Friday, July 12, 2024

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt five)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

But then suddenly, the Taliban boarded a bus and began demanding that the Albania-bound women unveil so that their faces could more thoroughly be checked against their passport photos. For the first time, the Taliban said that the women couldn’t leave without an Albanian visa—but that document had never been issued to them.

A member of the staff of Vital Voices, one of the NGOs that Clinton had cofounded, was already in Tirana, the Albanian capital, to begin securing housing for the White Scarves. She went to the foreign ministry and spent the night creating an electronic visa that could be sent to the White Scarves on their phones. The Albanians felt that a QR code would make the email look more official. Since there was a bag of potato chips sitting around, they took a photo of the QR code on the side of the packaging and appended it to the improvised visa.

When the White Scarves showed the Taliban the visa on their phones, it was good enough. The women on the bus escaped to Albania—and so did more than one thousand other Afghan women and their families who Hillary Clinton and her groups managed to rescue.



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