Former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is accusing the White House of backstabbing him as he prepared to leave the Pentagon in 2014, saying the Obama administration tried to 'destroy' him on his way out the door.
He told Foreign Policy magazine in an interview published Friday that he doesn't know why anonymous White House aides planted stories about why the president demanded his ouster.
'They already had my resignation, so what was the point of just continuing to try to destroy me?' he asked in the interview.
'I don't know what the purpose was. To this day, I'm still mystified by that. But I move forward. I'm proud of my service.'
He added that he 'would have preferred that my days as defense secretary not end that way.'
The New York Times carried much of the water for backbiting White House aides as Obama publicly praised Hagel for his service during a ceremony in which the humiliated Vietnam veteran and former Nebraska senator never made eye contact with the commander-in-chief.
'Aides said Mr. Obama made the decision to remove his defense secretary on Friday after weeks of rising tension over a variety of issues,' the Times reported, 'including what administration officials said were Mr. Hagel’s delays in transferring detainees from the military prison in Guantánamo Bay and a dispute with Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, over Syria policy.'
NBC News also broadcast an anonymous snipe from a White House official who said Hagel 'wasn’t up to the job.'
Hagel lobbed his own broadside at the Obama Administration in the Foreign Policy interview, insisting that the president should have followed through on attacking Damascus after dictator Bashar al-Assad crossed the now-infamous 'red line' and used chemical weapons in his country's bloody civil war.
Instead of pulling the trigger on the full-scale attack Hagel had prepared, Obama told his stunned Defense Secretary to stand down.
In an instant, plans to hammer Damascus with Tomahawk cruise missile fired from naval destroyers in the Mediterranean were scrapped, even though military commanders had their fingers on 'fire' buttons, waiting for the order to go.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ying-destroy-forced-office.html#ixzz3ui4MZEPY
He told Foreign Policy magazine in an interview published Friday that he doesn't know why anonymous White House aides planted stories about why the president demanded his ouster.
'They already had my resignation, so what was the point of just continuing to try to destroy me?' he asked in the interview.
'I don't know what the purpose was. To this day, I'm still mystified by that. But I move forward. I'm proud of my service.'
He added that he 'would have preferred that my days as defense secretary not end that way.'
The New York Times carried much of the water for backbiting White House aides as Obama publicly praised Hagel for his service during a ceremony in which the humiliated Vietnam veteran and former Nebraska senator never made eye contact with the commander-in-chief.
'Aides said Mr. Obama made the decision to remove his defense secretary on Friday after weeks of rising tension over a variety of issues,' the Times reported, 'including what administration officials said were Mr. Hagel’s delays in transferring detainees from the military prison in Guantánamo Bay and a dispute with Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, over Syria policy.'
NBC News also broadcast an anonymous snipe from a White House official who said Hagel 'wasn’t up to the job.'
Hagel lobbed his own broadside at the Obama Administration in the Foreign Policy interview, insisting that the president should have followed through on attacking Damascus after dictator Bashar al-Assad crossed the now-infamous 'red line' and used chemical weapons in his country's bloody civil war.
Instead of pulling the trigger on the full-scale attack Hagel had prepared, Obama told his stunned Defense Secretary to stand down.
In an instant, plans to hammer Damascus with Tomahawk cruise missile fired from naval destroyers in the Mediterranean were scrapped, even though military commanders had their fingers on 'fire' buttons, waiting for the order to go.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ying-destroy-forced-office.html#ixzz3ui4MZEPY
