Bergdahl And Obama Owe Explanation To Families Of Killed And Injured Soldiers Who Searched For Him

A Hero?: Obama’s Reasoning On Bergdahl Is Baffling

June 5, 2014 by Sam Rolley

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President Barack Obama left no questions during a Thursday press conference in Brussels when he said that he makes “absolutely no apologies” for the prisoner swap which led to the return of Pfc. (Sgt., if you count promotions following his defection) Bowe Bergdahl. But that isn’t stopping many people in the United States from continuing to heavily criticize the White House’s actions.

Appearing alongside British Prime Minister David Cameron during a joint press conference, the President also defended the White House decision to go ahead with the plan of trading five former top Taliban officials held captive at Guantanamo Bay for the soldier. Many people, including some of the men he served alongside, have accused Bergdahl of being a deserter.

Obama said that he “discussed with Congress that something like this could occur.”

The President also criticized lawmakers who have publically criticized the prisoner swap.

“I think it was important to understand this is not some abstraction, not some political football,” he said.

Still, for all of Obama’s concrete rhetoric, it seems as though the White House is having a tough time getting its Bergdahl story straight.

Senior White House officials were quoted this week claiming that they were caught off guard by the tidal wave of criticism stemming from the Bergdahl deal.

The Hill reported Thursday:

The administration believed any criticism of the deal would be overshadowed by a positive story: the freeing of a U.S. soldier after five years of captivity in Afghanistan, just as the war there is drawing to an end.

It expected some criticism over the release of the Guantánamo prisoners, and it also expected lawmakers would be angered they weren’t informed of the deal in advance. But it didn’t see the criticism of Bergdahl himself coming.

Despite the blowback, which the White House sought to quell with a classified briefing for the entire Senate on Wednesday night, the administration remains confident that the deal to release Bergdahl will eventually be seen as good policy and the right thing to do.

“I think the principle of leaving no man behind will ultimately win out,” said a senior White House official, who predicted most people will agree that the president was compelled to seek Bergdahl’s rescue.

But following reports like the aforementioned Hill story, White House officials changed their tune. The Administration’s communications director, Jen Palmieri, said during an MSNBC interview Thursday that the White House never expected the Bergdahl release “to be a good news story.”

“We knew that this was going to be a controversial decision,” she said. “That was why we wanted the President to speak to it.”

The White House maintains that criticism of Bergdahl is unfair because, as Palmieri put it, “We don’t know what happened.”

The communications director did acknowledge that information concerning the soldier’s decision to walk away from his duty has been in the public domain.

To make matters worse for the Obama Administration’s damage control mission, NBC reported Thursday that Taliban officials said they found Bergdahl “acting abnormally and cursing his countrymen.” And classified materials obtained by The New York Times detail that Bergdahl had left his post on occasions before the defection that led to his capture by the Taliban.

And then there’s this, via Fox:

The reports indicate that Bergdahl’s relations with his Haqqani captors morphed over time, from periods of hostility, where he was treated very much like a hostage, to periods where, as one source told Fox News, “he became much more of an accepted fellow” than is popularly understood. He even reportedly was allowed to carry a gun at times.

That’s the same Bergdahl who National Security Advisor recently said “served with honor and distinction.”

The question that some Americans are beginning to wonder is “honor and distinction” to whom?

Here’s a picture posted to Facebook by Shannon Allen, the wife of disabled Afghanistan veteran Sgt. 1st Class Mark Allen, who she says was injured in a firefight in Kabul that resulted from the search for Bergdahl.

“Meet my husband, injuries directly brought to you by the actions of this traitor. He can’t give an account of what went down, because he can no longer speak” Mrs. Allen wrote in an accompanying post. “Now, which guy is a ‘hero’ again?!? Sick.”

If Obama owed it to Bergdahl’s family to bring their son home, he certainly owes Allen’s family a clear explanation of his reasoning.