Why Is the FBI Trying to Bury a Special Forces War Hero?
Lieutenant Colonel Jason Amerine was one of the first U.S. soldiers into Afghanistan. He landed there with an Army Special Forces A-Team in late October 2001, when everyone agreed the war would be brief and the objectives were clear: Avenge the terror of the 9/11 attacks, depose the Taliban and leave. Nearly 14 years later, he went to Capitol Hill to explain why he’s still fighting his way out.
Until this past January, Amerine worked at the Pentagon, where he led an Army team ordered to bring home Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, a mission that was expanded to include several civilian hostages held by Taliban-aligned militants in Pakistan. Bergdahl had been captive for nearly four years by the time Amerine got involved, making him the longest-held prisoner of war since Vietnam and a key to any end-of-war negotiations. In 2013, Amerine lured the Taliban to a series of secret talks that identified a solution, but then hit a wall in Washington’s bureaucratic maze. As he wrangled more with federal agencies in D.C. than with the Quetta Shura in Pakistan, Amerine reached out to Representative Duncan Hunter, a Marine veteran and Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee.
Hunter wrote letters to then–Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and President Barack Obama pleading that someone cut through the interagency squabbling between the Army, the State Department, the FBI, the intelligence community and the Department of Defense. When Bergdahl was finally released last year in a trade for five Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Hunter complained that a far better deal brokered by Amerine was ignored. Worse still, six Western civilians, including two Canadians and a newborn child, were left behind, held by terrorist groups protected by the Pakistani government, a pivotal U.S. ally in the global war on terror.
This January, the day after an errant CIA drone missile killed one of those hostages, international aid worker Warren Weinstein, Amerine was abruptly escorted out of the Pentagon. The Army informed him that its Criminal Investigation Command (CID) had opened a case against him. His pay was halted, and his retirement was put on hold. Hunter says this was a hit job by the FBI, payback for infringing on the bureau’s hostage-recovery turf. The CID would not comment on the case for Newsweek, and the FBI redirected questions back to the Defense Department. Meanwhile, the hostages remain in Pakistan, the investigation of Amerine drags on, and an internal Pentagon investigation is investigating the CID’s investigation.
Testifying in June at a Senate hearing with the contorted title, “Blowing the Whistle on Retaliation: Accounts of Current and Former Federal Agency Whistleblowers,” Amerine did not relish his rebel status. “I am labeled a whistleblower, a term both radioactive and derogatory,” he said. “I am before you because I did my duty, and you need to ensure all in uniform can go on doing their duty without fear of reprisal.” (Read more from “Why Is the FBI Trying to Bury a Special Forces War Hero?” HERE)
Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.
