Obama Administration Pushes Back Against Criticism Of Deal That Led To Bergdahl Release
The Obama White House rejected Republican criticism of the deal that led to the release of the only American Prisoner Of War from the Afghanistan War.
The Administration is defending itself against criticism from Republicans regarding the circumstances that led to the release of American P.O.W. Bowe Bergdahl on Saturday:
WASHINGTON — Top Obama administration officials pushed back on Sunday against Republican criticism that a deal freeing the last American held prisoner in Afghanistan could allow dangerous Taliban leaders to return to the fight, might encourage terrorist groups to seize American hostages and possibly violated a law requiring notification of Congress.
Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser, spoke a day after years of fitful negotiations had finally yielded the release in Afghanistan of the prisoner, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The deal, brokered with Qatari help, also freed five high-level Taliban members from the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The release of the Taliban officials was sharply assailed by Republicans, including Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, chairman of the intelligence committee, as a dangerous transgression of longstanding policy against negotiating with terror groups.
“If you negotiate here, you’ve sent a message to every Al Qaeda 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,” Mr. Rogers said on the CNN program “State of the Union.” He added, “That is dangerous.”
But Ms. Rice said: “Sergeant Bergdahl wasn’t simply a hostage; he was an American prisoner of war captured on the battlefield. We have a sacred obligation that we have upheld since the founding of our republic to do our utmost to bring back our men and women who are taken in battle, and we did that in this instance.” She was speaking on the ABC program “This Week.”
Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who himself was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for six years, welcomed the return to American custody of Sergeant Bergdahl, who had spent five years in Taliban hands in conditions that remain unclear.
But Mr. McCain said he had serious concerns about the release of the five Taliban detainees, calling them “the hardest of the hard core.” He added, “It is disturbing that these individuals would have the ability to re-enter the fight, and they are big, high-level people, possibly responsible for the deaths of thousands” of Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan.
Ms. Rice, appearing separately on CNN, noted that President Obama had received “very specific assurances” regarding the handling of the freed detainees when he spoke by phone on Tuesday with the emir of Qatar. That country is taking in the five.
(…)Bow
Republican lawmakers also questioned the failure of the administration to give Congress the required notice of releases from Guantánamo.
Ms. Rice said the administration had felt compelled to move swiftly because Sergeant Bergdahl’s health seemed at risk and the opportunity to retrieve him possibly fleeting.
“We had reason to be concerned that this was an urgent and acute situation,” she said on ABC, adding that “had we waited and lost him, I don’t think anybody would have forgiven the United States government.”
As I noted in my post on the initial GOP reaction to this release on Saturday evening, it strikes me that Republicans are making a big political mistake if they start attacking the President over this. I will concede that here are legitimate questions regarding the circumstances and terms of the deal that led to Sgt. Bergdahl’s release, and the question of just how much we can trust the Qataris to live up to their assurances regarding the five released prisoners. Additionally, I’m still somewhat unclear on the exact terms of the law requiring the President to give Congress advance notice of any prisoner transfer out of Guantanamo Bay and what exceptions might exist to those requirements. And, finally, there are some outstanding questions regarding the circumstances that led to Sgt. Bergdahl’s capture, including allegations that he may have deserted his post and there are also some questions regarding comments that his father has made in public.
Some of these are legitimate questions, but based on their initial reaction to the deal, it seems clear to me that Republicans seem intent on reflexively treating this story the way they treat everything that this President does, as an opportunity to bash the President. Ordinary Americans looking at this story are going to see an American soldier who was held prisoner for five years finally coming home and being reunited with the family and friends that had been missing him. It is good news and it is inevitably something that is going to inure to the President’s benefit, which may be what most sticks in the craw of some people on the right. The politically smart thing to do, it strikes me, is to express gratitude for the safe return of one of our soldiers and allow him to heal and reunite with his family. Turning this into yet another opportunity to bash the President and score political points just comes across as petty, and if Republicans think voters aren’t going to notice that kind of pettiness they are kidding themselves.
An American solider is home, his family is happy. Perhaps Republicans should keep their reflexive desire to score political points against the President suppressed for at least a few days. Not only might it be the politically smart thing to do, it also happens to be the decent and humane thing to do.
Obama to Republicans: Impeach me. I dare you.
Republicans? BWAAHAHAAHAAHAAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…. Ten thousand unemployed comedians and here you are giving it away for free.
We should know by know that a President will take action in matters like this regardless of what Congress says. It makes no difference whether the President is Dem or GOP, when the legislative power conflicts with the executive power, any President will choose the executive power.
The Republicans can whine all day, but I guarantee any Republican President would have done exactly as Obama did.
The Republican response makes sense only if we are engaged with a criminal gang analogous to the pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries.
If we are engaged in an actual war the negotiations that resulted in this trade are part of the Presidential authority to raise and manage the U S Army.
It’s been 12 going-on 13 years since the terrorist attacks of 11 Sept, and the Repubs haven’t decided whether we’re in a war or are the international police hunting down a gang. Pitiful.
Wow Doug, that Soopermexican persona at IJR you linked to is a real piece of work.
@rudderpedals:
To say the least
Petty , childish obomba kicks the American people in the gut every day.
to believe whatever they read first that resonates with their own bias. Where did they get their info from first? Comment threads are full of people making accusations of desertion, conversion to Islam, his father is some wannabe Islamic Moses for Gitmo, culpability for the deaths of the searchers, the terrorists released are somehow more badass then OBL and Satan combined, political ploys, etc. People claiming to be from his unit are in full Swiftboating mode without any real evidence to back it all up.
The fact is we the public don’t know yet the whole truth. If the allegations are true, then there should be something to back it up and it should be brought to light immediately. if they are false, then they are vilifying an innocent man that’s gone through hell and should be held accountable.
Either way – I await proof.
McCain…the supporter of torture…wants to just leave this guy in the hands of the Taliban.
Makes sense to me.
I am no great fan of this president but I could be if once, just once, he went on TV and told the GOP to “go fcuk themselves in Macy’s window.”
If the Republicans think that the American people give a rat’s butt about Congressional prerogatives when a service member’s life is endangered, they have sorely misjudged the American people
@JohnMcC:
Simple: it’s a war when it’s convenient for the GOP (“It’s a war! These guys aren’t just criminals where you can send in the FBI and arrest them, they’re soldiers for a cause and we have to invade! We get to do what we want!”) and it’s not a war when it’s not convenient for them (“What do you mean, POWs and the Geneva Convention?! These guys aren’t soldiers, they’re terrorists, criminals! The rules of war don’t apply! We get to do what we want!”).
We’ve held those guys for twelve years. “Possibly” just ain’t good enough. If we had proof to convict them, we should have put them on trial and convicted them.
But thanks to the GOP, we didn’t.
AAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! You’re so funny, Doug!
Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. They’ve been at it for so long, they don’t know anything else. It’s 1st nature to them anymore.
Hey, of course the Republicans are upset!! Everyone knows you trade ARMS for prisoners.
NOTE: I stole that from a tweet yesterday. It was too good not to re-post.
@A.Men: Exhibit #1
@A.Men:
Irony. You do it well.
I think Tapper had a profile of the five Taliban (not AQ) operatives we released. To describe them as the hardest of the hard core seems a bit of a stretch.
If this guy turns out to have deserted his post — which many are alleging — then our course of action is clear. We get him back because we don’t abandon our own. And then we try him for desertion. These are not incompatible ideas.
@JohnMcC:
It’s Schrödinger’s War: it’s simultaneously a war and not-a-war depending on the political needs of the GOP at that exact moment.
@A.Men:
Did your mom help you out with that?
@Doug:
Democrats really couldn’t hope for much more than Republicans are providing here.
Republicans are saying, “typical Obama, he doesn’t respect us, and he ignored the law.” The public is hearing, “Sure an American was released, but we hate this president and that’s the most important thing.”
The GOP managed what Schrodinger’s kitty couldn’t: Resurrecting collapsed probability waveforms for another try.
@rudderpedals: Heheheeheehehehe… thanx!
@Rafer Janders: It’s Schrödinger’s War: it’s simultaneously a war and not-a-war depending on the political needs of the GOP at that exact moment.
You stole that motif from ObamaCare — it’s a tax AND it’s not a tax!
And we need to stop getting so upset about these sort of things. To the Obama administration, laws are merely suggestions, Especially laws that Obama himself signs. They’re only law-laws to to other people.
Apparently there is more to this story…this article calls him a deserter.
Interesting reading.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/02/we-lost-soldiers-in-the-hunt-for-bergdahl-a-guy-who-walked-off-in-the-dead-of-night.html
@KM:
Whatever the case…getting him out of the Taliban’s clutches was the right thing to do.
We can sort the dirty laundry now that he is safe.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
I know, it’s like the Tragedy of the Commons….oh, wait, it’s nothing at all like that! Guess I completely misunderstand what it means….!
@Jenos Idanian #13:
I am sure you were similarly upset with the Bush Admins ignoring environmental laws and all the signing statements that they added, weren’t you?
@OzarkHillbilly: And for the record, when it comes to signing statements, Obama is a piker:
Those challenges can be found within Bush’s 112 first-term statements and his 50 second-term statements.
The Obama administration has only issued 22 statements during his first term.
Most…..Corrupt….and Lawless….President…. Ever.
@OzarkHillbilly: Don’t even bother. According to him, what past presidents have done doesn’t matter one bit. Even if every President from Washington on down has done it once the black Kenyan Muslim usurper does it, it’s wrong. Of course Jenos can’t explain why it’s wrong; he just knows it is.
@OzarkHillbilly: Oh, the signing statements BS. Those were Bush’s way of saying that, at some point in the future, he might challenge the law on certain grounds.
Obama takes it a bit further. Instead, he just ignores the laws and rewrites them on the fly.
Once again, Obama takes what may or may not have been a bad idea and turns it up to 11.
Does the law say that Congress must be notified 30 days before any detainees are moved from Guantanamo? Yes.
Did Obama himself sign that law? Yes.
Did Obama choose to ignore that law? Yes.
Are the typical Obama lickspittles here doing all they can to keep that from being discussed?
Absolutely!
@Jenos Idanian #13: Obama did issue a signing statement with this law stating that the notification requirements could be waived under certain conditions. So he’s acting on a signing statement that he himself issued – JUST LIKE BUSH DID. And you are seriously deluded if you think you can imply that Bush never acted on his signing statements and no one here would challenge you on that with the facts.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
So you are thinking it would have been a far better idea to leave this guy behind as a prisoner of the Taliban…where, according to intelligence, his health was deteriorating quickly and his life was in imminent danger. Instead you are thinking it would have been better to risk losing the opportunity to save his life by delaying for 30 days in order to notify Congress, and also increase the attendant risk of leaks.
With thought processes like that it’s good to know that you will never, ever, be the Commander-in-Chief.
I wish I had the time to go search the archives and find all the comments you made railing against Bush and Cheney for violating the law by torturing people…or outing covert CIA operatives.
@beth: Oh, Beth. Did Bush ever act on any of his signing statements?
Like I said, Obama takes ideas (often bad ones) from Republicans and Turns Them Up To Eleven.
On a slight tangent, isn’t it odd how many ideas liberals push (allegedly) have their origins from the right? Can’t you come up with any on your own?
@C. Clavin: False choice, Cliffy. The law that was passed by the same Congress we have today and was signed by Obama required the notification. And these talks were going on a lot longer than 30 days. All Obama had to do was call in Reid and Boehner at some point and tell them that a deal was brewing.
As for the rest… have you ever made an honest argument around here?
@Jenos Idanian #13:
The ignorance that comment displays is mind-boggling.
Those losers that wrote the Constitution couldn’t even come up with their own ideas…they had to steal from the Roman Republic and the Magna Carta.
What an idiot.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Damn their cowardly tactic of preventing it being discussed by discussing it with multiple comments on a public forum!
Just pathetically desperate to be taken seriously, this guy, isn’t he?
http://www.alternet.org/story/54543/revealed%3A_bush's_presidential_signing_statements_have_been_used_to_nullify_laws
A Government Accountability Office report confirms that Bush’s use of presidential signing statements have the effect of nullifying the law in question in about 30 percent of cases.
@Jenos Idanian #13: Off the top of my head I can think of using torture, keeping the cost of the Iraq war off the books and certain privacy rights protections of the Patriot Act being overruled as all being done and justified by signing statements. I’m sure there are others you can find if you really wanted to.
So, why does Obama bother signing laws at all? Why does he pretend that they mean anything other than whatever he wants them to mean at the moment?
Oh, yeah. They’ll be binding on Republicans.
The one comforting thought is that, thanks to the Obama precedent, another president can just “suspend” things like whole swaths of bad Obama laws.
Which, of course, will prompt screams for impeachment from the people now rationalizing it.
Fixed it for ya. You are welcome.
Oh, and White House Designated Fabricator Susan Rice has declared that Bergdahl was “captured on the battlefield.” That is the New Operative Truth. All Prior Descriptions of Bergdah’s capture are now Inoperative and Did Not Happen.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Um, yeah. Bergdahl was a uniformed combatant in an active combat zone, captured by armed enemy fighters. Afghanistan is a battlefield for US forces. Wherever a soldier is confronted by an armed enemy in a combat zone, that’s a battlefield, be it a house, a field, a forest — or even a commons. Which is the Tragedy of the Commons,really, if that is I understand that concept accurately (and I think I do!)
@Jenos Idanian #13:
‘Signing Statements’ Study Finds Administration Has Ignored Laws
Do those, and others listed in the story, count?
It is unfortunate that in this country it is no longer possible to evaluate a public policy or to judge the act of an elected official without everyone just reflexively jumping to take the side of their party. It it particularly corrosive on the Republicans because they are so full of crap so much of the time that when they actually say something that might be right it is difficult to know when, if ever, to take them (or their motives) seriously. I voted for Obama twice and will very likely vote for Clinton next time, but this sure looks questionable to me. To negotiate with the Taliban, and trade five seemingly pretty dangerous people, for one guy who sounds like he may have deserted, and whose alleged desertion cost the lives of many other soldiers, and to do this trade in apparent violation of US law, on a deliberate and premeditated basis presumably with the President’s personal approval … I’m not going to judge it yet because I don’t have all of the facts but it is disconcerting. Certainly more than the trumped up fake Benghazi matter.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Emphasis mine.
I’m assuming that confronted with actual…you know…facts…that you will change your opinion.
BWAH-hahahahahahahahahahaha….
@Jenos Idanian #13:
It is interesting how the (by now completely) Pavlovian Republican response to Obama using a Conservative/Right idea is to denounce him. There’s obviously some deep self-loathing going on in the Republican Party – Freud would understand this, Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz, Rich Lowry, George Will and Chuck Krauthammer … not so much.
http://justsecurity.org/11101/bergdahl-exchange/
@Nightrider:
Republicans cry wolf so often that even if they have a legitimate point in the future, nobody will believe them because they have lost all credibility.
@Tony W: That’s what I was saying. But remember, in the actual boy who cried wolf story, a wolf actually did come at the end. Democrats are faced with a challenge in still trying to be grown-ups and self-reflect on their own party’s possible mistakes, while legitimately fearing that anytime they do so they just add fuel to the GOP BS machine.
@al-Ameda:
He’s an idiot.
Take Obamacare…yes it’s a moderate right-of-center idea….which Obama pursued because it was assumed Republicans would go along with it. No one would have predicted Republicans wouldn’t vote for their own idea. And now the attempt to work across the aisle is to be denounced.
You cannot make up how stupid this is…….
Ah, I see that Jenos “The Tragedy of the Commons ” Idanian is once again all hopped up on Mountain Dew and seeking fresh opportunities for public humiliation.
Just in case people forgot, the admin announced to the whole world back in February that they were negotiating this deal.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-seeks-prisoner-swap-with-taliban-to-free-army-sgt-bowe-bergdahl/2014/02/17/f142ed50-9590-11e3-afce-3e7c922ef31e_story.html
Steve
I really have to know–what thread prompted all the “Tragedy of the Commons” remarks?
@Neil Hudelson:
Jenos brought it up in order to bolster his position, not realizing he got the meaning of example completely backwards… Starting about here:
https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/its-a-matter-of-trust/#comment-1931398
Here’s where Jenos begins to explicitly get the meaning of the theory wrong:
https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/its-a-matter-of-trust/#comment-1931514
BTW – for fans of the show Agent’s of Shield, there’s a great Whedon-esque moment in the final episode that is a great echo of this:
@Nightrider:
Doesn’t trouble me at all. to quote somebody who said it far better than I could:
We’re getting out of Afghanistan, and the treaties to which this nation has repeatedly pledged itself require that we release Prisoners of War and repatriate them home. Taliban are distinct from Al Qaeda in this respect because Taliban could be considered the government forces of Afghanistan (whether legitimate, loved, respected, or not) while AQ isn’t anything but a bunch of thugs under international law. So this idea that we gave up valuable prisoners for one guy and that makes it a bad deal is bullshit on its face. We were going to release them. We were REQUIRED to release them under international law that we largely wrote.
As to whether he deserted or not (I have read one who was there and says he did) that is something to be sorted out upon his return. The guy who was there says the same.
As far as negotiating with the Taliban, that is what one does when trying to end a war, negotiate with your enemies.
@Matt Bernius:
Hahahahahaha….
That’ll teach me not to check in on OTB on a Sunday.
I miss all the good stuff.
Hahahahahahahaha…
@ C. Calvn
It could be the single stupidest thing Jenos has ever said- yes, and I know that that is a bold statement.
If I could interupt all of the dick wagging going on here for just a moment, and point to the words of a soldier in Bergdahl’s company..
But his words will mostly fall on deaf ears, and the political shitshow will carry on unimpeded.
@OzarkHillbilly: Thanks Ozark; if it were really a certainty that we’d be letting those five guys go soon anyway that would seem to change the analysis. But treaty or not, are we really doing that? If we’re really going to let them all go anyway why shouldn’t the administration easily comply with the apparent 30-day notice law and just give Congress notice that they are all going to go free once final arrangements can be made? I haven’t read the law so perhaps I am not understanding it correctly. Does pulling out our ground troops necessarily equate legally to the end of a war?
I get that negotiating with adversaries is a practical reality, fair enough on that point.
The Israelis have released much worse and dangerous scumbags. My sense is that we have a tracking device on all these guys released. Years of watching spy movies and 24 have led me to this conclusion..
@Neil Hudelson:
I believe he was referring to the possibility that once Marie Antoinette was guillotined the masses couldn’t eat cake anymore? I might be wrong on this, I just haven’t had the time to ‘google’ “tragedy of the commons.”
@C. Clavin: yeah, i’d let him settle in and such but now even the msm is questioning his “capture”. they can have a fun week with it i guess, until the next shiny object grabs their attention. i’m all about freeing our own but unless he has serious “intelligence” info we may have been played, and played badly.
guess we vcan keep tabs on “the big bad five” and dispose of them in the next year or so.
@Nightrider:
The secrecy was most likely a Taliban pre-condition. According to the BBC competing Taliban groups were after Bergdahl to use him for their own purposes and his captors were worried for his safety. Maybe they’d seen Fox News and understood our Congress was run by birthday clowns and didn’t want to run the risks of a leak.