must have done whatever to secure our soldiers.”
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., released a more direct declaration Tuesday prior to the event, stating “the Biden-Harris administration” made an inexpedient policy of slashing U.S. troop levels even worse with its execution of the last extraction of soldiers and Afghan partners in August 2021.
Biden and Harris “turned a bad concept into a historical fiasco, leaving important American weapons for our opponents to utilize and deserting countless our veteran Afghan buddies,” Wicker stated.
Electoral background
In addition to the fallen Americans, an approximated 170 Afghan civilians were eliminated on Aug. 26, 2021, at Abbey Gate, simply outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. U.S. authorities have stated a member of the Afghan branch of the Islamic State terrorist group performed the attack.
Tuesday's event occurred as Republicans attempt to pin duty on Harris for refraining from doing enough to avoid the fatal attack. The GOP-led House Foreign Affairs Committee released a report Monday that blamed President Joe Biden and Harris for the security breakdown. Democrats on the panel shot back with a defense.
Trump has actually stated of Biden and Harris that it was “much like they shot.”
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported in 2022 that the Biden administration mishandled the last days of U.S.
