Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, who also heads a panel reviewing the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, announced that officials have discovered documents in safes that pertain to the event.
“We are conducting a thorough review of what took place in Afghanistan, and I’m going to be honest with you about what’s turning up,” he said in a video. “The deeper we look, the more there is to look at. We are finding things that we did not expect.”
Parnell explained that his team “recovered highly relevant classified documents, material that should have been disclosed, stashed, and hidden away in safes where they would not be found. And after the team reviewed these documents, it became clear why someone tried to hide them.” He expressed that his team is “following the evidence to wherever it leads and to whoever it touches, we’re not accepting incomplete or comfortable answers.”
Emails obtained in 2024 through a Freedom of Information Act request by the watchdog group Functional Government Initiative found that on August 16, 2021, “breaches” and “flightline insecurity” led to exchanges of gunfire. The email read, “The crowd was out of control; the firing was only to defuse the chaos,” and noted that “hundreds have flooded the flight line, with at least one instance of individuals forcing themselves onto U.S. military (and civilian) aircraft, with crowds continuing to dangerously pursue the planes.”
In April, the Pentagon upgraded the valor awards for the Marines who stood at Abbey Gate in Kabul during the airport attack in 2021. “After reviewing the original awards and determining that several had been inappropriately downgraded, these awards have now been upgraded to levels that more accurately reflect the extreme risk these Marines knowingly accepted and the lives they saved under direct enemy fire,” Parnell said at the time. “The Marines at Abbey Gate were positioned in the direct blast zone with minimal cover, fully aware of an imminent suicide attack, yet they held their ground to keep evacuation operations running. Their actions that day were heroic. The original awards did not reflect that reality. Today’s upgrades correct that injustice.”
Parnell added that the upgraded awards “also demonstrates what the Afghanistan Withdrawal Special Review Panel was created to do: examine the full record, identify where the system failed our warfighters, and ensure accountability and fairness.”
