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American held hostage by al Qaeda appeals to Obama... (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter VA703
- Start date
3C's
Footballguy
3C's
Footballguy
glock
"Don't grumble, give a whistle!"
You sounded eerily like Carl Rove there, BTW. You know- just throwin' stuff out there and see what sticks. Fact is, there are a crap ton of serious illnesses that go hand in hand with being thin and walking gingerly.
Edited to add: not that I think he is gravely ill...
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jonessed
Footballguy
Obama had been trying to sell this to Congress for years. They were never going to go for it and he knew it.
What he did was illegal. That can sometimes be a gray area when dealing with inter-branch conflicts, but this one was clear-cut.
Parrothead
Footballguy
TheIronSheik
SUPER ELITE UPPER TIER
3C's
Footballguy
Could be.
I actually just wanted to get the Afghan Thursday line out there but I guess it wasn't funny.
No idea on his health but I do have my doubts of "gravely ill" as do some others. "U.S. officials said Bergdahl appeared to be in 'declining health,' but not gravely ill, in the video"
3C's
Footballguy
Arizona Ron
Footballguy
CNN right now: "desertion not the same as AWOL". I wish I could hear the explanation but I'm in a airport bar
3C's
Footballguy
Parrothead
Footballguy
Allah Daya Bin DrinkinAllahu Akbar! Or something.Thanks a lot, Mullah Mohammed Omar!
Fennis
Footballguy
I'm curious where it was reported he was gravely ill.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/15/bowe-bergdahl_n_4603726.html
from Jan. 15, 2014:
Ghost Rider
Footballguy
Reaper
Footballguy
jonessed
Footballguy
AWOL is leaving, desertion is leaving with no plans to come back.Given his writings I have a hard time believing he intended to come back, but we won't ever know. He's definitely not going to admit it now and there is no way any investigation is going to conclude that.
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avoiding injuries
Footballguy
The primary difference between the two offenses is "intent to remain away permanently," or if the purpose of the absence is to shirk "important duty," (such as a combat deployment).
If one intends to return to "military control" someday, one is guilty of AWOL, not desertion, even if they were away for 50 years. Conversely, if a person was absent for just one minute, and then captured, he could be convicted of desertion, if the prosecution could prove that the member intended to remain away from the military permanently.
If the intent of the absence was to "shirk important duty," such as a combat deployment, then the "intent to remain away permanently" to support a charge of desertion is not necessary. However, Such services as drill, target practice, maneuvers, and practice marches are not ordinarily "important duty." "Important duty" may include such duty as hazardous duty, duty in a combat zone, certain ship deployments, etc. Whether a duty is hazardous or a service is important depends upon the circumstances of the particular case, and is a question of fact for the court-martial to decide.
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/justicelawlegislation/a/awoldesertion.htm
avoiding injuries
Footballguy
After a ceremony in the Rose Garden and Susan Rice praising his service on TV, does anyone really think the administration is going to conduct a thorough investigation?
3C's
Footballguy
On NBC's "Meet the Press," Hagel said Congress was not told earlier about the operation because officials believed the soldier's life was in danger.
Intelligence gathered suggested that Bergdahl's "health was deteriorating," Hagel told host David Gregory in an interview from Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.
"This was essentially an operation to save the life of Sgt. Bergdahl," Hagel added. "We had information that his health could be deteriorating rapidly.
Arizona Ron
Footballguy
avoiding injuries
Footballguy
Can you imagine if President Obama had to give the speech at West Point this week?
Henry Ford
Footballguy
If someone came into your bunk and kidnapped you and dragged you away, and no one knew what happened to you, and you didn't show up the next day, you'd be Absent Without Leave.
Tackling Dummies
Footballguy
Mission Accomplished!
tommyboy
Footballguy
Henry Ford
Footballguy
3C's
Footballguy
So my guess is the 38% is the FOX crowd, the 41% being the sensible bunch, while the remaining 21% is the MSNBC crowd. Sounds about right.
Billy Bats
Footballguy
It was a main excuse from the White House for Obama not telling congress and having to wait the 30 days. Is everyone in the right thread?
http://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-live/2014/06/why-obama-didnt-tell-congress-about-prisoner-swap-189513.html
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timschochet
Footballguy
Jon Snow deserted from the Nights Watch when his father died, but his friends talked him out of it. But suppose the White Walkers (Taliban) had gotten him instead? No sympathy for Jon Snow?
BigSteelThrill
Footballguy
WTF.
At the conclusion of Afghan (which are currently trying to end and announced so last Thursday) do you know whats going to happen to those 5 guys?
And in 2015 we are scheduled to be down to 5000 persons in Afghan.
We tried to get something for what was soon to be nothing.
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mr roboto
Footballguy
Spoiler ####face.
Reaper
Footballguy
LOL... "we were going to set them free anyway.... For NOTHING"
Now adding.... "We were going to set them free anyway...... For NOTHING"
WOW
LOL....
Now adding.... "We were going to set them free anyway...... For NOTHING"
WOW
BigSteelThrill
Footballguy
MaxThreshold
Footballguy
The Geneva Convention doesn't apply to terrorists, only to organized militaries (legal combatants - which terrorists are not).
Homer J Simpson
I don't push
BigSteelThrill
Footballguy
Actually it would have applied to them, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others like....
George W. Bush national security legal adviser John Bellinger, writing at Lawfare: In my view, the U.S. would not be able to hold [the five detainees] forever. Indeed, it is likely that the U.S. would be required, as a matter of international law, to release them shortly after the end of 2014, when U.S. combat operations cease in Afghanistan.
In fact, even the negotiations/transfer/release via a neutral country is in accordance to the Geneva Conventions.
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BigSteelThrill
Footballguy
Max'imizing educational exposure...
Geneva Convention Applies to Taliban, not Al Qaeda
President Bush said the United States would regard the Geneva Conventions as applying to Taliban detainees under U.S. control -- but not Al Qaeda detainees.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said today the United States would continue to treat all detainees humanely and in accordance with standards set by the Geneva Conventions.
Bush's decision does not materially change the way all detainees will be treated by the United States nor does it confer prisoner of war status on Taliban members. U.S. officials will continue to call both Taliban and Al Qaeda members "detainees."
Afghanistan signed the Geneva Convention of 1949. U.S. government lawyers determined the convention applies to Taliban captured since the war on terrorism began.
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=43960
^^^ That's the defense departments website... defense.gov
Geneva Convention Applies to Taliban, not Al Qaeda
President Bush said the United States would regard the Geneva Conventions as applying to Taliban detainees under U.S. control -- but not Al Qaeda detainees.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said today the United States would continue to treat all detainees humanely and in accordance with standards set by the Geneva Conventions.
Bush's decision does not materially change the way all detainees will be treated by the United States nor does it confer prisoner of war status on Taliban members. U.S. officials will continue to call both Taliban and Al Qaeda members "detainees."
Afghanistan signed the Geneva Convention of 1949. U.S. government lawyers determined the convention applies to Taliban captured since the war on terrorism began.
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=43960
^^^ That's the defense departments website... defense.gov
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Henry Ford
Footballguy
Are you under the impression that we will be letting them all die in prison?
Todd Andrews
Footballguy
Homer J Simpson
I don't push
Can Bowe Bergdahl Be Tied to 6 Lost Lives? Facts Are Murky
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and ANDREW W. LEHREN
JUNE 3, 2014
WASHINGTON — Did the search for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl cost the lives of American soldiers?
Since last weekend’s prisoner exchange in which Afghan insurgents turned over Sergeant Bergdahl after five years of captivity, a number of the men who served with him have called him a deserter. Some have gone further, blaming him for the deaths of six to eight soldiers.
That second claim is hardening into a news media narrative. CNN has reported in scrolling headlines that six soldiers died looking for Sergeant Bergdahl after senior American military officials say he wandered off his base. The Daily Beast published an essay by a former member of Sergeant Bergdahl’s battalion, Nathan Bradley Bethea, who linked the search to the deaths of eight soldiers whom he named. “He has finally returned,” Mr. Bethea wrote. “Those men will never have the opportunity.”
But a review of casualty reports and contemporaneous military logs from the Afghanistan war shows that the facts surrounding the eight deaths are far murkier than definitive — even as critics of Sergeant Bergdahl contend that every American combat death in Paktika Province in the months after he disappeared, from July to September 2009, was his fault.
All across Afghanistan, that period was a time of ferocious fighting. President Obama had decided to send a surge of additional troops to improve security, but they had not yet arrived. In Paktika, the eight deaths during that period were up from five in the same three months the previous year. Across Afghanistan, 122 Americans died in that period, up from 58 in 2008.
In addition, a senior insurgent commander known as Mullah Sangeen, who was part of the Taliban-linked Haqqani network, had been carrying out attacks in the area for several years. A joint military statement by American and Afghan security forces released a month before Sergeant Bergdahl vanished warned that the mullah had brought in “hundreds of foreign fighters.”
Two soldiers died during the most intense period of the search after Sergeant Bergdahl’s June 30 disappearance. Both were inside an outpost that came under attack, not out patrolling and running checkpoints looking for him. The other six soldiers died in late August and early September.
Facts are often obscured in the fog of the battlefield, witnesses have incomplete vantage points and the events are five years in the past now. But an archive of military reports logging significant activities in America’s war in Afghanistan offers a contemporaneous written record of events in Paktika that summer. The archive was made public by Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pvt. Bradley Manning, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for the leak.
The first two deaths the critics link to Sergeant Bergdahl involved a major assault by insurgents on a combat outpost called Zerok on July 4, 2009. Their view is that the Taliban knew the Americans were stretched thin by the search mission and took advantage of that opportunity to try to overrun it.
Mr. Bethea, the soldier who wrote the essay in The Daily Beast, said the company executive officer for the unit at Zerok believed that “the attack would not have happened had his company received its normal complement of intelligence aircraft: drones, planes, and the like. Instead, every intelligence aircraft available in theater had received new instructions: find Bergdahl. My friend blames Bergdahl for his soldiers’ deaths.”
Military officials, speaking in recent days, have countered that additional surveillance aircraft had been brought in from other areas to help in the search, so air traffic in the region was intensified, not diminished, by the search.
Separately, context supplied by the leaked logs complicates claims that insurgents attacked the outpost because of the hunt.
Insurgents had been shooting at the outpost with escalating intensity in the preceding months. A June 24 log described a mortar attack inside its perimeter and cited intelligence that insurgents were planning a “complex ambush” of the outpost.
And a log recounting the July 4 attack said it confirmed “recent reporting regarding Mullah Sangeen’s desire to conduct a spectacular attack” against the outpost. The log did not mention the hunt for Sergeant Bergdahl. Still, one soldier from Sergeant Bergdahl’s battalion said that response time after the attack had been slow, and argued the issue was not if the outpost was going to be attacked, but rather when insurgents chose to attack it.
The first and most intense phase of the search operation wound down after July 8. But former soldiers say and the logs show that the hunt continued sporadically as patrols were sent out to chase rumors that Sergeant Bergdahl had been spotted.
The other six American deaths in Paktika that summer occurred from Aug. 18 to Sept. 5, which Sergeant Bergdahl’s critics link to him as well.
“You see a lot of anger because we lost guys not only at Zerok, but a decent amount of good guys looking” for him, said a soldier from his unit who spoke on condition of anonymity. Where those events are identifiable in the logs, they do not mention any link to Bergdahl search operations, although the logs are terse and contain few contextual details.
Mr. Bethea wrote that of the six men killed in August and September, two died in a roadside bombing while on a reconnaissance mission, a third was shot during a search for a Taliban political leader and three others were killed while conducting patrols — two in an ambush and one who stepped on a mine.
He suggested some connection to Sergeant Bergdahl for several of the deaths, saying the Taliban leader and a village that was in the area of one of the patrols were “thought affiliated with Bergdahl’s captors.” He also said a village in the areas of the other patrol was “near the area where Bergdahl vanished.”
Still, those villages and insurgents were in the overall area of responsibility for the soldiers, and the logs make clear that the region was an insurgent hotbed. A log on May 21, 2009, for example, said it had historically been a “safe haven” for the Taliban.
A retired senior American military officer, who was briefed at the time on the search for Sergeant Bergdahl, said that even though soldiers were instructed to watch for signs of the missing American, they would have been conducting patrols and performing risky operations anyway. “Look, it’s not like these soldiers would have been sitting around their base,” he said.
The soldier who spoke on condition of anonymity agreed that it was “ludicrous” to lay 100 percent of the blame for the deaths at Sergeant Bergdahl’s feet, and he acknowledged that patrols were going to get hit in Paktika during fighting season anyway.
But, he said, the reason he and his colleagues are angry is that too often that summer, the purpose of their patrols into dangerous areas was not ordinary wartime work like reconnaissance, maintaining a security presence, or humanitarian projects, but rather “to go look for this guy.”
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and ANDREW W. LEHREN
JUNE 3, 2014
WASHINGTON — Did the search for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl cost the lives of American soldiers?
Since last weekend’s prisoner exchange in which Afghan insurgents turned over Sergeant Bergdahl after five years of captivity, a number of the men who served with him have called him a deserter. Some have gone further, blaming him for the deaths of six to eight soldiers.
That second claim is hardening into a news media narrative. CNN has reported in scrolling headlines that six soldiers died looking for Sergeant Bergdahl after senior American military officials say he wandered off his base. The Daily Beast published an essay by a former member of Sergeant Bergdahl’s battalion, Nathan Bradley Bethea, who linked the search to the deaths of eight soldiers whom he named. “He has finally returned,” Mr. Bethea wrote. “Those men will never have the opportunity.”
But a review of casualty reports and contemporaneous military logs from the Afghanistan war shows that the facts surrounding the eight deaths are far murkier than definitive — even as critics of Sergeant Bergdahl contend that every American combat death in Paktika Province in the months after he disappeared, from July to September 2009, was his fault.
All across Afghanistan, that period was a time of ferocious fighting. President Obama had decided to send a surge of additional troops to improve security, but they had not yet arrived. In Paktika, the eight deaths during that period were up from five in the same three months the previous year. Across Afghanistan, 122 Americans died in that period, up from 58 in 2008.
In addition, a senior insurgent commander known as Mullah Sangeen, who was part of the Taliban-linked Haqqani network, had been carrying out attacks in the area for several years. A joint military statement by American and Afghan security forces released a month before Sergeant Bergdahl vanished warned that the mullah had brought in “hundreds of foreign fighters.”
Two soldiers died during the most intense period of the search after Sergeant Bergdahl’s June 30 disappearance. Both were inside an outpost that came under attack, not out patrolling and running checkpoints looking for him. The other six soldiers died in late August and early September.
Facts are often obscured in the fog of the battlefield, witnesses have incomplete vantage points and the events are five years in the past now. But an archive of military reports logging significant activities in America’s war in Afghanistan offers a contemporaneous written record of events in Paktika that summer. The archive was made public by Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pvt. Bradley Manning, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for the leak.
The first two deaths the critics link to Sergeant Bergdahl involved a major assault by insurgents on a combat outpost called Zerok on July 4, 2009. Their view is that the Taliban knew the Americans were stretched thin by the search mission and took advantage of that opportunity to try to overrun it.
Mr. Bethea, the soldier who wrote the essay in The Daily Beast, said the company executive officer for the unit at Zerok believed that “the attack would not have happened had his company received its normal complement of intelligence aircraft: drones, planes, and the like. Instead, every intelligence aircraft available in theater had received new instructions: find Bergdahl. My friend blames Bergdahl for his soldiers’ deaths.”
Military officials, speaking in recent days, have countered that additional surveillance aircraft had been brought in from other areas to help in the search, so air traffic in the region was intensified, not diminished, by the search.
Separately, context supplied by the leaked logs complicates claims that insurgents attacked the outpost because of the hunt.
Insurgents had been shooting at the outpost with escalating intensity in the preceding months. A June 24 log described a mortar attack inside its perimeter and cited intelligence that insurgents were planning a “complex ambush” of the outpost.
And a log recounting the July 4 attack said it confirmed “recent reporting regarding Mullah Sangeen’s desire to conduct a spectacular attack” against the outpost. The log did not mention the hunt for Sergeant Bergdahl. Still, one soldier from Sergeant Bergdahl’s battalion said that response time after the attack had been slow, and argued the issue was not if the outpost was going to be attacked, but rather when insurgents chose to attack it.
The first and most intense phase of the search operation wound down after July 8. But former soldiers say and the logs show that the hunt continued sporadically as patrols were sent out to chase rumors that Sergeant Bergdahl had been spotted.
The other six American deaths in Paktika that summer occurred from Aug. 18 to Sept. 5, which Sergeant Bergdahl’s critics link to him as well.
“You see a lot of anger because we lost guys not only at Zerok, but a decent amount of good guys looking” for him, said a soldier from his unit who spoke on condition of anonymity. Where those events are identifiable in the logs, they do not mention any link to Bergdahl search operations, although the logs are terse and contain few contextual details.
Mr. Bethea wrote that of the six men killed in August and September, two died in a roadside bombing while on a reconnaissance mission, a third was shot during a search for a Taliban political leader and three others were killed while conducting patrols — two in an ambush and one who stepped on a mine.
He suggested some connection to Sergeant Bergdahl for several of the deaths, saying the Taliban leader and a village that was in the area of one of the patrols were “thought affiliated with Bergdahl’s captors.” He also said a village in the areas of the other patrol was “near the area where Bergdahl vanished.”
Still, those villages and insurgents were in the overall area of responsibility for the soldiers, and the logs make clear that the region was an insurgent hotbed. A log on May 21, 2009, for example, said it had historically been a “safe haven” for the Taliban.
A retired senior American military officer, who was briefed at the time on the search for Sergeant Bergdahl, said that even though soldiers were instructed to watch for signs of the missing American, they would have been conducting patrols and performing risky operations anyway. “Look, it’s not like these soldiers would have been sitting around their base,” he said.
The soldier who spoke on condition of anonymity agreed that it was “ludicrous” to lay 100 percent of the blame for the deaths at Sergeant Bergdahl’s feet, and he acknowledged that patrols were going to get hit in Paktika during fighting season anyway.
But, he said, the reason he and his colleagues are angry is that too often that summer, the purpose of their patrols into dangerous areas was not ordinary wartime work like reconnaissance, maintaining a security presence, or humanitarian projects, but rather “to go look for this guy.”
Homer J Simpson
I don't push
We can start the asskissing with you.Just because something is bull#### doesn't mean they're definitely bull####ing...they could believe it, but that doesn't necessarily make it true. It could be as simple as they f###ing hated the guy, hated that he bailed, and they're blaming him for subsequent bad #### that went down.
Alright
Bottomfeeder Sports
Footballguy
All accounts
Established
Proven
Established
Proven
Homer J Simpson
I don't push
Homer J Simpson
I don't push
And fyi in case anyone else is under that impression, I think he should without a doubt be brought up on charges for desertion (or AWOLness, depending on the technical differences)
BigSteelThrill
Footballguy
Don't have to prove anything of the sort. He is a US soldier.
Everything else is the righties gnashing their teeth for all things Obama.
timschochet
Footballguy
I'm glad he was brought back. The trade doesn't bother me at all, since Homer's point is right: in the end, we're going to end up releasing all of these Taliban guys anyhow. Like it or not (and personally I hate it) we're going to have to come to an accord with the Taliban, in what will inevitably a messy end to a messy war. It's going to be ugly. Hopefully not Vietnam in 1975 ugly (that was the worst ending to a war in our history) but ugly all the same.
But the more I read about this guy, I have to say the more he really bothers me. I'm not gonna go all tommyboy and hope he gets ball cancer, but he doesn't sound like a good dude. (Also, if you read the Rolling Stone article, the troops he served with don't sound too good either- demoralized, not knowing what the hell they're doing there, hating the Afghans and themselves- sounds like Vietnam all over again!) I'd like to see him court-martialed for desertion. He doesn't need to serve any time (he's done that already) but he really should get a dishonorable discharge.
And I have to add, in this instance, the Obama administration looks foolish. They spoke too soon; they obviously didn't realize this guy was a deserter; they called him an honorable soldier. That's crap. And it is reminiscent of the first days after Benghazi. While I have little concern with President Obama's foreign policy (as I've written, I think he's been terrific) there is no question that his public relation team sucks. They keep getting #### wrong, mixing their messages, and sometimes insisting on stuff they know is wrong because they can't acknowledge that they screwed up. Not good. Of course the conservatives will run with this and try to find conspiracy ####; they're certain to go overboard as they always do. But this time Obama and crew really messed up good.
But the more I read about this guy, I have to say the more he really bothers me. I'm not gonna go all tommyboy and hope he gets ball cancer, but he doesn't sound like a good dude. (Also, if you read the Rolling Stone article, the troops he served with don't sound too good either- demoralized, not knowing what the hell they're doing there, hating the Afghans and themselves- sounds like Vietnam all over again!) I'd like to see him court-martialed for desertion. He doesn't need to serve any time (he's done that already) but he really should get a dishonorable discharge.
And I have to add, in this instance, the Obama administration looks foolish. They spoke too soon; they obviously didn't realize this guy was a deserter; they called him an honorable soldier. That's crap. And it is reminiscent of the first days after Benghazi. While I have little concern with President Obama's foreign policy (as I've written, I think he's been terrific) there is no question that his public relation team sucks. They keep getting #### wrong, mixing their messages, and sometimes insisting on stuff they know is wrong because they can't acknowledge that they screwed up. Not good. Of course the conservatives will run with this and try to find conspiracy ####; they're certain to go overboard as they always do. But this time Obama and crew really messed up good.
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