Justice Department officials are touting an early victory in the new War on Terror after a drone strike in Loudoun County, Virginia took out the chairwoman of a prominent parent activist group.
The terrorist, Karen White, was believed to be the leader of a local terror cell that opposed mask mandates and carried out a number of brazen attacks. Last week, White spoke for nearly seven minutes at a Loudoun County School Board meeting, blatantly ignoring the three-minute limit for public comments.
The strike, carried out early Monday evening, was the first since Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that he planned to treat parents speaking out against their local schools’ policies as domestic terrorists.
“If we did not act, Ms. White very likely would have carried out further attacks against these innocent school board members,” Garland said in a press conference announcing the strike. “We had intelligence indicating that Ms. White planned to question the district’s student reading list at the next board meeting. We could not just sit back and let that happen.”
The drone strike, a joint effort of the FBI, CIA, Justice Department and local police, struck White’s Jeep Grand Cherokee at 6:17 p.m. as it pulled into the school parking lot just minutes before White was set to attend another school board meeting. Twelve civilians, including seven children, were also killed in the strike.
“We hate to see any loss of innocent life as a result of our actions,” Garland said. “But frankly, the damage Karen would have caused would be much greater had we failed to act.”
