Tag: Bowe Bergdahl

Fact – more gitmo detainees released in Bush years than Obama, despite GOP attacks on latest decision pic.twitter.com/yEnR7ogsYr

— PoliticsNation (@PoliticsNation) June 2, 2014

Max Fisher tackles the notion that Obama can or should use the executive powers he flexed in the Bergdahl deal as an end-run around Congress to shutter Gitmo. The debate, which the Dish has covered here and here, hinges on how we categorize the facility’s 149 remaining detainees:

If the US categorizes them strictly as combatants in a war, then while that gives the US authority to hold them for the duration of war, the United States’ war in Afghanistan is legally ending in 2014, which means Obama would legally have to release most or all detainees at that time. It would also mean that he’d need to try them in a military tribunal to have detained them in the first place, which in many cases he did not do for lack of admissible evidence. But if the US categorizes the detainees as terrorists, while that gives the US legal license to hold them far beyond 2014, the US would need to convict them in a civilian courtroom first.

So why can’t the president exploit that ambiguity to release the rest of the detainees, like he did with the five we traded for Bergdahl? One reason is the question of where they would go:

The US cannot legally take these detainees, most of whom are not Afghan nationals, and simply drop them off by the side of a random road in Kabul, like a family pet that bit the baby. So the Obama administration has to try to find a third country that will accept them. This is why, for example, it wrangled Bermuda into accepting a handful of Chinese detainees whom China had refused to take back.

Were Obama to declare all of the Gitmo detainees to be legal enemy combatants, he would make these problems harder to solve, not easier.

It’s one thing for the US State Department to call up the Bermudan foreign ministry and ask them to accept some Chinese detainees whom the US insists are harmless; it’s quite another to ask Bermuda to accept people whom we legally designate as active fighters in an ongoing war. Even if Obama decided it were worth the risk to jump dump the entire population of Guantanamo into the Taliban’s hands, it’s not at all clear that even the Taliban would accept the detainees, not all of whom fought with the group.

Drum’s takeaway from Fisher’s analysis is that “Obama is not going to close Guantanamo,” ever:

The legal loophole he used in the Bergdahl prisoner exchange—no matter what you think of it—flatly wouldn’t apply to shutting down the entire prison. Plus there’s the fact that Congress would go ballistic if he tried—including plenty of Democrats. Impeachment would go from a fever dream of the tea-party right to a very realistic bipartisan possibility.

Finally, there’s frankly never been much evidence that Obama cares all that much. He’d obviously like to shut down Guantanamo, but he just doesn’t feel that strongly about it.

So give it up. Guantanamo will be here through the end of Obama’s presidency, and quite possibly until its last prisoner dies. It’s fanciful to think anything else.

But Matt Welch insists that Obama can and should do his darnedest to shut it down:

When it comes to terrorism, apples-to-apples rates of recidivism may not be possible—all it takes is one murderous nutbag to kill scores of people, the “worst of the worst” are probably going to be worse than the first ones released, and it’s important to be clear-eyed about the risk here. But one risk that rarely gets mentioned by War on Terror hawks is the (to my mind) equal certainty that other people around the world will be inspired by the existence of America’s Kafkaesque prison to commit murder against Americans. Put another way, we will be able to “see” acts of terrorism committed by those who are sprung from Gitmo, but the “unseen” acts of terror that are partly motivated by the U.S. conducting itself as a superpower above the law are no less real.

It’s a messed-up paradox, and one of Republicans‘ making. Maybe next time we’ll think a bit more through the problem of snatching and torturing people and then realizing that such treatment makes them damnably hard to stand even military tribunals.

Frank Goldsmith – a lawyer who has represented five detainees, including one of the Taliban members traded for Bergdahl – stresses how few of these “terrorists” have ever been successfully charged with crimes:

In the cases of the Guantánamo detainees, we lawyers cannot discuss the specific facts publicly, because we were required to trade our free speech for access to the classified evidence necessary to represent our clients. But it is telling that after over a dozen years of detention, the government has managed to charge, try, and convict only a handful – fewer than ten – of the 779 men it brought to the base.

Five were convicted of minor charges (some that were not even crimes at the time of their detention) and have been released. One of the convictions was overturned on appeal; other appeals remain pending. This is not a record of ringing prosecutorial success. Of the five men I represented, including the Taliban political official just sent to Qatar, none was ever charged with even the most minor crime; they were simply held for years without charges until it pleased the government to send them back. Where is the evidence that they are terrorists?

About half of the 149 men still left at Guantánamo have long been determined not to be a threat and have been approved for transfer; the only impediments to their release are political.

Here’s my fear: that 2009 represented the high watermark for closing this obscenity down. A newly-elected president had a clear mandate to do it and yet the Congress simply vetoed it, with strong public support. Blaming Obama for that seems absurd to me. The sad truth is that Americans are perfectly fine with detaining innocent people indefinitely, if they have beards and funny names, and have no interest in sustaining democratic norms if it means one life lost to terrorism. The whole edifice of Western justice went out the window with one terror attack and because one major political party, the GOP, is only too willing to use this fear for political dividends, it will not be put back together again. We will, in fact, be lucky if a future Republican president doesn’t restore torture as a legal form of statecraft.

Does this lead me to despair? Well, not far off. We have learned a lot about this country these past few years. Gitmo – a torture and detention camp outside any norms of Western justice – is now a symbol of America across the world. It is our 21st Century city on a hill. It is, in many ways, an emblem of the death of America as an ideal. And one political party made that happen.

Was he actually a bit of a gung-ho warrior? As I noted last night, further reporting keeps complicating the Palinite meme:

To many of those soldiers, Sergeant Bergdahl was viewed as standoffish or eccentric, smoking a pipe instead of spitting tobacco, as so many soldiers do, and reading voraciously when others napped or watched videos. But he was not isolated from his platoon mates, some said. And while he was, like other soldiers in the platoon, often disappointed or confused by their mission in Paktika, some of his peers also said that Sergeant Bergdahl seemed enthusiastic about fighting, particularly after the platoon was ambushed several weeks before his disappearance.

“He’d complain about not being able to go on the offensive, and being attacked and not being able to return fire,” said Gerald Sutton, who knew Sergeant Bergdahl from spending time together on their tiny outpost, Observation Post Mest Malak, near the village of Yahya Khel, about 50 miles west of the Pakistani border. Mr. Sutton said he had struggled to square the popular portrayal of Sergeant Bergdahl as brooding and disenchanted with the soldier he knew. “He wanted to take the fight to the enemy and do the mission of the infantry,” he said, adding, “He was a good soldier, and whenever he was told to do something, he would do it.”

But Carpenter expects the right to stick to its story without regard for the evidence:

The Times adds that “Just how and why Sergeant Bergdahl disappeared remains a mystery to his fellow soldiers.” But it’s no mystery to the right. They have their story and they’ll stick to it–no matter how thumpingly it unravels–because not only does it mesh with their history of Obamian horrors, it must mesh.

Meanwhile, Tomasky knocks down the meaningless notion that “we don’t negotiate with terrorists”:

Every president since has said we don’t negotiate with terrorists. And every president has. And I would say prudently and reasonably so. When terrorists can give you information, for a certain price or because you have a shared enemy, take it. George W. Bush paid a ransom of $300,000  to a radical Islamist group in the Philippines that was holding two American missionaries, a married couple, captive. To get them to safety? I say, fine. Alas, however, the man was killed, even after we paid the money. So an American president ended up financing terrorist operations and overseeing a failed military mission. Imagine what Lindsey Graham would be saying today if Barack Obama had done that over the weekend.

It’s a mindless, right-wing electoral politics that make our politicians say “I won’t negotiate with terrorists.” It’s just like “I won’t let the Willie Hortons out of prison,” or, from an earlier time, “We won’t let the ChiComs take over Korea.”

David Rohde, who was kidnapped by the Taliban around the same time as Bergdahl and subsequently escaped, weighs in on our misguided approach to the issue:

Both sides in the furor over the Bergdahl case offer simplistic answers to the growing problem of abductions. Those who say the release of the five prisoners sets no precedent are downplaying the scope of this propaganda coup for the Taliban. Other militants around the globe will likely emulate them. At the same time, the argument that refusing to pay ransom or release prisoners will end all kidnappings is wishful thinking. Given the delusions of my captors, jihadists will remain convinced for years, if not decades, that secret ransoms are being paid.

The real solution would require a massive and difficult long-term effort to reduce the world’s pockets of ungoverned spaces. The Taliban who held Bergdahl and me felt no pressure to reduce their demands because they had a safe haven in the mountains of Pakistan.

And Dexter Filkins wonders about the extent of Pakistan’s involvement in the Bergdahl case:

So far, Pakistani officials have been silent about any role they played in either Bergdahl’s captivity or his release. But there are many questions that need to be answered. The Haqqani network, the group that was holding Bergdahl, maintains especially close ties to Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence, or I.S.I. (The Taliban official who told me about Bergdahl was a leader of the Haqqani group.) That a Taliban-aligned guerrilla unit would be so closely tied to the government of our ostensible ally—to which we give more than a billion dollars each year—has long raised troubling questions about American policy in the region. …

Given the close connections that the I.S.I. maintains with the network, it seems inconceivable that the organization wasn’t well aware of Bergdahl’s condition, status, and whereabouts. Did the I.S.I. try, over the years, to free him? We don’t know. Could Pakistani intelligence officials have done more to help him? Did they do nothing? Likewise, we don’t know. Were they involved, and perhaps even instrumental in, gaining his final release? We don’t know. But, given the amount of American money that flows into Pakistan, we’re entitled to ask.

Recent Dish on the evolving Bergdahl story here. My take on the right’s hysterical reaction here, here, here, and here.

(Photo: a reaction to the military’s difficulties in interviewing someone immediately after five years of sometimes brutal captivity and stress.)

A YouGov poll finds the public split on whether trading five Taliban for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was a good idea. The opposition stems entirely from Bergdahl’s alleged desertion:

If the allegations about how Bergdahl was captured turn out to be true, support for the deal could fall even further, particularly among Republicans. Only 24% of Americans think that the government even has a responsibility to try and rescue a deserter who is captured by enemy combatants. This compares to 82% for soldiers that get lost and captured, 87% for soldiers who are wounded and captured. Even for soldiers that surrender to the enemy, most Americans (57%) think that the government has a responsibility to rescue them.

But how can you know if someone deserted if you cannot even question him? That question wasn’t asked. Meanwhile, Jonathan Bernstein doubts the controversy will affect the midterm elections:

My guess is that the flap here already had its desired effect. Getting a captured soldier home was a potential rally-around-the-flag moment that might have lifted the president’s approval rating. However, political scientist Richard Brody found long ago that the rally effect depends on one variable: whether the out-party praises or criticizes the president. So the immediate Republican attacks surely had the effect of preventing an approval boost. Not that it matters much anyway; the whole idea of the rally effect is that it’s a temporary boost. So that didn’t and won’t happen. After a few weeks, approval will be back to where it would have been anyway.

I remain of the view that the administration’s attempt to milk this for approval ratings is the one abiding, dumb-as-a-post misjudgment of the whole thing.

Scrutinizing Bergdahl’s last e-mail to his parents before he allegedly fled his unit, John Cassidy doesn’t see the right’s preferred story about Bergdahl holding up:

Does this e-mail prove that Bergdahl was a deserter or even, as some right-wing commentators are suggesting, a traitor who aided and abetted the Taliban? No, it doesn’t. If anything, he sounds more like Captain Yossarian, the antic antihero of Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22”—who considers his superiors to be nuts and eventually goes AWOL—than Sergeant Brody, the double-dealing protagonist of “Homeland.” In his early twenties, engaged in a war on the other side of the world that many people, including his Commander-in-Chief, would ultimately decide was counterproductive, Bergdahl, seemingly, had had enough.

And that, for now, is about all we know. “As for the circumstances of his capture, when he is able to provide them, we’ll learn the facts,” General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a statement on Tuesday. “Like any American, he is innocent until proven guilty.”

Also complicating the narrative is a military report from 2009 suggesting that Bergdahl was known to wander off:

It happened both in Afghanistan and while he was training in California. The report concludes that Bergdahl was likely wandering around off-base the night he disappeared in June 2009, says the Times, which spoke to people briefed on the 35-page document.

As for whether the disappearance was due to carelessness resulting in capture or willful desertion, the report doesn’t say. It does, however, lend credence to the former theory, criticizing lax security and poor discipline among Bergdahl’s unit that would allow his tendencies to wander to go unchecked. Perhaps most significantly, the report makes no mention of the letter Bergdahl reportedly left in his tent announcing his desertion. Nor does it corroborate claims from Bergdahl’s former squadmates that he was making radio calls trying to get in touch with the Taliban.

Tuccille sympathizes with Bergdahl, arguing that it should have been easier for him to leave the Army when he became disillusioned with the mission in Afghanistan:

American troops have engaged in continuous war in Afghanistan since 2001, so nobody can claim that they don’t know that military service might require actual military service. Then again, military recruiters focus on the young not just because they’re physically fit, but also because they have little perspective on what they’re getting themselves into. More than a few studies have found that recruiters tend to be a bit shaky on the details and potential consequences of enlisting—a choice that, at least potentially, locks enlistees into a situation with high stakes.

Even in the age of the Internet and non-stop news cycles, concepts like combat, injury, and death can be abstract concepts for an 18-year-old. So if Bowe Bergdahl decided that the bill of goods he was sold didn’t live up to the advertising—especially if he began to have moral qualms about his duties—I’m pretty sympathetic.

Zack Beauchamp profiles the five Taliban commanders we freed in exchange for our POW:

Internal Pentagon reports label all of them “high risks” to the United States. These Guanatanamo dossiers, helpfully reviewed by Daily Beast reporters Eli Lake and Josh Rogin, suggest that some of them have links to al-Qaeda and Iranian plots against American troops in Afghanistan.

Independent experts are somewhat skeptical of these claims. [Afghan Analysts Network’s Kate] Clark, for one, calls the documents on the five inmates “peculiar, opaquely sourced and peppered with factual errors.” The “claims made in the Guantanamo Bay tribunals and in press reports sourced to un-named US officials,” she says, “frequently do not stand up to close inspection.” But even if we throw the US intelligence reports completely out the window, this prisoner swap should still be troubling. Even Clark concedes there’s good reason to believe [Mullah Mohammad] Fazl committed war crimes.

Eli Lake relays concerns from the intelligence community that Qatar, where the five detainees are being transferred, will accidentally-on-purpose lose track of them:

[T]here are other reasons U.S. intelligence officials are worried about Qatar. The emirate is a good place to raise money for terrorist organizations. Late last year, the Treasury Department placed sanctions on Abdul Rahman Omeir al-Naimi, a Qatari history professor and human rights activist, for raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for al Qaeda’s affiliates in Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen.

In March, David Cohen, the undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a speech to the Center for a New American Security that while Qatar is a longtime U.S. ally, it also has “for many years openly financed Hamas, a group that continues to undermine regional stability.” Cohen also referenced press reports that indicated Qatar’s support for extremists in Syria. The State Department’s latest report on counterterrorism says that while Qatar has cooperated with the United States in some important areas of counterterrorism, its efforts to stop fundraising for terrorist groups have been inconsistent.

Like Greenwald, Sean Davis suspects that Bergdahl was just the administration’s cover for closing Gitmo:

It was never about Bowe Bergdahl. Make no mistake: judging by the behavior of the White House as this story has unfolded, the Obama administration’s primary goal was not the return of likely deserter (and rumored defector) Bowe Bergdahl. The primary goal was making it easier to finally shut down Guantanamo Bay, a 2008-era campaign promise that President Barack Obama was regularly mocked for failing to keep. Bowe Bergdahl was just the perfect political cover, or at least he was supposed to be.

Allahpundit is on the same page:

The “euphoria” Obama expected after Bergdahl’s release was supposed to be the perfume masking the stench from sending five lethal degenerates back into the jihadi ranks as a prelude to closing Gitmo entirely. Remember, he said in his State of the Union address in January that this was the year he wanted the prison shut down; that was one month after the ransom idea for Bergdahl had been dropped. Having resolved to exploit his lame-duck status to the fullest in 2014 and proceed with shuttering Gitmo, he recognized that Bergdahl would be better used as a consolation prize in handing over Taliban leaders than as part of some dubious ransom deal.

Bazelon criticizes Obama for his willingness to let these high-risk Gitmo prisoners go while dozens of others remain locked up indefinitely despite having been ruled innocent and harmless:

[W]hat about the suffering of Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab, the Syrian held in Guantánamo for 12 years without a trial, a man on the 2010 list of recommended transfers, who is being strapped against his will into a chair so a feeding tube can be forced into his nose and down his throat? The government doesn’t want to send Diyab back to Syria in the middle of the war there. Uruguay has offered to take him and five other detainees. Yet they’re still in Gitmo. As Andy Worthington writes at PolicyMic, for the 78 men cleared for transfer who remain imprisoned, “the release of the five Taliban prisoners is unlikely to cause anything but despair.”

P.M. Carpenter focuses on the nomenclature pundits are using to describe the “worst of the worst”:

Are the freed Taliban “warriors” terrorists? Were they prisoners of war? Are they jihadists? [the WaPo’s Kathleen] Parker conflates the three as though there are no distinctions to be bothered with, or troubled by. Yet the distinctions are critical ones; there’s a vast gulf in meaning between “prisoner of war” and “terrorist,” and even between terrorist and “jihadist.” … President Obama released prisoners of war, precisely as George Washington did. Such clarity might not kill the right’s outrage–would anything?–but it would contribute to more calm in the mainstream debate, which, at the moment, is hopelessly muddled and all over the road.

Will Saletan defends making the deal on the same basis:

Sgt. Bergdahl was not a noncombatant. He was a prisoner of war, captured on the field of battle. Therefore, by definition, his capture wasn’t terrorism. Negotiating for his release, trading enemy combatants for our own combatant, isn’t a concession to terrorism. It’s conformity with the long-standing tradition of exchanging POWs.

According to Sen. Ted Cruz, “The reason why the U.S. has had the policy for decades of not negotiating with terrorists is because once you start doing it, every other terrorist has an incentive to capture more soldiers.” That’s ridiculous. Terrorists didn’t invent the capture of soldiers. It’s a basic military objective, with a standard option to trade the enemy’s soldiers for yours. The reason not to negotiate with terrorists is to discourage the seizure of civilians, not the seizure of soldiers. So Obama’s critics are wrong to believe that negotiating for Bergdahl sends a dangerous message to terrorists. But they’re also ignoring the message his abandonment would have sent to our troops, their families, and prospective military recruits. It would have betrayed our pledge that if you’re captured in service to our country, we’ll free you.

But a Taliban commander close to the negotiations confirms that the Bergdahl trade makes his compatriots more eager to capture American soldiers:

“It’s better to kidnap one person like Bergdahl than kidnapping hundreds of useless people,” the commander said, speaking by telephone on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media. “It has encouraged our people. Now everybody will work hard to capture such an important bird.”

The commander has been known to TIME for several years and has consistently supplied reliable information about Bergdahl’s captivity.

Previous Dish on Bergdahl here, here, here, and here.