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Hagel Defends Bergdahl Trade Before House Panel Hagel Defends Bergdahl Trade Before House Panel
(35 minutes later)
WASHINGTON — He wrote almost every word of his opening statement himself. He slashed suggestions from his speechwriters and replaced them with his own blocks of paragraphs. By Monday night, he was five drafts into his planned presentation, aides said. WASHINGTON — A defiant Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Wednesday defended the prisoner exchange that brought the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl after years of captivity with the Taliban, telling skeptical lawmakers that the operation had needed to be kept secret from Congress to ensure that the soldier was not killed by his captors in the days leading up to the swap.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is appearing before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, the first high-level Obama administration official to face Congress in a public hearing about a deal that has raised bipartisan ire. But if Mr. Hagel was unprepared for his bruising confirmation hearing last year, he seemed determined that this time round — once again facing a hostile panel of his former colleagues — he would be ready to forcefully defend the swap of five Taliban detainees for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. After all, it is a deal he personally authorized. In the first public testimony before Congress by a senior member of the Obama administration since Sergeant Bergdahl’s release, Mr. Hagel described the exchange as a “military operation” that was in doubt until the very end. He called prisoner swaps part of the “dirty business” of war.
For Mr. Hagel, who often seems tentative or unsure of himself in public, this is his moment of either redemption or political perdition. “War, every part of war like prisoner exchanges, is not some abstraction or theoretical exercise,” he told members of the House Armed Services Committee. “All of these decisions are part of the brutal, imperfect realities we all deal with in war.”
On Wednesday, his role is not so much to parrot administration talking points but instead to walk through his own thinking and defend his decision. A two-time Purple Heart recipient for wounds sustained as an enlisted soldier during the worst of the Vietnam War, Mr. Hagel is more sure-footed when speaking about the men and women under his command than when he has to talk about administration policy. Mr. Hagel showed brief flashes of contrition, acknowledging the complaints of lawmakers’ “great frustration” that they were kept in the dark about the operation and admitting that the Obama administration “could have done a better job” keeping lawmakers informed. A statute signed by President Obama requires that the administration give Congress 30 days notice before it transfers a Guantánamo detainee. Mr. Obama issued a signing statement asserting that he could lawfully bypass the notice requirement under certain circumstances.
“As a combat infantryman and soldier himself, he well understands the importance of the leave-no-soldier-behind principle,” Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said before the hearing. “I think in ways different from typical posture and budget hearings, this one is more personal to him. This isn’t an abstract principle to him. He lived it.” But Mr. Hagel did not give ground about the necessity of the prisoner swap, in which Sergeant Bergdahl was exchanged for five senior Taliban detainees being held at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Speaking to aides in the 10 days since Sergeant Bergdahl was released, Mr. Hagel has often referred to his time in Vietnam, where he and his brother, Tom, who often “walked point” — at the front of foot patrols — and other members of his platoon had to come to the aid of young soldiers who found themselves in trouble because of reckless actions. “There were times that they had to go and rescue soldiers who found themselves in harm’s way because of their own decisions,” one senior military official said. “The way he described it was, ‘That’s just what we do.’ ” Republican critics of the deal have compared it to “negotiating with terrorists,” an accusation echoed on Wednesday by Representative Howard McKeon, the California Republican who is the committee’s chairman. Mr. McKeon also said the deal would “incentivize” militants to capture more American troops.
Whether that affinity with enlisted soldiers can soothe the ire of lawmakers who are outraged that they were not consulted about the swap is an open question. Even some administration officials have privately criticized the White House for not telling at least a handful of lawmakers of the pending exchange. That omission is particularly glaring given that the four people in charge of American foreign policy — President Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Secretary of State John Kerry and Mr. Hagel — are all former senators who know how easy it is to upset their former colleagues. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, has asserted that the five former detainees — now being held in Qatar for a year under the terms of the prisoner swap — have “American blood on their hands.”
So far Mr. Hagel has not demonstrated Mr. Kerry’s agility in hitting back when pelted with tough questions from former colleagues. During Mr. Hagel’s confirmation hearing, he fared poorly during a tough exchange with his former friend, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who asked him repeatedly if history would judge whether he was right or wrong in opposing the surge in American armed forces in Iraq in 2007. The escalation, along with other major factors, was credited with helping to quell the violence in Iraq at the time. On Wednesday, Mr. Hagel said they did not.” They have not been implicated in any attacks against the United States, and we had no basis to prosecute them in a federal court or military commission,” he said.
Mr. Hagel parried, before finally saying that “I’m not that certain that it was required.” (Mr. Hagel’s supporters say that history may ultimately prove him right, noting that on Tuesday, Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, fell to Sunni militants.) Later, however, under questioning by Representative Mac Thornberry, Republican of Texas, Mr. Hagel conceded that even though there was no evidence of “direct involvement” in attacks on American troops, the detainees had nevertheless been “combatants” because as mid- to high-ranking members of the Taliban government, they were involved in “planning” Taliban operations after the United States went to war in Afghanistan.
Mr. Hagel’s allies insisted that he was up to Wednesday’s mammoth task. “He looks forward to having the opportunity to talk to House members, to publicly walk those members through how he came to make that decision, and why he made it the way he did,” said Admiral Kirby, one of the aides preparing Mr. Hagel for his appearance. Mr. McKeon said, “Bin Laden didn’t pull the trigger, but we went after him because he caused 9/11.”
Vikram J. Singh, a former deputy assistant secretary at the Pentagon, echoed Admiral Kirby. He said, referring to Sergeant Bergdahl, “Hagel should be well equipped to say why, even in the case where the circumstances of him wandering off are not clear, that it’s the right thing to do to try to get him back.” Sergeant Bergdahl was being held in Pakistan by the Haqqani network, a group aligned with the Taliban that the State Department has listed as a foreign terrorist organization. On Wednesday, several Republican lawmakers asked Mr. Hagel to explain why the prisoner swap did not violate America’s longtime policy of not negotiating with terrorists.
Some Democrats have expressed frustration with the Obama administration’s failure to make its case — and its seeming reluctance to allow uniformed military leaders to defend the principle of leaving no men or women behind. Mr. Hagel said that the Obama administration had dealt directly with Qatari officials, not militants, and that it was operatives of the Taliban – the insurgents who formerly controlled the government of Afghanistan but have not been designated as members of a terrorist organization – and not the Haqqanis who were on the other end of the negotiations.
“I think the administration could be making a much more compelling or convincing case by using some of the facts and officials who have not been presented yet,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and a member of the Armed Services Committee, which received a classified briefing on Tuesday. He added that Mr. Hagel should bring military officers with him on Wednesday. Several lawmakers were not satisfied.
The most likely candidate among the military officers — Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — is in Europe. So Mr. Hagel brought with him Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr., the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “These responses are very, very tortuous,” said Representative John Kline, Republican of Minnesota.
Lawmakers and Mr. Hagel avoided delving into the still-murky circumstances surrounding how Sergeant Bergdahl came to be captured in late June 2009. A still-classified military investigation concluded that he voluntarily slipped away from his base, but stopped short of concluding that there was solid evidence that he intended to desert permanently, according to officials who have read the report.
Some former members of Sergeant Bergdahl’s unit have contended that he was a deserter and even that he was deliberately seeking out the Taliban. But Mr. Hagel noted that the military categorized him as “missing-captured” and that he had not been charged with desertion.
Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the committee, said there “simply is no proof, no evidence; I think the way Mr. Bergdahl has been slandered has been scandalous.” Mr. Smith said people should wait until for due process to take place to figure out what happened.
Some former members of his unit have also claimed that six to eight members of the military were killed because of the hunt for the missing soldier. Mr. Hagel said that he had asked whether any soldier had died in Afghanistan as a result of the search and that so far, he had seen no evidence to support those claims.
“I personally have gone back and asked that question inside the Pentagon, in the Army, and some of our reports,” he said. “I have seen no evidence that directly links any American combat death to the rescue or finding or search of Sergeant Bergdahl.”
Mr. McKeon said the failure to comply with the statute requiring Congressional notice was “one of the things that has bothered me the most about this.” He said, “There is no compelling reason why the department could not provide a notification to Congress 30 days before the transfer, especially when it has complied with a notification requirement for all previous Gitmo detainee transfers since enactment of the law.”
Mr. Thornberry also hammered on that theme, saying that notice requirements were central to legislative oversight of military and intelligence agencies generally, and that the failure to comply with the statute had undermined the broader relationship between the executive branch and Congressional overseers.
Mr. Smith, who otherwise largely defended the deal, also criticized the lack of notice, saying “the law is the law” and rejecting Mr. Obama’s use of a signing statement to reserve a right to bypass it.
“When President Bush was in the White House,” he said, “he had, gosh, hundreds of signing statements, and there was, I believe, a correct amount of outrage amongst many that those signing statements were put out there as a way to simply avoid the law. If it wasn’t right for President Bush to do it, it’s not right for President Obama to do it.”