Press Secretary Jen Psaki notoriously said (with a straight face) on August 24 that the catastrophically mismanaged evacuation operation could not be termed “anything but a success.” On Saturday, the appallingly woke Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, claimed (also with a straight face) that “there was an extensive amount of planning in this.”

Milley did admit that “the collapse of the Afghan Army happened at a much faster rate and very unexpected, by pretty much everybody, and then with that is the collapse of the Afghan government. So, that was definitely a surprise.” Nevertheless, he insisted that “there was an awful lot of planning done, ROC [Rehearsal of Concept] drills, rehearsals, etc.”

They rehearsed this calamity? So Milley would have us believe. “What you saw unfold with this noncombatant evacuation operation,” he asserted, “was one of the contingency plans.” Despite the fact that Americans are still stranded in Afghanistan while Biden’s handlers actually block efforts to get them out, the woke general didn’t hesitate to boast: “And the speed at which it was executed, the flow of the aircraft, we had planes taking off every 30 to 45 minutes or so. We had — we brought in 7,000 — or 6,000 U.S. troops, and then there [were] about a thousand or more or so Afghan troops that secured HKIA [Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul].”

Not everything went swimmingly, mind you: “The first day, it was clearly chaotic, no question about it. You saw that on video, etc. But within about 24 hours, that settled down and it became a much more orderly process. The security of HKIA was challenging to say the least, and we saw the bombing. But that would have happened no matter where it was. People talk about Bagram, wherever there’s a perimeter, if there’s no outside force, if there’s no Afghan force securing it, and there wasn’t any, then there’s going to be U.S. forces on the perimeter, on the edge. And they were doing what they were asked to do, which is go out and screen and process people.”

Wait a minute. “Screen and process people”? Yet Defense One reported in late August that “security screeners at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar have detected that at least one of the Afghans who was evacuated from Kabul Airport has potential ties to ISIS.” Even worse, “the Defense Department’s Automated Biometric Identification System has flagged up to 100 of the 7,000 Afghans evacuated as prospective recipients of Special Immigration Visas as potential matches to intelligence agency watch lists.” There is more.