Hagel earned his reputation as a skeptic of American military adventurism, as anyone who remembers his consistent criticism of the Iraq war will remember. But that criticism has blown Hagel’s reputation for dovishness out of proportion: After all, he voted in 2002 to authorize the war. National Journal’s Michael Hirsch insightfully argues Hagel’s reward for asking hard questions about the war is to have official Washington forget the rest of his record. So consider this a refresher.
When it became public that the NSA was scooping up Americans’ communications without judicial authorization, Hagel, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, defended the NSA as striking “a very delicate balance, an important balance and an effective balance.” He advocated giving the government more spy powers through “updat[ing]” the “outdated” Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which would become one of the bitterest defeats for civil libertarians and privacy advocates of the post-9/11 era.
Hagel also played some role in sparing the Bush administration a broad congressional inquiry into the warrantless surveillance efforts. While Hagel had expressed concerns about the spy effort shortly after its December 2005 disclosure, he joined a party-line effort inside the Senate intelligence panel to block a major investigation, after Vice President Dick Cheney and White House chief of staff Andrew Card began lobbying senators. Hagel and fellow moderate Republican Olympia Snowe, “bridle[d] at suggestions that they buckled under administration heat,” but a 2006 Washington Post re-creation of the episode cast them as the decisive factors in scuttling the investigation.
Hagel in History's Cockpit
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Originally Posted by johnpolitics
