The Bergdahl plot thickens
Just when you thought the Bergdahl story couldn’t get any worse—it does.
Did the White House scuttle, or at the very least ignore, a better Bergdahl prisoner exchange deal and replace it with the one we got, in order to free the five Taliban, which was the real goal?:
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.
Seems rather conspiracist, doesn’t it? Start with the freeing of the Taliban as the goal, and then work backward?
Well, it’s what I suggested from the start. One day after Bergdahl’s release, I wrote:
Obama has been winding down the Afghan War, and one of his stalled goals in connection with that is negotiations with the Taliban. So it may be that the release of these particular prisoners wasn’t just a reluctant move in order to free Bergdahl, it may be more accurate to say that Bergdahl’s release was negotiated at this point in time in order to free the Taliban Five…
[Hat tip: Richard Fernandez.]
Traitors do what traitors do. Evil does what evil is.
There is no reason for excuses to be made about them, any more. If ever.
Eventually….
Ymarsakar – He thinks he’s helping. That may be worse. A traitor might repent and try to undo. The self-righteous, however, never stop helping us, which is what makes them dangerous.
The CS Lewis quote becomes more apt each year: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. “
“Did the White House scuttle, or at the very least ignore, a better Bergdahl prisoner exchange deal and replace it with the one we got, in order to free the five Taliban, which was the real goal?”
Here I’ve corrected it;
The White House scuttled a much better Bergdahl prisoner exchange deal and replaced it with the one we got, in order to free the five Taliban, in hopes of tempting the Taliban to reach an agreement with the Taliban, one that would provide Obama with political cover for his retreat from Afghanistan and the WoT.
There’s no doubt in my mind that to be exactly what happened and the reason why.
He thinks he’s helping. That may be worse.
What difference does that make? Don’t you remember that Benedict Arnold also thought he was “helping” the US out of a war we couldn’t win? Washington refused to believe Arnold, his boy, was some traitorous piece of sh.
As for CS Lewis, the topic in contention there is whether evil can become a self perpetuating gold rube machine or not. Cruelty in itself, appears and disappears in a generation, ephemeral. Notable like the Marquis de Sade, but also not mainstream.
But a culture and a religion that believes in its own self righteous dogma like Islam or the Cult of the Left, is a self perpetuating machine of evil. It cannot be stopped, unless you kill all the believers like they will to you.