Senate Republicans Threaten Hegseth Over Iran Girls’ School Strike

Source: The New Republic · Bias: Left

Summary

Congress is finally demanding answers from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Iran.Senators are threatening to cut off Hegseth’s travel budget until the Pentagon provides more details about the deadly U.S. strike that hit a school full of children on February 28, Politico reported Wednesday.At the time, Pentagon intel had led them to believe that the school was actually an Iranian base. It was not. The DOD initially did not take responsibility for the strike.The vast majority of the 175 people killed in the strikes were children, according to Iranian officials.Senators have also asked Hegseth to turn over all the video footage of his department’s bombing campaign against small boats in the Caribbean, for which the death toll recently surpassed 205 people. The U.S. has been attacking boats off the coast of Venezuela since September 2 in what it claims is a broad effort to stamp out drug smuggling into the U.S. By December, Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio confessed during a classified meeting that there was no intelligence indicating that fentanyl was coming out of Venezuela. Instead the administration had learned the boats were carrying cocaine—bound for Europe, rather than America.“That is a massive waste of national security resources and your taxpayer dollars,” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said at the time.The details of Hegseth’s punishment were folded into a Senate Armed Services Committee’s defense policy bill, specifying that Congress would withhold 75 percent of his travel budget until lawmakers received adequate documentation for the aforementioned atrocities.It’s the second such time that lawmakers have tried this gambit. Late last year, lawmakers passed defense legislation that cut a quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget under similar demands. The raised stakes, however, suggest that lawmakers did not get what they asked for.Even Trump’s MAGA allies in the upper chamber seem disgruntled with the Pentagon’s lack of transparency. They’ve complained that Defense officials have kept them in the dark about major national security decisions—a frustration only further intensified by the administration’s cloaked proceedings around the Iran peace deal.

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Senate Republicans Threaten Hegseth Over Iran Girls’ School Strike
The New Republic

Senate Republicans Threaten Hegseth Over Iran Girls’ School Strike

Left

Congress is finally demanding answers from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Iran.Senators are threatening to cut off Hegseth’s travel budget until the Pentagon provides more details about the deadly U.S. strike that hit a school full of children on February 28, Politico reported Wednesday.At the time, Pentagon intel had led them to believe that the school was actually an Iranian base. It was not. The DOD initially did not take responsibility for the strike.The vast majority of the 175 people killed in the strikes were children, according to Iranian officials.Senators have also asked Hegseth to turn over all the video footage of his department’s bombing campaign against small boats in the Caribbean, for which the death toll recently surpassed 205 people. The U.S. has been attacking boats off the coast of Venezuela since September 2 in what it claims is a broad effort to stamp out drug smuggling into the U.S. By December, Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio confessed during a classified meeting that there was no intelligence indicating that fentanyl was coming out of Venezuela. Instead the administration had learned the boats were carrying cocaine—bound for Europe, rather than America.“That is a massive waste of national security resources and your taxpayer dollars,” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said at the time.The details of Hegseth’s punishment were folded into a Senate Armed Services Committee’s defense policy bill, specifying that Congress would withhold 75 percent of his travel budget until lawmakers received adequate documentation for the aforementioned atrocities.It’s the second such time that lawmakers have tried this gambit. Late last year, lawmakers passed defense legislation that cut a quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget under similar demands. The raised stakes, however, suggest that lawmakers did not get what they asked for.Even Trump’s MAGA allies in the upper chamber seem disgruntled with the Pentagon’s lack of transparency. They’ve complained that Defense officials have kept them in the dark about major national security decisions—a frustration only further intensified by the administration’s cloaked proceedings around the Iran peace deal.

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