Afghan Evacuee Added to CIS National Security Vetting Failures Database

From the Center for Immigration Studies

Former CIA guard is charged with terrorism; assurances that he was vetted turn out to be untrue

An Afghan evacuee from the August 2021 fall of Kabul who stands charged with multiple terrorism offenses that include a mass-casualty firearms attack plot is the latest addition to the Center for Immigration Studies National Security Vetting Failures Database, bringing the total number of cases to 49.

In March 2023, the Center published the database collection to draw “remedial attention” to ongoing government vetting failures lest they “drift from the public mind and interest of lawmakers, oversight committee members, media, and homeland security practitioners who would otherwise feel compelled to demand process reforms”, according to an explanatory Center report titled “Learning from our Mistakes”.

The latest addition is Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, who worked in Afghanistan as an outside guard for a Central Intelligence Agency facility and was authorized for air evacuation from a third country a month after the August 2021 fall of Kabul to Dallas, Texas, on a hastily approved humanitarian parole.

He was among nearly 100,000 mostly Afghan evacuees, of whom about 77,000 were initially admitted into the United States via humanitarian parole through a program called Operation Allies Welcome. All became eligible for more permanent Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) mainly intended to protect Afghans who collaborated with U.S. military operations from reprisals by the Taliban group that seized control of the country.

After arriving in the United States on September 9, 2021, on humanitarian parole, Tawhedi settled with his wife and infant near Oklahoma City on an SIV. He initially worked as a Lyft driver in Dallas and later as an auto mechanic in Oklahoma.

Some 37 months after arriving, in October 2024, the FBI arrested the 27-year-old Tawhedi and a juvenile co-conspirator — Tawhedi’s brother-in-law — for an alleged plot to conduct an Election Day terrorist firearms attack in the United States on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a designated foreign terrorist organization still active in Afghanistan. The unidentified co-conspirator, an Afghan, entered the United States in 2018 also on an SIV, but little else is known about his vetting processes.

Their plot involved liquidating a house and personal assets to fund the repatriation of Tawhedi’s wife and child to Afghanistan and weapons necessary for him and the juvenile to conduct a mass-casualty attack during which they would be killed, a criminal complaint alleged. The pair obtained semi-automatic rifles and ammunition for the attack, although by then FBI undercover agents had penetrated the plot.

Shortly after the arrests, U.S. government officials claimed that Tawhedi was “thoroughly” vetted three times: first to work for the CIA in Afghanistan, then “recurrently” by DHS for the humanitarian parole status allowing him to fly into the United States, and then for the Special Immigrant Visa once he was settled, probably sometime in 2022.

No red flags turned up, they asserted, without providing evidence.

“Afghan evacuees who sought to enter the United States were subject to multilayered screening and vetting against intelligence, law enforcement and counterterrorism information. If new information emerges after arrival, appropriate action is taken,” a DHS spokesperson told Fox News Digital in October 2024.

But within weeks of making those assertions, U.S. officials reversed course and acknowledged that Tawhedi did not undergo the previously claimed vetting. The State Department, in fact, never vetted or approved Tawhedi, nor had he been very thoroughly vetted for his CIA guard post job in Afghanistan, they said. DHS did not “thoroughly” vet Tawhedi for humanitarian parole on a recurring basis as initially claimed about all Afghan evacuees, either, before allowing him to fly from the unknown third country into the United States.

The screening process for Afghan evacuees in the program includes probing for any possible ties to terrorism, ISIS, or the Taliban using databases the U.S. compiled over 20 years in Afghanistan that include data from applicant electronic devices, biometrics, and other sources.

It’s unclear when Tawhedin radicalized in ways that might have been detected. U.S. officials initially told U.S. media they believed that happened only after he was admitted into the United States. In court records, the FBI says Tawhedi’s initial crime — sending $540 in cryptocurrency to ISIS — occurred in March 2024. But his ties and extremist proclivities almost certainly predated the currency transfer.

Had Tawhedi been thoroughly vetting when he was supposed to be, red flags were more likely than not available to be found both before and after he arrived in the U.S.

For instance, adjudicators might have found pre-existing extremist ideological proclivities within Tawhedi’s immediate family because two brothers evacuated to France also were arrested in September 2024 for a terrorism plot there to attack a French soccer match or shopping center, according to numerous media accounts and information that surfaced during an October 2024 Oklahoma City federal court hearing. (The French and Americans collaborated on both cases).

Furthermore, court records reveal that Tawhedi maintained relationships with well-known ISIS figures that were sufficiently trusting to have enabled direct communications with them by phone and on encrypted apps.

In fact, Tawhedi trusted these operatives to care for his repatriated wife and child after he was killed in the U.S. attack and to gift substantial remaining funds from the sale of the Oklahoma house. Lastly, an FBI investigator in the October 2024 court complaint indicated that most extended family members in Tawhedi’s Oklahoma circle were aware of the plot, approved, and could still be charged as co-conspirators as of that time.

The fact that many family members in the U.S. and abroad felt this way about Tawhedi’s plans further indicates that their extremism pre-dated U.S. entry and might have red-flagged during face-to-face interviews, database checks, and other standard security vetting practices.

Underscoring the admitted Tawhedi vetting failure, a September 2022 DHS Office of Inspector General report found, in part, that U.S. Customs and Border Protection “admitted or paroled evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States” and that, “As a result, DHS may have admitted or paroled individuals into the United States who pose a risk to national security and the safety of local communities.”

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I Was Hired To Root Out Bias At NIH. The Nation’s Health Research Agency Is Still Sick

Published on November 22, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Joe Duarte

Federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) continue to fund invalid, ideologically driven “scientific” research that subsidizes leftist activists and harms conservatives and the American people at large. There’s currently no plan to stop.

Conversely, NIH does not fund obvious research topics that would help the American people, because of institutional leftist bias.

While serving as a senior advisor at NIH, I discovered many active grants like these:

“Examining Anti-Racist Healing in Nature to Protect Telomeres of Transitional Age BIPOC for Health Equity” — Take minority teens to parks in a bid to reduce telomere erosion (the shortening of repetitive DNA sequences as we age). $3.8 million in five years and no results published – not surprising, given their absurd premise.

“Ecological Momentary Assessment of Racial/Ethnic Microaggressions and Cannabis Use among Black Adults” – This rests on an invalid leftist ideological concept – “microaggressions.” An example of a “microaggression” is a white person denying he’s racist. They can’t be validly measured since they’re simply defined into existence by Orwellian leftist ideology, with no attempt to discover the alleged aggressor’s motives.

“Influence of Social Media, Social Networks, and Misinformation on Vaccine Acceptance Among Black and Latinx Individuals” — from an activist who said the phrase “The coronavirus is genetically engineered” was “misinformation” and also conducted a bizarre, partisan study based entirely on a Trump tweet about recovering from COVID.

I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2020

The study claimed that people saw COVID as less “serious” after the tweet. I apologize for the flashback to when Democrats demanded everyone feel the exact level of COVID panic and anti-optimism they felt (and share their false beliefs on the efficacy of school closures, masks, and vaccines ). NIH funded this study and gave him another $651,586 in July for his new “misinformation” study, including $200,000 from the Office of the Director.

I’m a social psychologist who has focused on the harms of ideological bias in academic research. Our sensemaking institutions have been gashed by a cult political ideology that treats its conjectures and abstractions as descriptively true, without argument or even explanation, and enforces conformity with inhumane psychologizing and ostracism. This ideology – which dominates academia and NIH – poses an unprecedented threat to our connection to reality, and thus to science, by vaporizing the distinction between descriptive reality and ideological tenets.

In March, I emailed Jay Bhattacharya, Director of NIH, and pitched him on how I could build an objective framework to eliminate ideological bias in NIH-funded research.

Jay seemed to agree with my analysis. We spoke on the phone, and I started in May as a senior advisor to Jay in the Office of the Director (NIH-OD).

I never heard from Jay again beyond a couple of cursory replies.

For four months, I read tons of grants, passed a lengthy federal background check, started to build the pieces, and contacted Jay about once a week with questions, follow-up, and example grants. Dead air – he was ghosting me.

Jay also bizarrely deleted the last two months’ worth of my messages to him but kept the older ones. I’d sent him a two-page framework summary, asked if I should keep working on it, and also asked if I’d done something wrong, given his persistent lack of response. No response.

In September, the contractors working at NIH-OD, me included, were laid off. No explanation was given.

I have no idea what happened here. It’s been the strangest and most unprofessional experience of my career.

The result is that NIH is still funding ideological, scientifically invalid research and will continue to ignore major topics because of leftist bias. We have a precious opportunity for lasting reform, and that opportunity will be lost without a systematic approach to eliminating ideology in science.

What’s happened so far is that DOGE cut some grants earlier this year, after a search for DEI terms. It was a good first step but caught some false positives and missed most of the ideological research, including many grants premised on “microaggressions,” “systemic racism,” “intersectionality,” and other proprietary, question-begging leftist terms. Leftist academics are already adapting by changing their terminology – this meme is popular on Bluesky:

DOGE didn’t have the right search terms, and a systematic, objective anti-bias framework is necessary to do the job. It’s also more legally resilient and persuasive to reachable insiders — there’s no way to reform a huge bureaucracy without getting buy-in from some insiders (yes, you also have to fire some people). This mission requires empowered people at every funding agency who are thoroughly familiar with leftist ideology, can cleanly define “ideology,” and build robust frameworks to remove it from scientific research.

My framework identifies four areas of bias so far:

Ideological research
Rigged research
Ideological denial of science / suppression of data
Missing research – research that would happen if not for leftist bias

The missing research at NIH likely hurts the most — e.g. American men commit suicide at unusually high rates, especially white and American Indian men, yet NIH funds no research on this. But they do fund “Hypertension Self-management in Refugees Living in San Diego.”

Similarly, NIH is AWOL on the health benefits of religious observance and prayer, a promising area of research that Muslim countries are taking the lead on. These two gaping holes suggest that NIH is indifferent to the American people and even culturally and ideologically hostile them.

Joe Duarte grew up in small copper-mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. You can find his work here, find him on X here, and contact him at gravity at protonmail.com.

Daily Caller

Trump Gives Zelenskyy Until Thanksgiving To Agree On Peace Deal, With U.S. Weapons And Intel On The Line

Published on November 22, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Wallace White

President Donald Trump is turning up the heat on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to accept a peace deal to end his war with Russia, and has set a deadline with potential consequences.

The U.S. is warning that certain weapons shipments and intelligence sharing could be at risk if Zelenskyy does not play ball with Trump’s peace proposal, Reuters reported on Friday. The president set a Thanksgiving deadline for Zelenskyy to sign off on the details. Speaking with Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio, Trump confirmed that date, saying that while deadlines can be extended, “Thursday is it.”

Speaking with Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio, Trump confirmed that, though deadlines can be extended, “Thursday is it.”

Zelenskyy signaled his willingness to discuss concessions outlined in the proposed peace deal despite objections from other European leaders over the terms, and said in a post on X that his whole government is at work on the individual points. However, the Ukrainian leader also said in a Friday video statement that the U.S. has put Ukraine in a position of “either losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, said Friday Trump’s plan could “form the basis” for a final peace agreement.

A U.S. official told the Daily Caller News Foundation they “will not comment on sensitive peace discussions that may or may not have happened.”

“President Trump is working with both sides to end the war as quickly as possible, which has gone on for far too long, with too many senseless deaths,” the official said. “This would have never happened if he was President.”

Zelenskyy most recently has been embroiled in a corruption scandal, as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine launched a probe into Zelenskyy’s business partner, who allegedly laundered $100 million from Ukraine’s nuclear energy company.

“It was strongly implied to the Ukrainians that the United States expects them to agree to a peace deal,” another U.S. official told the DCNF. “Any changes will be decided upon by the President himself.”

The Ukrainian leader has been working to shore up support in Europe as well, most recently signing a deal with France to obtain 100 Rafale jets for its air force. The deal also included anti-air equipment, drones and other munitions.

The Trump administration has worked to offload direct military support for Ukraine to partners in Europe, with NATO agreeing to purchase U.S. weapons to then ship to Ukraine, instead of the American government delivering directly.