FIFA Peace President Would Evacuate Americans From War Zone But Has Ballroom To Plan
All the Americans are gone except for two. The embassy’s been hard to reach.
Donald Trump came up with a new lie Tuesday to explain why there was no plan to evacuate Americans from the Middle East before he launched his War For The Hell Of It against Iran. Even though the FIFA Peace President had been building up military forces in the region for weeks, the war Trump started Saturday also came as a surprise to him, so there simply wasn’t time to think about getting Americans out of the places that Iran might strike in retaliation for the war we started that Pete Hegseth says Iran started and also isn’t a war.
Here’s Trump making shit up as he goes along when a reporter asked why no plans were in place to evacuate Americans from the region.
REPORTER: Thousands of Americans are stranded. Why wasn't there an evacuation plan, and will you send planes to get people out?
TRUMP: Well, because it happened all very quickly. We thought, and I thought maybe more so than most, I could ask Marco, but I thought we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked. They were getting ready to attack Israel. They were getting ready to attack others.
No, there wasn’t any intelligence suggesting Iran was about to attack jack shit. (Here let us wag our finger at the New York Times for running Trump’s bullshit claim without any fact check.) And there’s not a lot of evidence that the administration gave any advance thought to getting Americans out of the way of reprisal attacks.
You have to understand: Just like any wartime president, Trump has also been preoccupied with the intense planning and logistics of his beautiful new ballroom. As he noted Monday, it was a real shame that American soldiers died in a reprisal attack, but also, how about those drapes?
The US and Israel began airstrikes on Iran Saturday. The State Department waited until Monday to tell Americans in 14 countries in the region to “DEPART NOW” — and to do so “using available commercial transportation.” But that was the problem: By then, many major airports had already shut down, airlines were cancelling flights, and airspace over parts of the region was closed.
Marco Rubio posted a video Tuesday morning to let Americans know there’s a State Department hotline they can call to get help finding commercial flights out, but the hotline only has an automated message telling callers “Please do not rely on the U.S. government for assisted departure or evacuation. At this time, there are currently no United States evacuation points.” If you stay on the line long enough, you might reach someone who’ll tell you to register for the agency’s “Smart Travel Enrollment Program” (STEP) to get travel advisories sent to your phone, good luck.
Rubio insisted to reporters Tuesday that registering for STEP was necessary so the government can reach stranded travelers once it figures out what the hell it intends to do, explaining that “as these options begin to open up and as they open up, we have to be able to call you and to reach you and to know where you are staying so that we can get this information to you and coordinate appropriately.”
Why yes, that does sound like they’re only now starting to get a concept of a plan in place. Rubio went on about the “variety of methods” that may become available for evacuating Americans in the area, including “charter flights, military flights, transports, expanded commercial opportunities and in some cases land routes that will allow them to go to neighboring countries who might have open airports.”
He added that it would be really helpful if TV networks would put the website’s URL on the screen so that Americans can see it and sign up, which mostly got us thinking about how weird it is that even as Americans in the Middle East face mortal danger and the embassies are saying there’s little help they can offer, most also still have access to satellite TV. Just imagine that in a Graham Greene novel.
Rubio also claimed, without offering any evidence, that in fact the US had already tried sending planes to pick up Americans, but that the “impediment we're facing now in many cases, we've had a couple instances in which we have planes in the air and on the way, and unfortunately, the airspace gets closed and they have to turn back around.”
That’s a terrific excuse: We already sent planes! But they hadda turn around, every one of them, just our darn luck that no planes made it to countries where the airspace remained open. Keep this one in mind for the next time you attack another country without any plan to aid your own citizens. You could also say the dog ate the flight plans.
The State Department posted a press release Tuesday afternoon to congratulate the State Department on the bang-up job it’s done so far, even though it hasn’t done much. The agency gave itself a big pat on the back for a result it had nothing to do with: “In the past several days, over 9,000 American citizens have safely returned from the Middle East, including over 300 from Israel.”
The press release also claimed, without any details, that State is “facilitating charter flights from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan for American citizens.” It said the agency is “actively helping American citizens” to book tickets for flights out of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, and Egypt, where commercial flights are still operating. Whole lot of facilitating going on, and the department “continues to provide travel options for those wishing to leave.”
Evidence of any of that actually happening remains sparse. Damn it, Fluffy, stop chewing on those telex lines!
So far though, it looks like Americans who have made it out of those places haven’t had any help from the government. NOTUS reports that after the announcement, the hotline’s message telling callers not to rely on their government remained up, and that it had been in touch with Americans in the UAE who were still not getting through to a human on the hotline, and that it had seen an email from the US embassy in the UAE saying “Please continue to shelter in place if you are not able to depart.”
James Blunt, a US businessman stuck in the UAE, told NOTUS he was eventually able to get a commercial flight out of the region, but without any help from the State Department. He noted that he did at least get the cost of his hotel and a taxi to the airport covered, though — by the government of the UAE, which was very helpful.
[AP / NOTUS / Guardian / ABC News / Reuters]
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𝗔𝗱𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘀𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝘄𝗮𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗜𝗿𝗮𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗹𝘆 𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗕𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻'𝘀 𝗳𝗮𝘂𝗹𝘁
Pete Hegseth suggested this morning that reporting on the 6 U.S. service members who were killed in Trump's Iran war is an example of the news media 'trying to make Trump look bad.'
https://bsky.app/profile/kylegriffin1.bsky.social/post/3mgal6uynp22m
This Gold Star Father will reply--Drunk Ass Hegseth can go fuck himself. 🤬