Joint Chiefs Chairman Under Obama Urges Accountability For Botched Drone Strike

Soon after on Friday the Pentagon admitted its drone strike on what was initially claimed to be an “ISIS-K target” – but was actually an Afghan humanitarian aid worker and nine other civilians including seven children in Kabul last month was a horrible “mistake”, it became clear that no one has actually lost their job over it.

Ten civilians snuffed out by a drone upon Biden’s orders as commander-in-chief… It remains from the intelligence which enabled the killings, to the commanders overseeing the operation, to those actually doing the targeting and pulling the trigger – not a single person appears to have been held accountable. There’s not even been so much as demotion within the D.C. national security ranks overseeing the botched and tragic drone strike.

Going into the weekend on the Sunday shows, there were calls for accountability, however, particularly from the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Obama, (ret.) Admiral Mike Mullen (who also served in the last two years of the Bush administration).

He told ABC’s “This Week” that there “absolutely” must be accountability over the “tragic, tragic mistake”.

Discussing the topic, the retired general said: 

“Absolutely. I think there should. This was obviously an incredibly complex, fast-moving situation. We lost those 13 military members a couple of days before that,” Mullen said. “There was clear intelligence that additional strikes were on the way, so it was in that environment in which this strike actually took place.”

While saying Gen. McKenzie was right to admit the mistake of killing the civilians and apologizing, Mullen said he hopes the internal Pentagon review overseen Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will lead to “accountability”.

Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen tells @MarthaRaddatz that Gen. Kenneth McKenzie’s acknowledgement that the Aug. 29 drone strike near the Kabul airport was “a mistake” was the correct response. https://t.co/2n5suvGtED pic.twitter.com/I8JfgXyIZP

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) September 19, 2021

“I think you’re going to want to try to get this right,” Mullen told ABC’s Martha Raddatz when she mentioned it took a while for the truth to come out. “Clearly they were convinced at the time it was a good strike, and it takes some time to do that, and this is the same command that’s been evacuating Afghanistan and all that that entails. I’m not overly concerned about how long it took.”

Mullen also addressed the deaths of 13 US service members by an ISIS-K suicide bomber that the circumstances of the poorly planned and disastrous evacuation operation leading to it: “I also think there should be accountability there as well,” Mullen said. “I hope there is.”

It terms of any serious accountability to come out of this which reaches into top levels of the command, or among the Biden admin decision-makers responsible… (other than the likely reprimand or demotion of some a low-level bureaucrat) we won’t hold our breath.