DOD's Deception: General's admission on U.S. troops in Syria latest whopper to mislead Americans

The Pentagon vowed to do better after hiding from Americans for days the fact that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was medically AWOL. It also struggled for a week to get its story straight on the nature of a Chinese spy balloon transversing U.S. air space. And it falsely claimed the withdrawal from Afghanistan would be orderly when its own emails conceded there was "chaos." Videos shown around the world revealed civilians falling to their deaths trying to cling to evacuating U.S. military aircraft.

The trouble with the truth inside America's most famous five-sided building exploded anew Thursday when a two-star general admitted at the beginning of a Pentagon press briefing that the Biden administration had doubled the number of U.S. troops inside Syria months ago while continuing to provide a false and lower number to reporters.

"As you know, we have been briefing you regularly that there are approximately 900 U.S. troops deployed to Syria," Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder told stunned reporters. "In light of the situation in Syria and the significant interest, we recently learned that those numbers were higher. 

"So asked to look into it, I learned today that, in fact, there are approximately 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria," he added.

The revelation that the Biden administration had doubled the number of deployed troops for months without public disclosure left even one of the country's oldest and most revered military publications incredulous.

"The surge of 1,100 troops to the country has been going on for months without being disclosed publicly," the Navy Times blared on X.

Legacy of mistruths

The four-year record of mistruths and obfuscation from the Pentagon podium under President Joe Biden is likely to be one of the administration's enduring legacies, which combined with the White House's own falsehoods about Biden's mental decline, border security and family business dealings has eroded public trust, experts said. Biden called for stricter gun control laws this week after pardoning his own son, Hunter, for federal weapons charges.

"The Biden administration has lost the American people, the credibility of the American people," former Trump Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told Just the News on Thursday night. "You mentioned all the different things coming out of the Pentagon, but this is also the administration that said the border was secure, right? Nothing to see there."

"It's in part why Donald Trump won that election, will be in office next year, because the American people just want someone to tell them the truth," he added.

The mistrust began just months into the Biden presidency when the Pentagon insisted it had an orderly plan for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan and that the country's government was capable of keeping control from falling to the Taliban. The Taliban took control within days and when news video footage showed a country in utter chaos, the Pentagon's chief spokesman at the time implored Americans not to believe their eyes.

“Now, some say we should have started mass evacuations sooner and, ‘Couldn’t this have been done in a more orderly manner?’” Kirby said following the pullout. “I respectfully disagree.”

But Kirby's own contemporaneous emails, obtained by Just the News three years later, showed he was told himself the exit was in disarray and the country in chaos.

Biden's outright lies in debate

One State Department situation report emailed to Kirby on Aug. 16, 2021 — 10 days before a suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. Marines at an airport gate in Kabul — referred to "breaches" and "flightline insecurity" at the airport that resulted in the exchange of gunfire that killed five Afghans and may have wounded an American soldier. Biden himself lied in his disastrous debate with then-GOP nominee Donald Trump, claiming that under his watch, "no American troops died anywhere in the world."

"The crowd was out of control, the firing was only done to defuse the chaos," the email reported, citing an official U.S. statement released inside the country.

Such deception extended all the way to the president, who told Americans on July 8, 2021, that the Afghan government was unlikely to fall and that there would be no chaotic evacuations of Americans similar to the end of the Vietnam War.

But by that time, classified intelligence reports obtained in 2023 by The New York Times and Congress were directly questioning whether Afghan security forces could resist the Taliban or hold on to the capital city of Kabul.

A damning State Department inspector general's report confirmed Biden's assurances were not supported by the intelligence even before the withdrawal began. "There had been warning signs that prospects the Afghan government forces would defend Kabul and hold out for a possible negotiated transfer of power were evaporating,” the report declared in summer 2023.

The Pentagon's slow response to a Chinese balloon that traversed U.S. space in 2023 created a fresh credibility crisis for the Pentagon. Officials said there was no need to shoot it down, then they did. And for most of the last two years the Pentagon's assessment of whether the balloon was spying has shifted.

“I think that the American public deserve more than they have seen in terms of transparency. About why this spy balloon was allowed to spend two days over our waters and over the state of Alaska. The state that is the guardian for everybody else,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska lamented at one point during an oversight hearing in the Senate.

Even loyal Democrats joined in disdain and questioned whether the Pentagon had a plan for a future such episode.

“Do we have a plan for the next time that happens and how we’re going to deal with it?” Sen. Jon Tester of Montana lamented. “Because quite frankly I’ll just tell you, I don’t want a damn balloon going across the United States.”

The Pentagon eventually would admit at least three other Chinese balloons had pierced U.S. airspace without Congress being told much.  “So the real question here is, if we had an incursion before and we shot this one down when it hits water, why didn’t we shoot the previous ones down and gather intelligence from those?” Tester asked at one point.

Similarly, Secretary Austin caused distrust when he failed to tell Biden for four days he was hospitalized for cancer treatment, and the American public was kept in the dark even longer, earlier this year. 

The episode, in which Austin even transferred his Cabinet powers to a deputy temporarily, prompted a rebuke even from the 46th president, who called it a lapse in judgement.

An after-action report promised the public the Pentagon would do better and be more transparent in the future.

"The process for making decisions to transfer the Secretary’s authority could and should be improved," the after-action memo stated.

Not even a year later, the Syria troops fiasco provided fresh evidence some of those transparency improvements have yet to be achieved. That failure has eroded trust in institutions that Americans once revered.

"The American people just don't believe them anymore"

Americans "just they want to be informed, and this administration, time and again, has continued to mischaracterize and withhold information from them," Wolf said Thursday night.

The former Homeland Security secretary said the Pentagon's slow and sometimes evasive response to recent drone sightings in New Jersey have added to the mistrust.

"I think people are very, very concerned about about what's going on," he said of the drones. "It goes back to that credibility and accountability issue that we talked at the beginning of this administration, which spent days and weeks saying there's no Chinese spy balloon, the border is secure, on and on and on.

"The American people just don't believe them anymore," he added.