Photo Credit: Fox News ‘Lopsided’ Deal with Enemy for Bergdahl in Sharp Contrast to Inaction on Tahmooressi
By Joseph J. Kolb.
The Obama administration’s extraordinary effort to free Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has some wondering why the president can’t make a simple phone call on behalf of a former Marine being held in a Mexican prison after mistakenly driving across the border with registered guns.
Obama announced Saturday in a dramatic Rose Garden news conference that five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay would be exchanged for Bergdahl, a 28-year-old infantryman held captive for five years by the terrorist group. The swap angered many in the military and on Capitol Hill, because it went against long-standing policy of not bargaining with terrorists.
“He wasn’t forgotten by his country, because the United States of America does not ever leave our men and women in uniform behind,” Obama said.
Although Tahmooressi is not a prisoner of war, he served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and now suffers post-traumatic stress disorder, according to his mother, Jennifer Tahmooressi. Friends who have visited him in prison say he has been tortured and threatened with rape and death, and they question whether the administration is doing enough to help him.
Read more from this story HERE.
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Photo Credit: Fox News Bergdahl wrote of being ‘ashamed’ to be an American in emails
By Fox News.
Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl left a letter the night he disappeared from his base in Afghanistan saying he wanted to renounce his citizenship, according to sources, and previously expressed his disillusionment with the Army, telling his father in an e-mail he was “ashamed” to be an American.
That account, though, is being called into question amid conflicting claims over whether Bergdahl left a note behind. U.S Army officials who have read the investigation document said there was no reference in that report to a letter.
While Bergdahl remained at a U.S. military hospital in Germany following a swap for five high-level Taliban members — dubbed a jihadist “Dream Team” — two of Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers told Fox News Channel that the 28-year-old Idaho native willingly walked away from his post in Afghanistan on June 30, 2009. Their claims that Bergdahl’s departure from the base was premeditated jibes with emails published in 2012, in which he told his father of his growing disenchantment with the Army’s mission in Afghanistan.
“The future is too good to waste on lies,” Bergdahl wrote his parents. “And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be American. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting.”
Read more from this story HERE.
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Photo Credit: Joe Raedl – Getty Images
White House Overrode Internal Objections to Taliban Prisoner Release
By Massimo Calabresi.
To pull off the prisoner swap of five Taliban leaders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the White House overrode an existing interagency process charged with debating the transfer of Guantanamo Bay prisoners and dismissed long-standing Pentagon and intelligence community concerns based on Top Secret intelligence about the dangers of releasing the five men, sources familiar with the debate tell TIME.
National Security Council officials at the White House decline to describe the work of the ad hoc process they established to trade the prisoners, or to detail the measures they have taken to limit the threat the Taliban officials may pose. They say consensus on the plan was reached by the top officials of Obama’s national security team, including representatives from the Pentagon, State Department, intelligence community and Joint Chiefs of Staff. “These releases were worked extensively through deputies and principals,” says National Security Counsel Deputy for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes. “There was not a dissent on moving forward with this plan.”
But officials in the Pentagon and intelligence communities had successfully fought off release of the five men in the past, officials tell TIME. “This was out of the norm,” says one official familiar with the debate over the dangers of releasing the five Taliban officials. “There was never the conversation.” Obama’s move was an ultimate victory for those at the White House and the State Department who had previously argued the military should “suck it up and salute,” says the official familiar with the debate.
Read more from this story HERE.
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Treason Trifecta: Bergdahl is a Deserter, Defector, and Collaborator
By Russ Vaughn.
Forgive the cynicism of this old infantry sergeant when it comes to media depictions of anyone and anything associated with the military. But they inevitably get it wrong: ranks, unit designations, and terminology. And most of all, what they never seem capable of comprehending is the military mindset regarding loyalty to your brothers in arms and the importance of successfully completing the mission. Except for the minuscule few veterans among them, journalists just don’t get it.
Let us hope that in the case of this recently apprehended deserter, Bowe Bergdahl, they will resist their natural compulsion to brand another American traitor a hero. Several liberal media outlets appear to be taking a balanced position rather than swallowing whole the Obama administration’s propaganda.
Notice that I do not use the term “POW” for the simple reason Bergdahl disgraces that description of his captivity. He is a wartime collaborator, or more precisely, a collaborationist, the term applied to treasonous soldiers who defected to the enemy in earlier wars. And apprehended is the correct term to apply to a deserter/defector now back under U.S. Army control in Germany.
Bergdahl deserted his platoon to fulfill what may turn out to be a family-concocted book-deal plan to undermine the mission of American troops in Afghanistan. His recorded words and those of his father indicate their sympathies to those Islamists we are fighting. PFC Bergdahl’s fuzzy, feel-good airs and mysterious conversations may well have been contrived to justify and camouflage his true intent to desert his post and go over to the enemy.
Read more from this story HERE.
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U.S. concluded in 2010 that Bergdahl walked away
By Ken Dilanian and Deb Riechmann.
A Pentagon investigation concluded in 2010 that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl walked away from his unit, and after an initial flurry of searching the military decided not to exert extraordinary efforts to rescue him, according to a former senior defense official who was involved in the matter.
Instead, the U.S. government pursued negotiations to get him back over the following five years of his captivity — a track that led to his release over the weekend.
Bergdahl was being checked and treated Monday at a U.S. military hospital in Germany as questions mounted at home over the swap that resulted in his freedom in exchange for the release of five detainees who were sent to Qatar from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo, Cuba.
Even in the first hours of Bergdahl’s handoff to U.S. special forces in eastern Afghanistan, it was clear this would not be an uncomplicated yellow-ribbon celebration. Five terrorist suspects also walked free, stirring a debate over whether the exchange would heighten the risk of other Americans being snatched as bargaining chips and whether the released detainees — several senior Taliban figures among them — would find their way back to the fight.
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