By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--June 3, 2014
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Sources told Fox News that many officials in the Executive Branch are "quite baffled" by the White House's decision to allow the president to stand alongside Bergdahl's father this past weekend, given the father's history of controversial statements, emails and online posts. Asked Monday about reports that Bergdahl's father was communicating on Twitter with a man described as a Taliban spokesman, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney declined to comment on those reports but defended the administration's handling of the release. "The fact is they are the parents of Sergeant Bergdahl. Their son was held in captivity for five years," he said. "And it was absolutely the right thing to do, for the commander in chief, for this administration to take action to secure his release, the last prisoner of war from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars."
And you'll enjoy this one from three years ago:
As for Bowe Bergdahl himself, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal talked to one of his contemporaries and found something less than sympathy, to say the least:
I spoke Monday with a highly decorated former Special Forces operator and asked what he thought about Bowe Bergdahl, the Army sergeant who was released over the weekend after five years of Taliban captivity in exchange for five hard cases out of Gitmo. The former operator suggested a firing squad might be appropriate. His view is widely shared in the community of warriors who risked—and, in at least six cases, lost—their lives searching for a soldier who wrote his parents that "the horror that is america is disgusting" before vanishing from his post in Afghanistan in 2009. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl's parents, Jani and Bob, with the president, May 31. Zuma Press Whether Sgt. Bergdahl was taken by the enemy, deserted the Army or defected to the Taliban remains to be established. But just to be clear where the former operator is coming from, Article 85 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice states: "Any person found guilty of desertion or attempt to desert shall be punished, if the offense is committed in time of war, by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct."Now it is certainly not a crime in the United States to be a left-wing, anti-American radical. But it is a crime to desert your unit, and the correspondences being revealed between father and son show that a considered anti-American ideology clearly informed Bergdahl's decision to do just that. Rosen tells us the intelligence community suspects Bergdahl was far more than sympathetic to the Taliban. They think he was actively collaborating with them, and they're looking for evidence to support that suspicion. Trading five Gitmo terrorists for this guy looks so bad, you almost have to think there is more to the story than we're hearing. Maybe I shouldn't write about stuff like this so soon after watching a new 24 episode, but I can't help but wonder if they dcided to pay the price to get Bergdahl out of there because they were determined to interrogate him and extract some sort of information that they need. I'm probably giving the Obama White House too much credit with that speculation, but the decision to wantonly break the law and swap five terrorists for an anti-American deserter, only to then have Susan Rice claim that Bergdahl "served with distinction" . . . even the Obama Administration isn't that clueless and inept. Is it?
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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