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There are a few potentially important details surrounding the timeline leading to Bowe Bergdahl’s release that might deserve some discussion. Truth Revolt supplies some details on the timeline: This week’s [the week of Bergdahl’s release] secret diplomacy was not the first time the U.S. government had engaged the Taliban in an effort to negotiate a prisoner swap for the release of Bergdahl. In 2011, State Department officials held a series of meetings with Taliban leaders in Doha. In Congress, there was bipartisan opposition to any release of Guantanamo prisoners. After the negotiations were made public in early 2012 by Sen....

None of about 48 Guantanamo Bay detainees released or transferred elsewhere by the Obama administration has participated or been suspected of participating in subsequent "recidivist" activity, compared with 20 percent of about 540 detainees released by the George W. Bush administration, according to White House counterterrorism chief John O. Brennan

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Todd: White House was 'caught off guard' MSNBC’S Chuck Todd observed Tuesday that the White House was “caught off guard” by the disastrous public roll out of their prisoner exchange for Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. Todd and Andrea Mitchell agreed that the White House had likely thought there would be “some euphoria around this, the only POW that was remaining in Afghanistan, that there would be a rally around the flag. That didn’t happen.” “They were expecting criticisms of Gitmo, criticisms of the detainees that were chosen,” Todd said. “They did not expect this criticism of the attempt to...

(Please excuse the vanity but I did do a diligent search and didn't find a current news article addressing this issue.) The Afganistan War is a war conducted under the auspices of NATO, with some 28 nations cooperating with each other to achieve their goals, some by providing troops and some by providing funds. Not all prisoners at Gitmo were captured by US forces; some prisoners were captured by NATO forces and ended up at Gitmo. So while the USA provides the jail cells and the meals, aren't Gitmo prisoners from the battlefields of Afganistan actually NATO prisoners, and not...

Five years ago, I publicly raised questions about Bowe Bergdahl’s desertion from Blackfoot Company, 1-501 Infantry (Airborne), 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division.A few weeks after his so-called “capture” in late June 2009, three conflicting accounts had surfaced: U.S. officials told the Associated Press Bergdahl had “walked off” the base with three Afghans; the Taliban claimed on its website that “a drunken American soldier had come out of his garrison” and into their arms; and Bergdahl claimed in his Taliban “hostage video” that he had “lagged behind a patrol” before being captured.I asked on my blog: Were the...

To pull off the prisoner swap of five Taliban leaders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the White House overrode an existing interagency process charged with debating the transfer of Guantanamo Bay prisoners and dismissed long-standing Pentagon and intelligence community concerns based on Top Secret intelligence about the dangers of releasing the five men, sources familiar with the debate tell TIME. National Security Council officials at the White House decline to describe the work of the ad hoc process they established to trade the prisoners, or to detail the measures they have taken to limit the threat the Taliban officials may pose....

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — President Barack Obama on Tuesday defended his decision to release five Afghan detainees from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for an American soldier's freedom, saying his administration had consulted with Congress "for some time" about that possibility. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff left open the possibility of desertion charges against the soldier.

The White House has apologized to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for failing to alert her in advance of a decision to release Taliban commanders from Guantanamo Bay. Feinstein told reporters that she received a call from Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken on Monday evening apologizing for what the administration is calling an “oversight.” “I had a call from the White House last night, from Tony Blinken, apologizing for it,” she said. “He apologized and said it was an oversight,” she added.

I assume this has been reported before but if, like me, you’re coming to the story only recently, it’s big news. Apparently, the military had — and, maybe, has — hard evidence from the man himself that he went AWOL deliberately. Which would be worse: If Obama didn’t know about the note before making the swap, or if he did know and went ahead with it anyway? Sometime after midnight on June 30, 2009, Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl left behind a note in his tent saying he had become disillusioned with the Army, did not support the American mission in Afghanistan...

" John Ekdahl @JohnEkdahl Follow If confirmed, this would be a bit of a game-changer. 9:52 AM - 3 Jun 2014" That’s putting it mildly. If this report from Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin is true, the Bergdahl affair just got a whole lot stickier: "Jenna Lee ✔ @Jennafnc Follow Great reporting from @JenGriffinFNC - new report: Berghdal left behind a note renouncing American citizenship...developing... 9:43 AM - 3 Jun 2014" "David Shor @IshYimini Follow OMG. https://twitter.com/jennafnc/status/473852493286633472 … he left us behind. This is a game changer. He should be happy we didn't drone him. 9:53 AM -...

The excuse-making on behalf of President Obama has always found its most extreme form when it came time to explain why he failed to fulfill his oft-stated 2008 election promise to close Guantanamo. As I’ve documented many times, even the promise itself was misleading, as it became quickly apparent that Obama — even in the absence of congressional obstruction — did not intend to “close GITMO” at all but rather to re-locate it, maintaining its defining injustice of indefinite detention. But the events of the last three days have obliterated the last remaining excuse. In order to secure the release...

Qatar has moved five Afghan Taliban prisoners freed in exchange for a U.S. soldier to a residential compound and will let them move freely in the country, a senior Gulf official said on Tuesday, a step likely to be scrutinized by Washington. U.S. officials have referred to the release of the Islamist militants as a transfer and said they would be subject to certain restrictions in Qatar. One of the officials said that would include a minimum one-year ban on them traveling outside of Qatar as well as monitoring of their activities. "All five men received medical checks and they...

This morning on WMALs “Morning on the Mall” radio show with hosts Brian and Larry I was asked a simple question relating to the Taliban prisoner release and impeachment of the president. I responded yes that in this current case, the U.S. House of Representatives should file articles of impeachment against Barack Hussein Obama.

Breitbart News had the opportunity to speak with Bill Roggio, managing editor of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' The Long War Journal, about the ongoing debacle over the exchange of five senior Taliban commanders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. Roggio has been praised for being “the best-in-class on situation awareness, especially of the Af-Pak theater.” He was embedded within the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army as a reporter in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and he also served in the Army from 1991 to 1997. He provided Breitbart News with valuable feedback: Breitbart News: What is your interpretation of...

U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey says the Army may still pursue an investigation that could lead to desertion charges against Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl (boh BURG'-dahl), who was freed from five years of Taliban captivity in a prisoner exchange last weekend.

Who the hell was President Obama rescuing: Bowe Bergdahl or the Taliban terrorists themselves? The questions arises out of the mind-boggling defense of the Bergdahl deal proferred on today's Morning Joe by Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg, who argued that by dint of the deal, "the President managed to get five guys out of Gitmo." Well, at least President Obama didn't have to send Navy Seals in helicopters over the Gitmo fence to rescue the Talibans. He achieved his goal with a mere stroke of his mighty pen. View the video here.

Today’s reflection: From odd Rose Garden receptions,“And then there were times when he was very idealistic. Some of the stuff he said might have sounded smart inside his head at the time, but I was never inside his head,” to odder emails, clandestine negotiations and unlikely homecomings, things just seem to be growing curiouser and curiouser.Butt all we need is…“Let’s be careful out there.” h/t Sgt. Phil Esterhaus Posted from: Michelle Obama’s Mirror 

MSBNC host Chris Matthews became the first on his network to express the slightest bit of skepticism over the Obama administration’s deal to trade Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five high-ranking Taliban officials from Guantanamo Bay, with Matthews repeatedly questioning the wisdom of trading an “AWOL” and possibly treasonous soldier for terrorist mass murderers. Matthews opened his program Monday with a deeply suspicious look into Bergdahl’s statements and actions before he went inexplicably missing from his post in the summer of 2009. In particular, the MSNBC host highlighted portions of a piece by late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings, which...

A Pentagon investigation concluded in 2010 that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl walked away from his unit, and after an initial flurry of searching the military decided not to exert extraordinary efforts to rescue him, according to a former senior defense official who was involved in the matter. Instead, the U.S. government pursued negotiations to get him back over the following five years of his captivity — a track that led to his release over the weekend. Bergdahl was being checked and treated Monday at a U.S. military hospital in Germany as questions mounted at home over the swap that resulted...

In June 2012, fearless Rolling Stone contributing editor Michael Hastings wrote the definitive first account of Bowe Bergdahl — the young American soldier who was captured by the Taliban and became the last American prisoner of war. Hastings, the journalist who brought down the career of General Stanley McChrystal in these pages, died in a car accident one year later. Bergdahl was freed this weekend. Hastings' incredible story is available in full here: The mother and father sit at the kitchen table in their Idaho farmhouse, watching their son on YouTube plead for his life. The Taliban captured 26-year-old Bowe...