Interrogation of the Month: Rand Paul vs. Antony Blinken

Senator Rand Paul: “The guy the Biden administration droned: was he an aid worker or an ISIS-K operative?”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “I don’t know because we’re reviewing it.”

Paul: “You’d think you’d kind of know before you off somebody with a predator drone.”

Such was the exchange Tuesday during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Biden’s handlers’ catastrophic bungling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and ongoing incompetence.

The Biden Administration is “holding no one accountable, having everyone circle the wagons,” said Paul.

“To add insult to injury, this week you’ve now released sixty-four million dollars in aid to Afghanistan. Don’t we have some prohibition against giving aid and comfort to the enemy? Now the argument from the Biden administration is, ‘Oh, we’re giving it to charities, and it’s for the good of the people, for poor people, and for women.’ Well, the Taliban has a history of taking this. Throughout their governance, they would take the money. This was a big complaint we had when they were in power the last time.”

Paul looked Blinken square in the eye and continued. “They now have eighty billion dollars’ worth of weapons. Three-hundred and fifty thousand automatic weapons. Are we really naïve enough to believe that we are just going to keep sending charity to Afghanistan and they’re not going to interrupt it? I think that’s a foolish notion.”

When Paul asked about the family man who was assassinated by the U.S. with a drone strike, Blinken balked.

“Uh, I can’t speak to that, and I can’t speak to that in this setting in any event,” Blinken stuttered.

Paul shot back: “So you don’t know or won’t tell us.”

Blinken responded: “Uh, I don’t, I don’t know because we’re, we’re reviewing it.”

“Well, see, you’d think you’d kind of know before you off somebody with a predator drone whether he’s an aid worker or he’s an ISIS-K,” Paul loaded on Blinken. “You see, the thing is, this isn’t just you. It’s been going on for administration after administration. The Obama administration droned hundreds and hundreds of people.”

“And the thing is, there is blowback to that,” Paul continued. “I mean, I don’t know if it’s true, but I see these pictures of these beautiful children that were killed in the attack. If that’s true and not propaganda, if that’s true, guess what? Maybe you’ve created hundreds or thousands of new potential terrorists from bombing the wrong people. So you’ve gotta know who you’re – we can’t sort of have an investigation after we kill people, we have an investigation before we kill people.”

Even the liberal New York Times chimed in: “Times reporting has identified the driver as Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group. The evidence suggests that his travels that day actually involved transporting colleagues to and from work. And an analysis of video feeds showed that what the military may have seen was Mr. Ahmadi and a colleague loading canisters of water into his trunk to bring home to his family.”

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