'Why did Biden trust the Taliban?': Cruz suggests Biden administration received misinformation from Taliban

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) recently tweeted that a recent "over-the-horizon" drone strike which killed innocent civilians may have been due to the US receiving bad intel from the Taliban.

"The Biden Afghanistan catastrophe keeps getting worse,” Cruz wrote. “This raises two obvious questions: Did the Taliban provide the faulty 'intel’ that led to the Biden admin killing 10 innocent civilians, including seven children? If so, why did Biden trust the Taliban?”

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had initially declared the Aug. 29 drone strike a “righteous strike” against an “imminent threat,” however, the Pentagon recently admitted that bombing, in the wake of frenzied withdraw from Afghanistan, was a “horrible mistake” that killed 10 innocent Afghans, including several children.

Biden’s secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, released a statement that said they were under the impression that the target of the strike was a dangerous threat to U.S. service members and others at Hamad Karzai airport, but “we now know that there was no connection between Mr. Zemari Ahmadi and ISIS-Khorasan.”

Last week, Austin acknowledged what The New York Times and other media outlets had already reported. The drone stroke killed an Afghan U.S. aid worker and several nearby children and not an ISIS-K affiliate.

According to the Pentagon and several other sources, Ahmadi, the driver of the vehicle targeted, was an employee of an American-established aid organization Nutrition and Education International and had no menace to U.S. forces.

The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) issued a pair of statements on the day of the strike which declared that the U.S. had executed a “self-defense unmanned over-the-horizon airstrike” against an automobile in Kabul which posed an "imminent ISIS-K threat."

Once information circulated that the drone strike had taken the lives of several civilians, CENTCOM told the public they were “aware of reports of civilian casualties” and were “still assessing the results of this strike, which we know disrupted an imminent ISIS-K threat to the airport.”

Three days after the strike, Milley stood his ground on the reasons behind the attack.

“We know from a variety of other means that at least one of those people that were killed was an ISIS facilitator,” he said. “At this point, we think that the procedures were correctly followed and it was a righteous strike.”

On Aug. 31, Biden signified that the strike was a chief illustration of his “over-the-horizon” counter terrorism strategy. In his statements on withdrawing from Afghanistan from the State Dining Room, the president told the American people of “what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities" and that “we’ve shown that capacity just in the last week.” Biden claimed that the U.S. had “struck ISIS-K remotely, days after they murdered 13 of our service members and dozens of innocent Afghans.”

Axios reported that counterterrorism experts are questioning the worth of Biden’s “over-the-horizon” strategy, with one member of the  intelligence community calling it the “over-the-rainbow” strategy, following the country's swift departure from Afghanistan.