A Pentagon inspector general report released this week found that officials identified at least 50 Afghan evacuees who were brought to the United States in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan whose information indicated “potentially significant security concerns” –and were unable to locate dozens of those who it said had “derogatory information” that would make them ineligible for parole.
The report, released on Thursday, found that U.S. agencies “did not use all available data when vetting Afghan evacuees.” The National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) later expanded its review to fill the gaps in screening, the report said.
“As of November 2, 2021, NGIC personnel had identified 50 Afghan personnel in the United States with information in DoD records that would indicate potentially significant security concerns,” the report states.
According to a footnote assigned to that section of the report, “significant security concerns include individuals whose latent fingerprints have been found on improvised explosive devices and known or suspected terrorists and for which the NGIC sends derogatory information notifications to appropriate DoD personnel.”
The report also found that Defense Department personnel “stated that they could not locate some Afghan evacuees when attempting to report derogatory information to the DoD and U.S. government agencies supporting CONUS safe havens.”
CONUS is a military acronym for the “Continental United States.”
The report also states that as of Sept. 17, 2021, the NGIC had “identified 31 Afghans in CONUS who had derogatory information.”
“Of those 31, only 3 could be located,” the report states.
“To attempt to locate the 31 individuals, the NGIC developed an informal process of sending emails detailing the derogatory information to DoD and U.S. Government personnel that either were located at, or had oversight of, all CONUS safe havens,” the report states.
The report stated that as of Dec. 13, 2021, NGIC personnel “have reviewed approximately 58,455 of the 80,404 Afghan evacuee identities received and have assessed that it will take until approximately March 2022 to finish this analytic review.”
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