Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on October 6, 2026 that the Pentagon denied him access to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest U.S. base in the region, and refused to arrange a briefing on the Iran war while he was there. A senior Pentagon official told Reuters his office had been informed before the trip that he would not receive the department's support to visit the base, “consistent with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's March 3, 2026, directive restricting travel to the area,” and said, “The Department applies the Secretary's guidance evenly.”
“This trip confirmed for me that there is an active, unprecedented, unconstitutional effort underway to hide the costs of this war and the implications of this war from Congress and the American people,” Murphy told reporters in Riyadh. “I've never encountered anything like this in my time in the Senate and it's part of a deliberate campaign of obfuscation that my Republican colleagues in Congress should demand an end to.” He said Secretary of State Marco Rubio had facilitated the trip. The Hill described him as the first Democratic lawmaker to visit the region since the war began.
It follows the Pentagon's refusal to give senators an accounting of the war's cost (see Hegseth Has Briefed Congress Seven Times in Six Months of War. Rumsfeld Did It More Than Twenty Times in the Same Span of Iraq.).