Republicans Blast Release Of Hardcore Terrorists For U.S. Soldier

by JASmius

In case you had any doubt that the ransom of Sergeant Bergdahl was more than just tactical and strategic foolishness, congratulations, your instincts are robustly undiminished:

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Sunday the military operation to free Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl from the Taliban in exchange for the release of five Guantanamo Bay detainees was not relayed to Congress because officials believed the soldier's life was in danger.

In his first extensive public comments about Saturday's operation, Hagel said intelligence the U.S. had gathered suggested that Bergdahl's "safety and health were both in jeopardy, and in particular his health was deteriorating."

See how convenient a cover that is?  Who can argue with, "We had to move NOW because he was going to die!"?  Anybody who does will be denounced as - you guessed it - "wanting veterans to die".  It sounds insane, given the depth of the VA scandal that Eric Shinseki's resignation won't be the end of, but in the minds of Team Messiah, VA-gate has been "fixed," the box has been checked off, and they're daring any Republican to criticize coughing up five hardcore jihadists for this guy so they can spring their PR "trap" and launch their counterattack.

Not that some Pachyderms, amazingly, weren't up for the challenge:

But a Republican lawmaker appearing on the same program said he was disappointed and shocked by the move.

"The release of five mid- to high-level of Taliban is shocking to me," said Representative Adam Kinzinger, R-IL16.

"I’m very disappointed."

The trade of known terrorists is a "break with U.S. policy," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers added.

"The #1 way that al-Qaida raises money is by ransom — kidnapping and ransom. We have now set a price," the Michigan-8 Republican said on CNN’s "State of the Union."

"If you negotiate here, you’ve sent a message to every al-Qaida group in the world, by the way, some who are holding U.S. hostages today — that there is some value now in that hostage in a way that they didn’t have before," Rogers said. "That is dangerous."

Senator Ted Cruz, meanwhile, said the U.S. could have used military force to free Bergdahl rather than negotiate a swap.

"I do not think the way to deal with terrorists is through releasing other violent terrorists," Cruz said on ABC’s "This Week." "It's not the only way. We can go in and use military force, as needed, to rescue our fallen compatriots.

"The idea that we're now making trades, what does that do for every single soldier stationed abroad?" he asked. "It says 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."

All of which is the same basic point I made the other day.  And that's fine and good, and certainly true.  But there's more to this story that just doesn't smell right.

First of all, this "military operation" was illegal:

The Pentagon did not give Congress the required thirty-day notice for the release of detainees.

This gets back to Senator Cruz's point about there being more than one way of extracting captured military personnel.  Ransoming Sergeant Bergdahl is being presented by Commissar Hagel as a fait accompli, as the only possible option, because he was going to die!  But was it?  Did the only way to rescue this soldier require the Obama Regime to break one of the laws it is oath-bound to faithfully execute?  Or did they deliberately let the Taliban keep him on ice until his life would prove useful to them in terms of policy preferences and partisan politics?

By the way, Hagel hid the caper behind Article II, Section II - or, in other words, he used a "Republican" argument, so that if GOP critics weren't deterred by being accused of "rooting for American soldiers to die," they would by taunts of "shredding the Constitution".

And there's more:

Only a handful of people knew about the operation and Hagel said "we couldn't afford any leaks anywhere, for obvious reasons."

Oh, really?  Where was this "obvious" hypersensitivity to leaks when it came to the CIA's Kabul chief of station?  What made Sergeant Bergdahl's life more important than his?

And I don't say that lightly:

Hagel declined to say whether he believes Bergdahl was attempting to desert the Army or go absent without leave when he walked away from his unit and disappeared nearly five years ago.

"Our first priority is assuring his well-being and his health and getting him reunited with his family," Hagel said. "Other circumstances that may develop and questions — those will be dealt with later." [emphases added]

Sergeant Bergdahl "walked away from his unit and disappeared" five years ago?  And the Regime only suddenly became overwhelmingly concerned with his safe return now?  Where have the hashtag campaigns been since 2009?  The telethons, the national advertising campaigns, the Bowe Bergdahl khaki lapel ribbons?  Which is to say, why did they callously leave him to languish in Taliban captivity all this time without even uttering a peep about his plight, and now suddenly decide his deliverance was a national priority?  So that President Gutsy Call could wax flatulent about "America's unwavering commitment to leave no man or woman in uniform behind on the battlefield"?  Or not more than half a decade, anyway.

And why Hagel's reticence about the details behind Bergdahl's desertion/going AWOL?  Why doesn't he want to discuss that?  Which leads, in my mind, to the next logical question: Why did the Taliban keep Bergdahl alive for all this time?  Don't they tend to behead captured infidels, unless they have a practical use for them?  And would they really have kept this deserter alive for five years on the off chance that he might, someday, become prisoner exchange bait?  If they thought the chances of that were at all promising, wouldn't they have grabbed a large cohort of Bergdahl's erstwhile buddies?

I'm not a conspiracist, believe it or not, because as a practical matter, conspiracies are the least efficient way of accomplishing anything.  But neither do I believe in coincidences.  And there are just too many unanswered questions about Sergeant Bergdahl's ransom, too much convenient timing, that add up to a monumental stench that just happens to potentially serve too many White House policy and propaganda purposes.

Who is Bowe Bergdahl?  Why did he "walk away from his unit and disappear" five years ago, and what's he been doing since?   Why did the Taliban keep him alive?  And was his life really worth the release of five jihadi kingpins, the "hardest of the hardcore" in Senator McCain's phrasing, responsible for thousands of deaths and who, now sprung, can bring about the deaths of thousands more?