OPINION:
The Army has apparently completed its investigation of the circumstances surrounding the suspected desertion of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, but no one expects to see the results before Tuesday’s elections. The last thing the Obama administration wants now is a round of attention to the sordid details of another public-relations disaster.
Sgt. Bergdahl, at the time a private, walked away from his base in Afghanistan in 2009 and spent nearly five years in Taliban captivity. His captors released him in May in exchange for five high-ranking Taliban terrorist commanders held at Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration conducted the negotiations behind the back of Congress, and several soldiers who served with Sgt. Bergdahl, angry that the president traded five battle-hardened terrorists they had risked their lives to capture, said the sergeant had actually deserted his post. He may have gone looking for Taliban captors.
The Army has so far refused to release the report written by Brig. Gen. Kenneth Dahl, although it was completed weeks ago. Gen. Dahl earlier this month told The San Antonio Express-News that the document was being “reviewed by commanders.”
The Government Accountability Office’s nonpartisan legal analysts have already determined that the prisoner swap was illegal. Now there’s the possibility that Gen. Dahl concluded that Sgt. Bergdahl should be court-martialed, and this would further shine a bright light on President Obama’s incompetence and the ineptitude of his administration.
Other Guantanamo detainees released into the wild wasted little time getting back into their terrorist ways. As many as 30 former Guantanamo prisoners are thought to be fighting under the black flag of ISIS, Fox News reports.
Sgt. Bergdahl is waiting for the release of the Dahl report in a comfortable job behind a desk at U.S. Army North, Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston. A few hundred miles across the Rio Grande, Andrew Tahmooressi, 25, a former Marine sergeant, was finally freed Friday from a squalid Mexican jail cell in Tijuana after being held seven months to the day on trumped-up gun charges lodged against him after he missed an exit and drove into Mexico.
Mr. Obama showed no interest in the incident. After 135,000 American signed a petition to the White House, asking for White House attention, Mr. Obama’s administration declined to get involved, citing the “incorruptibility” of Mexico’s judicial system. “We respect the rule of law,” an Obama minion wrote, “and expect the judicial process of sovereign nations to protect other U.S. citizens who might find themselves in similar circumstances in the future.”
Mr. Tahmooressi’s freedom wasn’t deemed worth, say, a swap of five Mexican drug lords held in U.S. prisons, or even another crate of Fast and Furious guns. Sometimes surprises are worth the wait, but we won’t know about this one until after next week — unless a whistleblower leaks a copy.
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