The United States has troops dying in a country where a number of United States senators did not know troops were stationed to begin with. There are a lot of questions after four soldiers died in Niger, and apparently, for several of the 100 people in the Senate, one of the questions was, “Wait—we have troops in Niger?”
"I did not," Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pennsylvania, responded to CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day" Monday whether he knew there were troops in Niger. "When you consider what happened here, the four sergeants lost their lives, I think there's a lot of work that both parties and both branches of government need to do. Not only to stay more informed but to focus on why we're there and what happened to get to the bottom of this." [...]
"I didn't know there was 1,000 troops in Niger," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told NBC's Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" Sunday. "They are going to brief us next week as to why they were there and what they were doing." [...]
When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was asked later on "Meet the Press" about knowing whether there were troops in Niger, he responded, "No, I did not."
The Pentagon says it keeps Congress informed of these things, but it sounds like maybe the information was not presented in a very attention-grabbing way if it managed to get past Lindsey Graham, who centered his entire little presidential campaign around his foreign policy credentials and hawkishness. Now, everyone’s going to be paying close attention—though whether the military comes up with a satisfactory explanation for how the soldiers got ambushed to begin with, why Sgt. La David Johnson’s body was not recovered for 48 hours, and other open questions is another story.