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Lloyd J. Austin III issued a statement Saturday night saying, “I take full responsibility for my decision about disclosure.”


NYT
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III was admitted to intensive care on Monday. The White House learned of it on
It took the Pentagon three and a half days to inform the White House that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had been hospitalized on New Year’s Day following complications from an elective procedure, two U.S. officials said Saturday.

The extraordinary breach of protocol — Mr. Austin is in charge of the country’s 1.4 million active-duty military at a time when the wars in Gaza and Ukraine have dominated the American national security landscape — has baffled officials across the government, including at the Pentagon.

Senior defense officials say Mr. Austin did not inform them until Thursday that he had been admitted to the intensive care unit at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. The Pentagon then informed the White House.

The Pentagon’s belated notification, first reported by Politico, confounded White House officials, one Biden administration official said. A spokeswoman for the National Security Council declined to comment on Saturday.

On Saturday night, Mr. Austin issued a mea culpa.

“I recognize I could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed,” he said in a statement. “I commit to doing better.”

Mr. Austin added, “This was my medical procedure, and I take full responsibility for my decision about disclosure.”

President Biden and Mr. Austin spoke by telephone Saturday night, a U.S. official said, adding that the president was glad to hear that Mr. Austin is recovering. Another official said that the president has full confidence in his defense secretary. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive situation.

It was late Friday evening when Mr. Austin’s spokesman, Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, put out a statement to the news media that the secretary had been hospitalized. General Ryder said patient privacy prevented him from elaborating about Mr. Austin’s medical issue.

In the Friday statement, he said the defense secretary, who is 70, was “recovering well and is expecting to resume his full duties today.”

Mr. Austin was still in the hospital on Saturday, a defense official said.

Pentagon officials had to call Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks while she was on vacation in Puerto Rico to handle affairs while Mr. Austin was hospitalized, a Defense Department official said on Saturday, confirming a report by NBC News. The department said on Friday that Ms. Hicks had assumed Mr. Austin’s duties temporarily. The secretary has delegated authority to her in the past, when he has been on vacation and off the grid.

But just Thursday, while Mr. Austin was out of action, the United States launched a retaliatory strike in Baghdad that killed a militia leader who Pentagon officials said was responsible for recent attacks on American troops in the region.

A Biden administration official said that the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, already had authorization for the strike.

Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas and a member of the Armed Services Committee, demanded on Saturday that Mr. Austin explain why he had not immediately informed the White House that he had been hospitalized and was unable to perform his duties.

“The secretary of defense is the key link in the chain of command between the president and the uniformed military, including the nuclear chain of command, when the weightiest of decisions must be made in minutes,” Mr. Cotton said in a statement. “If this report is true, there must be consequences for this shocking breakdown.”

Criticism was growing in other quarters as well.

“The public has a right to know when U.S. cabinet members are hospitalized, under anesthesia or when duties are delegated as the result of any medical procedure,” the Pentagon Press Association said in a statement Friday night. “As the nation’s top defense leader, Secretary Austin has no claim to privacy in this situation.”

Mr. Austin is notoriously private and has kept a low profile during his time as defense secretary. It has been more than a year since he appeared at the lectern in the Pentagon briefing room to address members of the news media, and he has been known to sometimes avoid reporters who travel with him overseas.

On those trips, he prefers to dine alone in his hotel room when he does not have an engagement with a foreign counterpart.

In his statement Saturday, Mr. Austin said, “I am very glad to be on the mend and look forward to returning to the Pentagon soon.”



This Guy has got to go immediately.

Polly anal HPV WARTS AND his rectum wall was compromised and infected after laser surgery...ALLedGeDly

Pretty pathetic. Current administration is pathetic. Those in "power" don't seem like they have control of anything. This includes the Executive and the Congressional branches of office.

It’s pretty sad when one thinks about what has become acceptable behavior by those in charge.

But before anyone goes on a rant about Biden, who in my opinion is the poster child of a chitty President, others before him both D & R have had some pretty severe lapses in their administrations.

Who can forget Reagan napping upstairs while Ollie North was busy in the White House basement organizing cocaine shipments into the US to fund the Contras?

Then we have Clinton who had an affinity for getting his slick Willie waxed while on the phone with world leaders. Or that before he was President he was the governor of Arkansas when Barry Seal was flying Contra fighters to train, their weapons and cocaine into Mena, AK then flying cash to Nicaragua to purchase the aforementioned weapons as well as returning the fighters with their weapons to Nicaragua to fight the Sandinistas.

Then we have W’s Sec of D Rumsfeld and his crew who manufactured the narrative that Saddam has WMD’s to justify an invasion of Iraq. The NSA’s PRISM program, on of the most egregious and perhaps the first publicly well known example of weaponizing federal agencies against US citizens, was hatched during W’s administration.

Not to be outdone by W, Obama’s administration had no problem with weaponization of federal agencies. But, perhaps it was the first to do so against political foes. There was the IRS which got caught targeting conservative organizations and the DOJ seizing AP reporters phone records in an effort to plug a leak regarding a story about a foiled terrorist plot to bomb a plane. Of course we shouldn’t forget about Fast and Furious.

Following Obama’s lead, Trump had the records of New York Times reporters seized in an attempt to plug a leak regarding an article about the way Director Comey handled an investigation. Trump’s DOJ also seized records of Washington Post and a CNN journalist.

Pretty sad indeed.

Well I'm a CoonAss so I'll complement his Post then go read it... LOL CoonAss's can be backwards sometimes...

Think of it more like a football scoreboard. Even though both teams have given up multiple safeties, the score is still 0-0.

Other than Col. North stating AFTER Reagan had passed...everyone else on record has stated he didn't. Knowing what I know about the matter...this smacked of CIA all the way. Now, if we could only find someone close to the POTUS that had ties to the CIA...

Ever wonder how a sitting President gets uphended by a bumf@ck governor of a Southern state lagging in each and every category? Now, what twirls the beeny is that perhaps Pops tried to setup the POTUS like some revolving door by allowing that "Bubba" the ability to "win" setting up the office for future legacy members. That too would be CIA'ish.

I think we need to make them use needle bearings.

We talkin government mandate here?

Farticus Returns!

I never did like that Neocon Dubya Regime.
They paved the way for Obama.

So prostate cancer surgery is considered an elective surgery? The plot thickens.

The Jury will be out for days on the conclusion on this one... W'll have to follow TMZ for updates!!!

Perhaps a march on the capitol?

Secretary Austin’s Strange Health Secrecy

It turns out the Defense chief was in the hospital for complications after surgery for prostate cancer. His silence was bad judgment.

The Editorial Board
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in December. PHOTO: MAYA ALLERUZZO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
We’ve hesitated to pile on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for his failure to tell the White House about an illness that required hospitalization. But the news Tuesday that he was treated for an infection after surgery for prostate cancer makes the silence more serious.

Mr. Austin’s doctors at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center disclosed the news after days of what had become a medical and political mystery. Why in the world wouldn’t the secretary of defense, one of the top officials in government during a time of global unrest, let his boss and his deputy know he was in the intensive care unit at a hospital? What was he afraid of disclosing?

It now appears he was trying to protect his privacy, in particular the cancer diagnosis. This makes his silence worse. Prostate cancer is hardly uncommon for a man of Mr. Austin’s 70 years. Tens of thousands of men have had a prostatectomy, or the “minimally invasive surgical procedure,” as the Walter Reed statement put it. There’s nothing to be embarrassed or secretive about.

All the more so if you’re the President’s chief military adviser. Men and women of that government rank might have some expectation of medical privacy from the public. But they have no such expectation of privacy from the President and White House national security adviser. Mr. Austin is at the top of the national chain of military command.

The Pentagon’s early statements on the matter said Mr. Austin was working at Walter Reed. But he was taking medication to fight infection in the ICU for heaven’s sake. How one defines working in that environment probably isn’t how most Americans would understand it. Would he have been able to provide adequate and informed advice in a crisis?

With his failure to tell his superiors and deputies, Mr. Austin created a mystery that ruined the privacy he was trying to protect. He also set a bad example for other men who have a prostate cancer diagnosis, as if the disease still carries some stigma.

Worst of all was Mr. Austin’s judgment, and we wonder if it’s a function in part of his long military service. General officers tend to be surrounded by a close circle of aides who are also career officers. Anyone who has worked in private business knows that an executive headed for the hospital needs to tell his boss and arrange for deputies to fill in.

President Biden says he won’t accept Mr. Austin’s resignation if offered, and that’s his call. The calls to impeach Mr. Austin are silly. But the secretary does owe the public a more extensive explanation of what he was thinking, or not thinking, if only to reassure the country that he understands his mistake.

https://youtu.be/Byp8ZNIgheU?si=-RfGNRjv0FJ7MfTf