The Bergdahl plot thickens

The New Neo Posted on by

And it was already plenty thick enough.

Reaction in Kabul:

On the streets of the capital Kabul many expressed anger at the decision to release the five men, a contrast with scenes of celebration in Bergdahl’s home town in Idaho.

“This decision showed that the region, Afghanistan and its people aren’t worth anything to American government,” said Gul Mohammad, a high school teacher.

“Otherwise, why would they swap a useless army soldier who broke the law with the five most dangerous Taliban fighters?”

Some among Afghanistan’s security forces also expressed unease about the release, which comes as the Taliban’s summer offensive gathers pace ahead of a second round of voting in the presidential election on June 14.

“This act will boost the Taliban’s morale and encourage them to fight harder to capture foreign soldiers. Now they are confident that their efforts won’t be wasted,” said army colonel Asadullah Samadi.

It’s difficult to come to any other conclusion, isn’t it?

And even CNN is covering the widespread allegations that Bergdahl was a deserter, and that the hunt for him led to loss of American lives:

Many soldiers on the ground at the time said insurgents were able to take advantage of the intense search for Bergdahl.

“A huge thing in-country is not building patterns. Well when you are looking for a person everyday that creates a pattern. While searching for him, ambushes and IEDs picked up tremendously. Enemy knew we would be coming. IEDs started being placed more effectively in the coming weeks. Ambushes were more calculated, cover and concealment was used,” Cody tweeted.

On August 18, 2009, Staff Sgt. Clayton Bowen and Pfc. Morris Walker were killed by an IED in the search for Bergdahl. Staff Sgt. Kurt Curtiss was killed on August 26; 2nd Lt. Darryn Andrews and Pfc. Matthew Michael Martinek were killed after being attacked in Yahya Khail District on September 4; Staff Sgt. Michael Murphrey was killed September 5 by an IED at the Forward Operating Base, Sharana.

Moreover, other operations were put on hold while the search for Bergdahl was made a top priority, according to officers who served in Afghanistan in that time. Manpower and assets — such as scarce surveillance drones and helicopters — were redirected to the hunt. The lack of assets is one reason the closure of a dangerous combat outpost, COP Keating, was delayed. Eight soldiers were killed at COP Keating before it was ultimately closed.

There’s more at the link—much more. Including this:

Many of Bergdahl’s fellow troops — from the seven or so who knew him best in his squad, to the larger group that comprised the 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division — told CNN that they signed nondisclosure agreements agreeing to never share any information about Bergdahl’s disappearance and the efforts to recapture him. Some were willing to dismiss that document in hopes that the truth would come out about a soldier who they now fear is being hailed as a hero, while the men who lost their lives looking for him are ignored.

Who was behind these agreements, and why? I could understand if they were time-limited in the sense of being in effect only as long as Bergdahl remained in captivity. But they seem to be lifelong (“to never share”). I’m not sure what the penalty for disclosure was, but people seem to be willing to pay the price and talk, now that Bergdahl’s out. And the opinion of the talkers seems to be nearly unanimous; I haven’t heard of any so far who are defending him.

There hardly seems to be a single thing the Obama administration does that could be considered straightforward, is there? Maybe the killing of Bin Laden; that’s about the only event that comes to my mind. Even the release of an American POW turns out to be loaded with suspicious and powerfully disturbing elements that ought to outrage all Americans.

I suspect that Obama thought this would enhance his reputation as a defender and protector of the military, but I wonder if it will. One thing it has done, though, is to change the subject from the mess at the VA hospitals.

[ADDENDUM: The first sentence of this article indicates that the non-disclosure agreement may have been only for the duration of Bergdahl’s captivity:

For five years, soldiers have been forced to stay silent about the disappearance and search for Bergdahl. Now we can talk about what really happened.

Interesting article; read the whole thing. I think the author is too kind to Bergdahl.

Here’s another piece of interest, which voices a concern I’ve had:

“This whole deal may have been a test to see how far the administration can actually push it, and if Congress doesn’t fight back they will feel more empowered to move forward with additional transfers,” said one senior GOP senate aide close to the issue. “They’ve lined up all the dominoes to be able to move a lot more detainees out of Guantanamo and this could be just the beginning.”

As I wrote yesterday:

…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…

Obama has been stymied by the fact that he promised long ago to close Gitmo, and he hasn’t done it. Now he may be fufilling that promise.]

Next, they came for the bakers

The New Neo Posted on by

We all knew this sort of thing was bound to happen:

The Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission has ordered a suburban Denver baker named Jack Phillips to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples, finding that his religious objections do not supersede the state’s anti-discrimination statutes…

Jack Phillips isn’t discriminating against gay Coloradans. Gay customers, as far as all the news stories have suggested, are free to shop in the bakery and purchase (at the same price) any of the cakes, cookies, pastries they like without ever being asked by anyone who they love or what the gender equation is in their sex life. Public accommodations, fine. But the fact is that Phillips does not want to participate in a specific ceremony because he holds authentic, well-documented, age-old religious objections to such an event…

It’s not clear what authorities can force Phillips to do. My guess is not all that much. But their action is no doubt intended to have a chilling effect on anyone who might want to act as Phillips has. This is an assault on religious freedom that is antithetical to the liberty on which our country was founded.

It’s ironic that gay marriage isn’t even legal in Colorado. The plaintiffs were married in Massachusetts and live in Colorado, and wanted the cake for a home town celebration of their nuptials.

Still, after all of this Phillips doesn’t seem too worried. He says that “his bakery has been so overwhelmed by supporters eager to buy cookies and brownies that he does not currently make wedding cakes.”

Connecting the dots in the Bergdahl release

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight.

We have Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, released in exchange for five of the most notorious Taliban terrorists held in Guantanamo, the place Obama keeps saying he wants to empty. This certainly helps to empty it.

The five men will now be held by Qatar, which has reassured us they’ll be in secure conditions but won’t say what those conditions are, except that they can’t travel out of the country for a year. Qatar is a Wahabi country, by the way.

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:

The official’s comments hinted that the deal is seen as potentially helping the Afghan government, which soon will have a new president, in efforts to end strife with the Taliban — a point seconded by Jonah Blank, a senior political scientist at the Santa Monica, California-based RAND Corporation.

“The Taliban prisoners released weren’t mere bargaining chips: It’s quite possible that, as influential figures, they’ll facilitate a broader negotiated settlement,” in Afghanistan, said Blank, a former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Doesn’t sound as though the plan is to keep them locked up in Qatar, does it?

And then there’s the goal of the resumption of direct talks between the Taliban and the US:

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel expressed hope Sunday the release of US Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl would lead to direct US talks with the Taliban.

“It could, it might and we hope it will present an opening,” Hagel said in an interview from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

As for Bergdahl himself, his capture in Afghanistan involved some interesting circumstances:

Rolling Stone magazine quoted emails Bergdahl is said to have sent to his parents that suggest he was disillusioned with America’s mission in Afghanistan, had lost faith in the U.S. Army’s mission there and was considering desertion.

Bergdahl told his parents he was “ashamed to even be American.” Bergdahl, who mailed home boxes containing his uniform and books, also wrote: “The future is too good to waste on lies. And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong.”

The Associated Press could not independently authenticate the emails published by the magazine in 2012. Bergdahl’s family has not commented on the allegations of desertion, according to Col. Tim Marsano, a spokesman for the Idaho National Guard. Marsano is in regular contact with Bergdahl’s mother, Jani, and father, Bob, who has grown a long, thick beard and has worked to learn Pashto, the language spoken by his son’s captors.

A senior Defense Department official said that if Bergdahl is released, it could be determined that he has more than paid for leaving his unit – if that’s what really happened – “and there’s every indicator that he did.”

Here’s more:

Bergdahl’s dream was to help Afghan villagers rebuild their lives and learn to defend themselves, his dad told the magazine [Rolling Stone].

“The whole ”˜COIN’ thing,” Bob explained, referring to America’s strategy of counter-insurgency. “We were given a fictitious picture, an artificially created picture of what we were doing in ­Afghanistan,” the dad said.

Bowe Bergdahl would detail his disillusionment with the Afghanistan campaign in an e-mail to his parents three days before he went missing.

“I am sorry for everything here,” he wrote. “These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid.”

Bergdahl also complained about fellow soldiers. The battalion commander was a “conceited old fool,” he said, and the only “decent” sergeants, planning to leave the platoon “as soon as they can,” told the privates ”” Bergdahl then among them ”” “to do the same.”

“I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools,” he concluded. “I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting.”

Bob Bergdahl responded in an e-mail: “OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!”

One night, after finishing a guard-duty shift Bowe Bergdahl asked his team leader whether there would be a problem if he left camp with his rifle and night-vision goggles ”” to which the team leader replied “yes.”

Bergdahl then returned to his bunker, picked up a knife, water, his diary and a camera, and left camp, according to Rolling Stone.

The next morning, he was reported missing, and later that day, a drone and four fighter jets ­began to search for him.

Last but hardly least, Obama did not comply with a law that requires he give Congress 30 days notice if releasing prisoners from Guantanamo:

The Obama administration is required by law to notify Congress 30 days before any terrorists are transferred from Guantanamo Bay.

Rice said the administration began telling members of Congress once Bergdahl had been recovered and before the prisoners left the Guantanamo Bay facility.

“This was held closely within the administration. We could not take any risk with … losing the opportunity to bring him back safely,” she said, adding the Department of Defense had consulted with the Department of Justice before making the decision.

“Given the acute urgency of the health condition of Sgt. Bergdahl, and given the President’s constitutional responsibilities, it was determined that it was necessary and appropriate not to adhere to the 30-day notification requirement, because it would have potentially meant that the opportunity to get Sgt. Bergdahl would have been lost.”

So, supposedly Bergdahl’s health was an urgent concern, after five years of it not being such an urgent concern. That of course is possible, but somehow I’m skeptical. Disregarding the law about informing Congress seems completely in line with the Obama administration’s notion that the law is for the little people or for Obama’s opponents, not for them. After all, who’s going to stop them? Eric Holder’s Department of Justice?

Get out…

The New Neo Posted on by

…a big box of Kleenex if you’re going to watch this one:

I like country music because I really like lyrics, and country music songs often have schmaltzy but really fine lyrics, resembling short and accessible old-fashioned poems.

A few weeks ago I actually uttered the words (although I wasn’t knowingly referencing this particular song) “I don’t think even 100 is very old any more.” Meaning that, as I get older, I realize how quickly a life, even a very very long life, goes.

What’s up with the glass house in the video, though?

Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, held by Taliban for five years…

The New Neo Posted on by

…has been released.

I’m glad he’s out. But we gave them five Guantanamo prisoners in exchange. Who are they? Some very bad guys, apparently:

The detainees are believed to be the most senior Afghans still held at the prison. They are believed to be:

-Abdul Haq Wasiq, who served as the Taliban deputy minister of intelligence

-Mullah Norullah Nori, a senior Taliban commander in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif when the Taliban fought U.S. forces in late 2001

-Khairullah Khairkhwa, who served in various Taliban positions including interior minister and had direct ties to Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden

-Mohammed Nabi, who served as chief of security for the Taliban in Qalat, Afghanistan, and later worked as a radio operator for the Taliban’s communications office in Kabul

-Mohammad Fazl, whom Human Rights Watch says could be prosecuted for war crimes for presiding over the mass killing of Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001 as the Taliban sought to consolidate their control over the country.

Ah, but they’re being released to the custody of Qatar:

The five Guantanamo detainees were still at the base as of Saturday morning, but were being transferred into the custody of Qatari officials. Under the conditions of their release, the detainees will be banned from traveling outside of Qatar for at least one year.

That’ll hold ’em, right? I don’t pretend to know all that much about what Qatar plans to actually do with them, but the country is both a Wahabi stronghold and a dictatorship. Chuck Hagel had the following to say on the subject:

The United States has coordinated closely with Qatar to ensure that security measures are in place and the national security of the United States will not be compromised. I appreciate the efforts of the Emir of Qatar to put these measures in place…

Reassured? I’m not:

he U.S. has received “appropriate assurances” that the five Guantanamo detainees will be secured in Qatar and will be subject to a travel ban for one year, the Defense official said. The White House has not yet responded to a request to clarify whether the Guantanamo detainees will be held in Qatari custody or free to live as legal residents.

If the released prisoners—who have not been officially identified yet—are in fact the five men on the above list, I can’t imagine that they’ll be stopped from doing a lot of damage unless they are kept for life in another highly secure prison, and maybe not even then. But it sure doesn’t sound as though that’s going to happen.

Prisoner exchangers for terrorists always present this dilemma. Do we let our people languish in captivity? Or do we free them and release terrorists who will almost certainly plot against us again? Israel, when faced with the same conundrum, often chooses the same solution: release the terrorists (and sometimes in a ratio a lot more lopsided than five to one).

Medicare ban on transgender surgery coverage lifted

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve noted that now that the battle for gay marriage has all but ended, transgender rights seem to be next on the agenda.

You know, I’ve got nothing against transgendered people. Based on the fairly extensive research I’ve read, both pro and con, I think the evidence indicates that transgenderism is a real issue that causes real suffering for a relatively small percentage of the population, and that for many of those it is probably something they were born with, perhaps having to do with hormonal glitches affecting fetal brain development in utero.

But having Medicare pay for sex reassignment surgery in a 74-year-old seems preposterous. If a person’s gotten that far in that particular body, why not go the distance? Practically speaking it really doesn’t come up very often. But, as the article indicated, Medicare rulings such as this often pave the way for private insurance, too. Will the Obamacare powers-that-be insist that transgender reassignment surgery coverage, like birth control, be something every health insurance policy must have? And what about Medicaid, which so far doesn’t cover it? It seems to me that if Medicare pays for it then Medicaid can’t be far behind.

Also:

Administration officials originally sought to overturn the ban in 2013, but the attempt prompted a backlash among social conservatives and religious groups who oppose taxpayer funding for such procedures.

What’s different about 2014, I wonder? Is it just that we are so preoccupied with so much that our attention is diverted? Is it that people feel powerless to stop this administration in its administrative rulings?

And one more thing about Jay Carney…

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, if might be more than one more thing.

In the comments thread of the post about his departure yesterday, commenter “Lizzy” wrote of the press secretary position:

Yes, it’s an awful job, but imagine how much harder it would have been if Carney worked for a Republican president? Hard to pity Carney or Earnest.

My response is that yes, but it all depends which you consider more awful. Personally, I’d rather be serving a Republican president and be questioned by a hostile liberal press than to have to lie through my teeth over and over in public as Carney did. But I agree that both situations are bad.

However, (and I may be imagining this, because of his choirboy looks) I always thought I saw a tiny smidgeon (and I mean teeny-tiny) of shame and/or suffering behind Carney’s eyes when he was standing on the podium as press secretary. Unlike the more pugnacious Gibbs, he never seemed to me to be enjoying the actual performance of his job, although he no doubt enjoyed the manifold perks.

I’m not saying his conscience tortured him. But something seemed not right to me. Of course, he should never have taken the job in the first place, or at the very least have quit much earlier. But early in his tenure I found the following video from 2006, which I featured in a previous post but which I may as well repeat here:

As I wrote in that earlier post:

Carney is caught in a terrible dilemma, unless he is completely amoral (which I don’t think he is, but I certainly could be wrong about that). He either has to lie for the president, day after day, in the most public and embarrassing way possible, or he must publicly break away and become a traitor to his fellows, shunned and despised, and off the guest list at the best parties.

It may sound as though I’m making light of this, but I’m not. How many people have that sort of courage? How many would instead find themselves compromising bit by bit, until they find in the end that they have become something they once would have hated and despised? I don’t know the numbers, but I believe that last group is not small.

I think Carney finally couldn’t take it anymore, in the personal sense. But I think he will never publicly renounce or disown what he did (au contraire), and I believe that he remains strongly dedicated to the liberal and the Obama cause.

If you go to the trouble of having a database, shouldn’t you search it?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been reluctant so far to place blame on the authorities in Santa Barbara who saw nothing amiss on a visit to Elliot Rodger after his parents had alerted them to an alarming video and asked them to check on their son. Hindsight is 20/20, and they probably get so many calls like this that they can’t spend a lot of time on each one. Even Rodger’s parents and therapists seemed to think he was only a danger to himself, not others, because he was so careful to hide his homicidal intent till his rampage began.

However, as we learn more, two things stand out that seem like obvious errors, and not just ex-post-facto either. The first is that, although police were told by Rodger’s parents that there was a disturbing YouTube video involved and they easily could have watched it, they apparently did not. And this despite the fact that, because of a prior case of petty theft Rodger had reported, they were sufficiently interested in him to send two extra deputies to his house. The videos in question—the ones the parents mentioned but the police didn’t think it necessary to watch—were not his final, especially chilling video, but rather records of Rodger “talking about his feelings of loneliness, being wronged by women who did not like him and wanting to ‘punish you all for it.'”

This seems like an obvious error/omission on the part of police, especially because Rodger had been involved as accuser in a rather odd case of petty theft (candles) earlier.

But an even greater error/omission on the part of police was this one:

With the toughest gun-control regulations in the country, California has a unique, centralized database of gun purchases that law enforcement can easily search. It offers precious intelligence about a suspect or other people officers may encounter when responding to a call…

Before a half-dozen sheriff’s deputies knocked on Elliot Rodger’s door last month in response to concerns raised by his mother about his well-being, they could have checked the database and discovered he had bought three 9mm semiautomatic handguns. Several law enforcement officials and legal experts on gun policy said this might have given deputies greater insight into Rodger’s intentions and his capability for doing harm.

The deputies did not check the database. They left his apartment after finding him to be “shy, timid, polite and well-spoken,” in the words of Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown. The deputies saw no evidence that Rodger was an immediate threat to others or to himself.

And yet apparently the officers’ behavior was standard:

Traditionally, law enforcement officers infrequently consult the DROS database when conducting what is known as a “wellness check” on people who may be suicidal but are not threatening violence.

“Wellness checks” are problematic. They can be dangerous, so police are involved, but police don’t really have the expertise (or, probably, the time; they spent ten minutes at Rodgers’ place) to do this well. It’s somewhat of a crapshoot, anyway, even for mental health professionals, and especially if a psychopath wants to hide his/her homicidal intent, as I believe was the case with Rodger. People who are not stark raving mad can often dissemble quite well.

There’s a further problem. Let’s say that police had checked the database and found that Rodgers had the guns. Questioned about them, he may have been clever enough to come up with a convincing cover story about them, too. After all, he seems to have owned them legally, and if police didn’t think him dangerous they wouldn’t think his owning guns was dangerous. And although he’d been in therapy for a long, long time, as far as I know he’d never received a diagnosis of psychosis or been hospitalized for such.

Would this crime have been prevented if police had watched the video and checked the database? Actually, I doubt it. As I wrote initially, my sense is that Rodger was an intelligent psychopath/sociopath with some other problems as well (perhaps Asperger’s, perhaps something else), and it was mainly the first characteristic that accounted for both his homicidal acts and his ability to cover up his homicidal intent prior to those acts. Even had police watched the videos and checked the database—and even if they had committed him for a short time—I don’t think it would have stopped him.

However, I believe they should have watched the video and checked the database. Or at the very least, one of the two. The fact that they did neither is disturbing. Why bother to have a database if you’re not going to use it? How hard could it be to look something up on a computer? For example, don’t police routinely check a database when they stop a person for a traffic ticket, to see whether the person has a prior violation? What situation would be serious enough in police’s eyes to warrant a gun database check, if not one they’ve already deemed of sufficient importance to send four deputies to an apartment?

On radio later today

The New Neo Posted on by

The plan is for me to be interviewed by Lars Larson today, around 6:45 PM Eastern time (3:45 PM Pacific time). The general topic will be the Ibrahim Ishag case, although other things might come up. The interview should last about ten or fifteen minutes.

So if you’ve been missing the sound of my dulcet tones since the podcasts ended, please tune in here.

Feet of clay and naked emperors

The New Neo Posted on by

Even the WaPo seems to have noticed that Obama has been attacking a host of strawmen. And the WaPo is not alone; the NY Times suggested something similar when it wrote, as part of its editorial about Obama’s West Point speech: “In some ways, that was a straw-man argument…”

Obama’s actually been attacking strawmen from the beginning; it’s one of this favorite ploys. But something has changed ever-so-slightly lately, something in the air. Even the left is frustrated with him, and the frustration has been growing.

Why, I wonder? Do they think he looks dull and disorganized rather than smart at this point? Were they still expecting more from him in that speech at West Point? Not necessarily different content, but just something more resolute, more eloquent, more firm? Are they now embarrassed about their previous fulsome over-the-top support for him?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t for a moment think that they are changing their politics; they’re not about to come out for Republicans or conservatives. I think they have just become more and more disgusted with Obama’s weakness and repetitiveness, and his reliance on words, words, words.

Of course, that was always true of Obama. But previously they believed he could deliver in many areas, and most definitely in this one area in particular: making the world respect us, getting along well with other countries. He’s not been doing that, has he? And so when NBC’s Richard Engel says he’s “hard-pressed” to find one country where relations with the US have gotten better under Obama, you know that the disillusionment has grown so large that some can no longer pretend as well as they did before. They’re exhausted with the effort it requires.

Barack Obama’s speeches have always been composed—from the very start of his national campaign, when I first began to follow him—of some combination of these things: platitudes, self-references, outrageous statements (lies, or promises that turn out to be lies), passing the buck to others, criticizing the US, ascribing bad motives to the opposition, and attacking strawmen. Has he ever had any other arrows in his quiver? I can’t think of any.

He’s still doing all of this, but even the left seems to be getting a little bit sick of it (does that mean they’ve turned into racists?). Oh, I suppose it would still be okay with them if his accomplishments were more obvious. But the biggest one so far, Obamacare, may turn out to be a pyrrhic victory.

That could all change, of course, if immigration “reform” passes. Ensuring a permanent Democrat majority and making the American people more and more dependent on big government would be the biggest accomplishment of all.