June 2, 2014

We Lost Soldiers in the Hunt for Bergdahl, a Guy Who Walked Off in the Dead of Night

Nathan Bradley Bethea

For five years, soldiers have been forced to stay silent about the disappearance and search for Bergdahl. Now we can talk about what really happened.

It was June 30, 2009, and I was in the city of Sharana, the capitol of Paktika province in Afghanistan. As I stepped out of a decrepit office building into a perfect sunny day, a member of my team started talking into his radio. “Say that again,” he said. “There’s an American soldier missing?”

There was. His name was Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, the only prisoner of war in the Afghan theater of operations. His release from Taliban custody on May 31 marks the end of a nearly five-year-old story for the soldiers of his unit, the 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment. I served in the same battalion in Afghanistan and participated in the attempts to retrieve him throughout the summer of 2009. After we redeployed, every member of my brigade combat team received an order that we were not allowed to discuss what happened to Bergdahl for fear of endangering him. He is safe, and now it is time to speak the truth.

And that the truth is: Bergdahl was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.

On the night prior to his capture, Bergdahl pulled guard duty at OP Mest, a small outpost about two hours south of the provincial capitol. The base resembled a wagon circle of armored vehicles with some razor wire strung around them. A guard tower sat high up on a nearby hill, but the outpost itself was no fortress. Besides the tower, the only hard structure that I saw in July 2009 was a plywood shed filled with bottled water. Soldiers either slept in poncho tents or inside their vehicles.

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/02/we-lost-soldiers-in-the-hunt-for-bergdahl-a-guy-who-walked-off-in-the-dead-of-night.html

June 2, 2014

Bowe Bergdahl Is the Right’s New Benghazi

Michael Tomasky

Buckle up: The right is going to try to turn the Taliban prisoner swap for ‘deserter’ Bowe Bergdahl into a Willie Horton moment for the president—and they’ll ride it to January 2017.

So let’s imagine that on Saturday night, the news had emerged not that Bowe Bergdahl was being freed but that he’d been murdered by his Taliban captors. What do you suppose we’d be hearing from Republican legislators? You know exactly what: Barack Obama is the weakest president ever, this is unconscionable. Which, of course, is exactly what we’re hearing from them now that the U.S. Army sergeant, held by the Taliban since 2009, has been freed. And it’s going to get worse. I’m even tempted to say forget Benghazi—Bergdahl may well end up being the flimsy excuse for the impeachment hearings they’ve been dreaming of before all this is over.

The Republicans’ audacity here is a bit beyond the usual. Let’s face it: There is no question that if President George W. Bush or a President McCain or President Romney had secured Bergdahl’s release in exchange for five Taliban prisoners at Gitmo, Republicans would be defending the move all the way. That business about notifying Congress? They’d have a dozen excuses for it. We got our prisoner of war home, they’d all be saying. That’s what matters.

But Obama does it, and Bergdahl’s freedom isn’t what matters at all. It’s that we negotiated with terrorists. Well, yes. We’ve been negotiating with the Taliban for a long time now, trying to end the war. See, they’re the people leading the fighting on the other side. When you’re trying to end a war, that’s generally who you negotiate with.

The five guys we returned to the Taliban are really bad guys, as Eli Lake and Josh Rogin wrote this weekend, and it’s fair to ask whether the price was too high. We can’t know the answer to that question today. But other criticisms are bogus. House intel chairman Mike Rogers said on TV Sunday that in cutting the deal, “you send a message to every al Qaeda group in the world that there is some value in a hostage that it didn’t have before.” That’s ridiculous. So al Qaeda groups didn’t know until this past weekend that taking an American hostage could give them leverage? Guerrilla forces have been taking people hostage since warfare began. We’ve even done lower-level prisoner trades in Afghanistan.

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/02/bowe-bergdahl-is-the-right-s-new-benghazi.html

June 2, 2014

2012 GOP threat: Sgt. Bergdahl swap will be Obama, Democrats’ ‘Willie Horton moment’

By Scott Kaufman
Sunday, June 1, 2014 11:25 EDT

Republicans are outraged that President Barack Obama authorized a prisoner exchange with the Taliban for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl — who has been held captive since 2009 — and that they plan to use the exchange against Democrats in the upcoming election.

The news of the prisoner exchange — in which Sgt. Bergdahl was swapped for Afghan detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay — surprised many Republicans because, they claim, it violated a law Obama signed last year requiring the defense secretary to notify congressional committees 30 days before arranging for a transfer of prisoners.

When he signed the law, however, President Obama issued a signing statement in which he contended that the notification requirement was an unconstitutional infringement on his powers as commander-in-chief.

“Due to a near-term opportunity to save Sergeant Bergdahl’s life, we moved as quickly as possible,” a senior administration official told The Washington Post. “The administration determined that given these unique and exigent circumstances, such a transfer should go forward notwithstanding the notice requirement.”

more
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/06/01/2012-gop-threat-sgt-bergdahl-swap-will-be-obama-democrats-willie-horton-moment/

June 1, 2014

Fox neocon John Bolton: Obama ‘despicable’ for swapping American POW for Gitmo detainees

By David Edwards
Sunday, June 1, 2014 9:55 EDT

Neoconservative Fox News contributor John Bolton on Saturday blasted President Barack Obama as “despicable” for negotiating for the release of a U.S. Army sergeant who had been held captive in Afghanistan for five years.

Just hours after the president announced that 28-year-old Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl had been freed, Bolton told Fox News host Jeanine Pirro that a dangerous precedent had been set by trading five Guantanamo Bay prisoners for one American.

“The president has sent the Taliban an unmistakable signal that he will pay any price to get the United States out, and that’s a signal that’s bad for Taliban and al Qaeda to hear and our adversaries around the world,” Bolton opined. “And perhaps even worse, it is despicable for a president of the United States to grant moral equivalence to these terrorist in Gitmo compared to an American servicemember. The idea that there’s any equivalence at all between and American soldier and a terrorist, I think, is reprehensible.”

Pirro argued that Obama was “putting us in jeopardy” by accepting Qatar’s assurances that the five prisoners would not return to the battlefield.

more
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/06/01/fox-neocon-john-bolton-obama-despicable-for-swapping-american-pow-for-gitmo-detainees/

June 1, 2014

Cruz: Federal Government Shutdown Gave GOP A Boost For 2014 Elections

CAITLIN MACNEAL – JUNE 1, 2014, 9:10 AM EDT

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who led Republicans' charge to shut down the government by trying to link federal funding to an Obamacare repeal, on Saturday said that his efforts gave the GOP an edge in the 2014 elections.

During a speech at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, La., Cruz said that "graybeards" in the Republican party are not giving him enough credit for his help.

"They’re reaping the fruits of the battle, which is perfectly fine," Cruz said, as recorded by the Washington Post. "But we need to take a moment to acknowledge the lesson of the battle." Cruz also indicated that even though he has so far failed to defund the health care law, he will not give up on a full repeal.

"Any wartime general will tell you that not every war is won in a single battle," he said.

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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cruz-shutdown-helps-gop-elections

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Wow. Cruz sees himself as a wartime general? What an egomaniac.