Michaell Steele and GOP busted with lying about Berghdals's father [View all]

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Bergdahl’s Dad: Drone Killed Captor’s Kid
In a 2010 speech, Robert Bergdahl claimed that the man who held Bowe “recently lost a son to a CIA missile drone strike.” The reports at the time appear to back him up.
In June 2010, Robert Bergdahl, the father of released American POW Bowe Bergdahl, gave a speech at an Idaho Republican Party fundraiser. In one of his first public appearances during his son's five-year captivity, he asked the conservative audience to show compassion for his son's captors—and, in a twist that foretold the plot of Homeland—he alleged that the United States had killed one of those captor's children with a drone strike.



In the past week, Bowe Bergdahl’s case has grown into a full-blown political firestorm. The 2010 speech was not televised, but it was one of the first sparks. It was Robert Bergdahl's first turn as either a tool or technician of national politics in his family's struggle.

The Idaho fundraiser was an election year event, and the day's other speakers—Idaho Senator Jim Risch, then-national-party-chairman Michael Steele, radio host Dennis Prager, and a belligerent stand-up comic named Eric Golub—took the usual shots at President Obama and rallied partisans to donate money to November's cause. [I covered the event as a reporter for AOL News.]

"There are many things that can hurt America," Senator Risch said. "Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, the Taliban—they can all hurt us. But they can't destroy us. This [Obama] Administration can destroy us."

It was four years before Bob and Jani Bergdahl would know that their son's imagined execution would not be videotaped for Taliban propaganda. The traditional symbols of MIA-POW remembrance were laid out before the speakers' podium—an empty table set for one with a white cloth, a red rose in a vase tied with a yellow ribbon—and Bergdahl began by explaining why he was at a political event at all.

"I grew up in a conservative family in Los Angeles," he said with a smile. "My father was for Goldwater. He wore a Nixon button in our liberal Jewish neighborhood. I was the lone U.C. Santa Barbara surfer who voted for Ronald Reagan." Many in the audience nodded in approval, and then Bergdahl talked about the work of retrieving his son.

His contacts in the Pentagon had assured them that Bowe's safety was an absolute priority. "Everything that can be done has been done. I have [then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Admiral [Mike] Mullen's cell phone number on me right now."

Several people in the room began to cry. Then Bergdahl turned his attention to his son's captors, and his speech veered into the complexities and humanism that, four years later to the week, have confounded the American media and made his private thoughts a national speculation.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/06/bergdahl-s-dad-drone-killed-captor-s-kid.html