It’s an “error of judgment,” said Joe Biden. The President of the United States has been in controversy since he admitted on Tuesday that the head of the Pentagon had hidden his cancer from him. Worse still, the Minister of Defense, Lloyd Austin, was operated on for this illness without the head of state being informed.
This Friday, Joe Biden answered “yes” to journalists asking him if Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, who was hospitalized, had made an error of judgment by not informing him until very late of his health problems. The president, traveling to a town in Pennsylvania (north-east), however, also said that he had confidence in his minister.
Supervision of strikes “from his hospital bed”
Lloyd Austin, 70, has been hospitalized since January 1 due to complications following an operation related to prostate cancer which he was diagnosed with in early December.
This diagnosis and the two hospitalizations that followed were only communicated to the country’s senior authorities, starting with Joe Biden, in recent days, which caused an outcry in the press and among his Republican adversaries, in the middle of the year electoral. Earlier Friday, the White House assured that the head of the Pentagon had supervised the American-British strikes on the Houthi rebels in Yemen “from his hospital bed”.
“Total involvement”
Lloyd Austin was “totally involved all day yesterday [jeudi] in preparations for these strikes launched against the Houthi rebels in Yemen early Friday,” John Kirby, spokesperson for the National Security Council, declared on MSNBC.
These strikes, carried out by the United States and the United Kingdom, targeted 30 military sites held by Yemeni rebels, according to an American general. Close to Iran, the bane of the United States, the Houthis have increased missile and drone attacks in the Red Sea in recent months, in support, according to them, of the Palestinians in Gaza, a territory relentlessly bombed and totally besieged by Israel. after the bloody Hamas attack on Israeli soil on October 7.