For U.S. service members, one day from the war with Iran stands out: On March 1, the second day of the military offensive, an unmanned Iranian drone struck a “tactical operations center” in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, killing six U.S. soldiers and wounding many others.

Donald Trump’s response to the deadly developments sparked a controversy; the president posted a prerecorded video to social media, in which he said, among other things, “Before it ends, that’s the way it is. Likely be more.”

But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s response was considerably worse.

Two days before he pressed news organizations to downplay the significance of fallen U.S. troops, the beleaguered Pentagon chief told reporters, in reference to the Iranian drone, “Every once in a while, you might have a squirter that makes its way through.”

In other words, according to Hegseth, defenses were in place to protect the U.S. military outpost in Kuwait, but one unmanned drone managed to sneak through and do deadly harm.

That version of events is now facing important pushback from sources in a position to know. MS NOW reported, as part of the network’s liveblog coverage:

The White House did not address the account Thursday of survivors of the Iranian attack on a U.S. military outpost in Kuwait who pushed back against the Pentagon’s characterization of the incident. Six U.S. service members were killed in the strike during the early days of the war.

In an interview with CBS News, one soldier injured in the attack on the Port of Shuaiba called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s description of the incident as merely one drone that ‘squeaked through’ a ‘falsehood.’

One of the injured soldiers, speaking on the condition of anonymity, specifically told CBS News, “Painting a picture that ‘one squeaked through’ is a falsehood. I want people to know the unit … was unprepared to provide any defense for itself. It was not a fortified position.”

Other soldiers from the Army’s 103rd Sustainment Command who survived the attack said in the interview that the military never articulated a “good reason” for moving their unit “closer to Iran, to a deeply unsafe area that was a known target.” They described the bunker protection “as weak as one gets.”

Asked if the attack was preventable, one soldier replied, “Absolutely, yes.”

Time will tell what will become of the allegations, and for now, neither the Pentagon nor the White House have commented on the soldiers’ descriptions of the attack and the lack of military preparedness.

But given the circumstances, the need for an investigation seems painfully obvious. Indeed, 14 years ago, an attack on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, left four Americans dead. Republicans and their allies spent several years questioning the defenses in place at the time, holding countless hours of congressional hearings, and in 2014, the GOP-led House even launched a special select committee to scrutinize what happened in detail. The investigation never substantiated Republican conspiracy theories, quietly ending its work in late 2016.

The question for the party and the administration is simple: If questions surrounding the deadly attack in Benghazi warranted years’ worth of granular examination, and there’s reason to believe the current defense secretary made false claims about a deadly attack in Kuwait, will that receive comparable demands for answers?

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From MS Now.