In secret, behind locked gates, our Nation's Oldest City dumped a landfill in a lake (Old City Reservoir), while emitting sewage in our rivers and salt marsh. Organized citizens exposed and defeated pollution, racism and cronyism. We elected a new Mayor. We're transforming our City -- advanced citizenship. Ask questions. Make disclosures. Demand answers. Be involved. Expect democracy. Report and expose corruption. Smile! Help enact a St. Augustine National Park and Seashore. We shall overcome!
"The Pentagon said it would not comment on pending legislation." Inarticulate, insulting, goofy and gooberish for a building to say no comment. The Pentagon houses to the Department of Defense, which now calls itself "War" to to say "no comment" on "pending legislation." Answer the question. It's not litigation, it's legislation. Your insolent silence is insolent and inculpatory.
From The Washington Post:
Senate targets Hegseth’s travel in standoff over apparent Iran school attack, boat strikes
Frustrated lawmakers are increasing pressure on the defense secretary to get answers they have sought for months.
Frustrated senators are threatening to withhold 75 percent of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget unless the Pentagon provides Congress with answers about an apparent U.S. strike on a girls school in Iran and the military’s ongoing attacks targeting alleged drug smuggling boats in Latin America.
The proposal is tucked into an early version of the Senate’s 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), sprawling, must-pass legislation that sets Defense Department priorities. It reflects the growing bipartisan frustration over the Pentagon’s refusal to comply with congressional requests.
The Pentagon said it would not comment on pending legislation.
For months lawmakers have sought the complete, unedited video of the first, and highly controversial, boat strike in which the U.S. military killed two survivors of an initial attack that mostly destroyed the vessel.
Since that episode in early September, U.S. forces have killed more than 200 people in strikes on small boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.
The Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee advanced the bill by a vote of 18-9 last week and has since made the legislation public. The committee is seeking unedited footage of every boat strike in waters around Latin America.
Lawmakers have also sought information on the military’s investigation into how a girls school in Iran was apparently targeted by a Navy Tomahawk missile on Feb. 28, during the war’s initial hours. The strike, for which the U.S. government has not publicly accepted blame amid an ongoing investigation, killed more than 170 people, most of them children, Iranian officials have said.
No one hasyet been held accountable for those deaths. The investigation is being conducted by U.S. Central Command.
Speaking Wednesday at the Group of Seven summit in France, President Donald Trump said the investigation was ongoing but “nobody did that on purpose.”
“Mistakes are made,” the president said, adding, “war is nasty.”
The Senate committee’s draft of the defense bill must still pass the full chamber. It will then need to be reconciled with the House Armed Services Committee’s version, which so far would restrict 25 percent of Hegseth’s travel budget if the Pentagon does not provide lawmakers with the desired materials.
The legislation must then pass the full Congress, expected late this year.
A similar House proposal made it into law last year, though it was unclear how close Hegseth had come to reaching the spending threshold.
“We’ve been asking for these kinds of things for some time,” said one Senate staffer, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss the lawmakers’ frustration with the Pentagon’s noncompliance. “So we’re trying to use all the tools for more enforcement now.”
The proposal to restrict Hegseth’s travel budget was reported earlier by Politico.
Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, have at times been displeased by what they say is a lack of engagement by Hegseth and his advisers over U.S. support for Ukraine, which remains at war with Russia. The proposal to withhold funds from the defense secretary’s travel budget would remain in place until the Pentagon also provides a previously ordered report to Congress on U.S. and allied support for the government in Kyiv.
GOP hawks have been deeply unhappy, too, about the Trump administration’s refusal to consult Congress on its plans for sweeping cuts to U.S. troop levels in Europe. The Senate bill seeks to further restrict the Pentagon’s ability to withdraw troops from the continent without first alerting lawmakers.
Spokesmen for the committee’s top Republicans, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
If passed, the withholding of travel funds would not only impact Hegseth, but his deputy as well and anyone in his office seeking to conduct official travel, the Senate staffer said.
While Hegseth does not go on as many international trips as his predecessors have, he frequently travels to domestic military bases and sometimes has brought members of his family along. The secretary is currently in Brussels, where he is due to meet with NATO defense ministers.
Hegseth’s political staff at the Pentagon has said that the secretary pays for his family to join him on official travel, such as this month’s trip to France where he took six of his children, but to date they have not disclosed documentation verifying that he has reimbursed the government.
An unusually large number of Democrats on the committee, including Sen. Tammy Duckworth (Illinois), voted against the NDAA in the committee’s markup last week. Duckworth cited her disapproval of the Trump administration’s actions in Iran and the lack of oversight as reasons not to support the often bipartisan-passed committee bill.
“I cannot rubber-stamp $1.5 trillion — the largest defense budget ever proposed in our nation’s history — with zero checks,” Duckworth said.
