CIA Warned Biden Children Would Be Killed BEFORE Kabul Drone Strike
Family of dead three-year-old demands Joe Biden is 'punished'
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The CIA warned Democrat Joe Biden and his administration that innocent people, including several children, were at the scene where the drone strike in Kabul was targetting and they would likely be killed, accoridng to reports.
Three sources reportedly told CNN that the agency sent an urgent warning that civilians were likely in the area of the botched US drone strike in Kabul just seconds before the missile was launched that hit the car killing 10 innocent civilians.
The Biden admin was warned that children could be inside the target vehicle just moments before the Hellfire missile struck its target.
The precise time lapse between the intel warning of civilians in the area and the missile being launched is not clear but officials claim it came when it was too late to stop the missile from striking its target.
Nor is it clear if the warning reached the individuals who green-lighted the missile launch.
However, the report suggests there may have been yet another key lapse in intelligence that led to the deaths of the seven children and three adults killed in the August 29 strike, which the Biden administration finally admitted Friday was a "tragic mistake."
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This latest report of a possible misstep by US officials comes as the grieving father of one child victim demanded that Biden accepts responsibility for the blunder that killed his daughter, saying "I want him punished."
Emal Ahmadi, whose three-year-old daughter Malika and nine other family members were killed in the attack, told the Associated Press on Saturday that an apology is "not enough."
"That is not enough for us to say sorry," he said.
Emal, the younger brother of Zemari Ahmadi, demanded the US investigates who authorized the strike.
"I want him punished by the USA," he said.
Emal spoke out after the Pentagon made the extraordinary admission Friday that the man targeted in the attack was not an ISIS-K operative, as previously thought, but an aid worker.
Head of US Central Command Gen. Frank McKenzie said in Friday's press conference the US carried out the strike in the "earnest belief" it was preventing an imminent threat to Americans and Afghans evacuating Kabul airport during the US's withdrawal from the country.
But, the Pentagon made a "tragic mistake" and he offered his "sincere apology" to the victims.
The strike targeted Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a US aid group, as he arrived home to his family, killing him, his children, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10; Ahmadi's cousin Naser, 30; three of Ahmadi's nephews, Arwin, seven, Benyamin, six, and Hayat, two; and two three-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya.
Reports that a warning came too late to stop the strike leaves many questions still unanswered, in particular the exact timeline of the intel and how it was passed through the chain of command versus the timeline of the operative launching the missile and it hitting its target.
The single Hellfire missile was launched from an M-Q Reaper drone which had surveilled Ahmadi for eight hours, flying at a maximum altitude of 50,000 feet or 15,240 meters.
Hellfire missiles travel at speeds of up to Mach 1.3 or 997 miles per hour.
This means - if the strike was carried out when the Reaper was at its maximum altitude and the missile traveled at its maximum speed - there would have been only a 34-second lapse between the missile's launch and it reaching its target.
It is not clear if the military had communicated to the CIA it was firing the missile before it pulled the trigger.
It is also not clear where the CIA gathered its intel of possible civilians at the kill site.
McKenzie said Friday up to six MQ-9 Reaper drones were carrying out surveillance that morning of a compound thought to be used by ISIS-K.
He also insisted there were no US forces on the ground assisting with the operation and that it did not involve help from the Taliban.
However, the Defense Department and the CIA are known to often work together to carry out counterterrorism strikes in Afghanistan.
The sources said this joint effort can lead to mistakes when there is miscommunication and problems around decision-making.
Military commanders in the field are responsible for launching the strikes and can carry them out without the usual chain of command if the situation requires it.
Meanwhile, the CIA is sometimes tasked with surveillance and passes the information onto the Defense Department in real-time.
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Mick Mulroy, a former CIA officer and Pentagon official not involved in the strike, told CNN something must have been "really wrong there" if the intelligence could not reach the right people.
"If they tasked the agency with looking at the target for indications of 'go' or 'no go' criteria, they should have had the ability to get that information and affect whether they launched a strike," he said.
"If there was no way to know that they were about to launch, there's something really wrong there."
