House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) said subpoenas are needed to get to the bottom of how the United States military conducted a drone strike in Kabul on August 29 that killed as many as ten civilians, including seven children.
“We’re going to need subpoenas to get to the bottom of this,” Nunes said in an interview with Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday.
“This clearly was the administration wanting to pretend to be tough … It’s going to take a major investigation by Congress and senators that are on the Armed Services Committee and the intelligence committee to get to the bottom of this,” Nunes said.
He acknowledged that since Republicans do not currently control the House, subpoenas will be a “challenge.” However, Republicans will have a chance to regain control in the 2022 midterm elections.
The U.S. military conducted a drone strike in Kabul on August 29 against what it said was an “ISIS-K threat.” ISIS-K stands for ISIS-Khorasan, which is the ISIS branch in Afghanistan.
The drone strike was conducted three days after an ISIS-K suicide bomber killed 13 Americans, wounded over a dozen more, and killed about 200 Afghan civilians.
Central Command (Centcom) spokesman Navy Capt. Bill Urban announced in a statement on August 29:
U.S. military forces conducted a self-defense unmanned over-the-horizon airstrike today on a vehicle in Kabul, eliminating an imminent ISIS-K threat to Hamad Karzai International airport. We are confident we successfully hit the target. Significant secondary explosions from the vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material. We are assessing the possibilities of civilian casualties, though we have no indications at this time. We remain vigilant for potential future threats.
However, on Friday, Centcom Commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie admitted that it was unlikely that an ISIS target was hit and that as many as ten innocent civilians, including up to seven children, were killed instead.
The admission came after several news reports that showed the alleged ISIS-K threat was actually an aid worker who had done work for the U.S. and was pulling into his home when he and his family were struck.
Nunes said the military likely knew that something went wrong within hours but held it for two weeks so the public would have already moved on.
US President Joe Biden speaks about the ongoing evacuation of Afghanistan, on August 24, 2021, from the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC. – Biden said Tuesday that the US-led airlift from Afghanistan has to finish soon because of the increasing threat from the Islamic State group’s Afghan arm. The longer the US stays in the country, Biden said, there is an “acute and growing risk of an attack by a terrorist group known as ISIS-K,” or Islamic State-Khorasan. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
“The left builds narratives — Damn reality — and especially in the United States where they control everything. It’s not just the media that they control … but they also control the delivery mechanism with the social media companies because they can censor,” he said.
“So we’re under attack; Biden looks completely weak. It’s the biggest U.S. foreign policy disaster in my lifetime. So they pull out the playbook and say, ‘Oh we got to look tough, we got to look tough.’ And they probably call up [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark] Milley and Secretary of Defense [Lloyd Austin] and say, ‘Just go do something. Just go blow something up.’ … This is what I assume,” he said.
Nunes said after the strike, Biden and Democrats bragged about it.
“What are you doing firing off drone strikes and then bragging about it? That’s the point: it’s the bragging about it … Biden was bragging about it, Democrats were bragging about it, [saying], ‘Look see, Biden is really tough,'” he said.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, left, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley talk before the start of the Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on “A Review of the FY2022 Department of Defense Budget Request’ on June 17, 2021 in Washington, DC. The hearings are to examine proposed budget estimates and justification for fiscal year 2022 for the Department of Defense. (Photo by Caroline Brehman-Pool/Getty Images)
However, Nunes said he knew something was wrong because the Intelligence Committee would typically be briefed after such a strike, but in this case, “Nobody was available to brief us.” He added:
When we said, “Uh guys, where’s the process, where’s the documentation, what’s going on?” Nothing. Crickets. And then, here we are. And they knew it right away, probably within hours that there had been a total screw up, a total fiasco. They bury it for two weeks, hoping it would go away, and they leak it to their buddies in the fake news a couple of days ago. And now of course, it’s buried, it’s now Saturday morning and, by Monday, most people will have gone through the news cycle. Biden and the left will not be held accountable. That’s the way they do things. …
Things get real on the outside when you got China and Russia and radical Islamic terrorists. Narratives don’t work on those guys. They kill people. And sadly that’s what happened … 13 members of our military got murdered because Biden and his team were playing narrative-building instead of actually following typical military doctrine, which would be to keep the military base Bagram open and make sure that everyone is safe and secured. And now we’ve got 13 dead Americans and now we have ten innocent dead Afghanis who got murdered by Biden and his little narrative-building team propaganda machine in the White House.
Follow Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong on Twitter or on Facebook.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.