Rand Paul: Did Joe Biden Personally Approve Drone Strike That Killed Children?

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Friday urged journalists to question whether President Joe Biden directly approved a drone strike that reportedly took the lives of several people, including children.

“Journalists, should ask: did Joe Biden personally approve the drone strike that killed 7 children and an aid worker?” he wrote:

In a subsequent post, Paul said former President Barack Obama authorized individual drone killings, adding, “Is it unreasonable to ask if Biden approved this killing of an aid worker and 7 children?”

Breitbart News reported Friday Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin admitted the U.S. military may have killed approximately 10 civilians, including up to seven children, amid a drone strike in Kabul on August 29 that was initially intended to kill an Islamic State-Khorasan attacker.

Austin wrote in a statement:

The investigation concluded that the strike — conducted to prevent what was believed to be an imminent threat to Hamid Karzai International Airport — resulted in the deaths of as many as 10 people, including up to seven children.

On behalf of the men and women of the Department of Defense, I offer my deepest condolences to surviving family members of those who were killed, including Mr. Ahmadi, and to the staff of Nutrition and Education International, Mr. Ahmadi’s employer.

We now know that there was no connection between Mr. Ahmadi and ISIS-Khorasan, that his activities on that day were completely harmless and not at all related to the imminent threat we believed we faced, and that Mr. Ahmadi was just as innocent a victim as were the others tragically killed.

“We apologize, and we will endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake,” he said.

The drone strike occurred after an ISIS suicide bomber killed 13 American servicemembers deployed to assist during the Afghanistan evacuation.

“The administration had at first touted the strike as preventing another ISIS attack against U.S. troops, but it was first revealed in a New York Times investigation that the U.S. had in fact killed an Afghan aid worker and his family members,” the Breitbart News article read.

In an earlier post on Friday, Paul said, “This isn’t new (see Obama’s wedding drone strike for more details and many others) but it’s always tragic”:

“It needs to stop and congress needs to take back its authority to declare war,” he concluded.