Free Republic

President Barack Obama is moving ahead with his push to close the Guantanamo Bay prison despite the uproar over the exchange of five Taliban prisoners for a captured American soldier, an administration official said Thursday. The government has been working to reduce a backlog of prisoners already approved after a security review for transfer to their homeland or repatriation elsewhere, the official told reporters. The official said a “significant number” of prisoners are on their way toward release, but he declined to say precisely how many or when they would leave Guantanamo. The remarks were made on condition of anonymity...

The Obama administration passed up multiple opportunities to rescue Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl because the president was dead-set on finding a reason to begin emptying Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a Pentagon official. 'JSOC went to the White House with several specific rescue-op scenarios,' the official with knowledge of interagency negotiations underway since at least November 2013 told MailOnline, referring to the Joint Special Operations Command. 'But no one ever got traction.' 'What we learned along the way was that the president wanted a diplomatic scenario that would establish a precedent for repatriating detainees from Gitmo,' he said. The official said...

National Security: A new study says that since 2010 the number of terrorists threatening the U.S. has doubled as terrorist groups have increased by more than half. The president has been whistling past our graveyard. The predicate for President Obama's trade of what some have called the Taliban's board of directors for a soldier whose platoon and squad leaders have called a deserter who abandoned his post is a reprise of the Obama 2012 campaign meme — the war on terror is over and terrorists, particularly al-Qaida, are on the run. It is the lie that spawned the Benghazi cover-up...

Not all of this can be an oversight: 1. Obama goes to Afghanistan on a surprise visit. 2. CIA Station Chief is outed (oops). 3. A deal is made for a known deserter they didn't know was a deserter with possible Talibani leanings (oops). 4. WH forgets to tell Congress (oops. 5. WH frees five top terrorists, allegedly transfers $5M into the enemy's bank account, and brings Bergdahl home. I know Michelle Malkin cruises FR. You can't fire the CIA Chief of Station for disagreeing with the trade, but if you out him its the same thing, right? Is there...

Here's the thing about Bergdahl and the Jump-to-Conclusions mats: What if his platoon was long on psychopaths and short on leadership? (1/5)— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) June 5, 2014

Scrub-a-dub-dub. When Brandon Friedman took to Twitter to plant the seeds for another attack on Bowe Bergdahl’s whistle-blowing platoon mates, his bio proudly announced his role as deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “What if [Bergdahl's] platoon was long on psychopaths and short on leadership?” he tweeted, before calling for everyone to “withhold judgment” about allegations that Bergdahl deserted. “I’m not a fan of such speculation,” he added. Uh huh. And then Friedman scrubbed his Twitter bio. Here’s the Google cache from Jun 3, 2014:

Reuters reporter Mark Felsenthal reports that Sgt. Bergdahl's hometown in Idaho is cancelling its planned celebration. "Bergdahl's home town in Idaho has canceled plans for a celebration, city administrator says," reports Felsenthal on Twitter.

In Hailey, Idaho, the hometown of freed U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl, the joy at his release has turned for some into shock and fear — the fear of picking up the phone. That's because some town officials have been deluged with angry calls from people who think that Bergdahl is an Army deserter or traitor who doesn't deserve a hero's welcome.

President Obama, facing rising bipartisan criticism over his handling of the Taliban-for-Bergdahl prisoner swap, dug in his heels Thursday and declared he would make "absolutely no apologies" for bringing an American soldier home -- as his administration stepped up its defense of the controversial deal. The president fielded a question on the Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl controversy during a press conference on Thursday in Brussels, Belgium, alongside British Prime Minister David Cameron. Amid signals that the administration plans to aggressively challenge critics of the deal, the president brushed off the pushback as business as usual in Washington. "I'm never surprised by...

Asked whether the Taliban would be inspired by the exchange to kidnap others, a commander laughed. “Definitely." In the days and hours leading up to the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl last week, his Taliban captors in Pakistan prepared for a big sendoff. Those selected to physically hand Bergdahl over to U.S. officials at a pre-arranged location on the other side of the border in Afghanistan rehearsed the messages they wanted to convey to the American people. A videographer was assigned to cover the event, for propaganda purposes. And those closest to Bergdahl commissioned a local tailor to make him...

The announcement that the U.S. government had secured the release of missing U.S. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and that it was freeing five senior Taliban figures from Guantanamo Bay has been portrayed first and foremost as a prisoner exchange. But the four-year history of secret dialogue that led to Saturday's release suggests that the main goal of each side may have been far more sweeping. It was about setting the stage for larger discussions on a future peaceful Afghanistan. As The Associated Press first reported in 2011, talks about releasing the five senior Taliban reach back to at least late 2010,...

The State Department’s attempt to shut up the soldiers who served with Bowe Bergdahl at the time of his capture may end up backfiring on the White House, which has apparently decided to attack their integrity rather than explain their own spin on the issue. One soldier appeared on Fox and Friends this morning who took part in the post-desertion search for Bergdahl and said that the military instructed them to lie about the circumstances of Bergdahl’s disappearance (via Noah Rothman at Mediaite): “The sentiment that everybody knew was that he walked off the base in the middle of the...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Among the most tantalizing mysteries surrounding Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s departure from his U.S. military base in 2009 is this: Was he trying to find the Taliban? Or did he simply wander away and get captured? Politicians and members of the military have criticized the Obama administration’s decision to swap five jailed Taliban leaders for Bergdahl, saying the soldier may have deserted. Until now, few details have emerged about the circumstances of Bergdahl’s disappearance from his base. But The Washington Post has reached Afghan villagers who spotted Bergdahl shortly after he slipped away from his base. To them, it’s clear something...

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 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 Battle of Kamdesh, one of the most deadly military engagements during the U.S. war in Afghanistan, turned especially bloody – leaving eight Americans dead and 22 wounded – because troops and aircraft normally tasked to support U.S. fighting men and woman were diverted to search for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The Oct. 3, 2009 battle at Combat Outpost Keating, near the town of Kamdesh in Nuristan province, lasted more than 12 hours and earned two Army staff sergeants the Medal of Honor, the highest award for bravery the Pentagon can bestow on a warrior. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2647711/Revealed-Hunt-Bowe-Bergdahl-left-troops-unprotected-bloody-battle-left-EIGHT-U-S-soldiers-dead-22-wounded-produced-two-Medal-Honor-recipients.html#ixzz33dBfsoz2 Follow us: @MailOnline...

In his five years of captivity, Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was never listed by the Pentagon as a prisoner of war. Nor has the U.S. applied that term to any of its Taliban prisoners — including the five senior Taliban figures who were released last weekend from detention at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in exchange for Bergdahl’s freedom. A look at how that process works:

(CNN) - Former Army Sgt. Evan Buetow was the team leader with Bowe Bergdahl the night Bergdahl disappeared. "Bergdahl is a deserter, and he's not a hero," says Buetow. "He needs to answer for what he did." Within days of his disappearance, says Buetow, teams monitoring radio chatter and cell phone communications intercepted an alarming message: The American is in Yahya Khel (a village two miles away). He's looking for someone who speaks English so he can talk to the Taliban. "I heard it straight from the interpreter's lips as he heard it over the radio," said Buetow. "There's a...

As one of the characters in “Anchorman” observed of its bloody brawl between news teams: Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean, that really got out of hand fast. Two days after President Obama broke the law to arrange an insanely reckless swap of five incredibly dangerous Taliban terrorists for captive American Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, virtually every aspect of the deal has blown up in Obama’s face, and the whole thing has soured into another five-star scandal for an Administration riddled with them. Maybe it’s the accumulated weight of Obama fatigue, or the sheer stupidity and arrogance the President displayed in...

The Pentagon on several occasions had ground-level intelligence on where ArmySgt. Bowe Bergdahl was being held captive at various times — down to how many gunmen were guarding him — but special operations commanders repeatedly shelved rescue missions because they didn’t want to risk casualties for a man they believed to be a “deserter,” sources familiar with the mission plans said. Commanders on the ground debated whether to pull the trigger on a rescue several times in recent years, according to one of the sources, a former high-level intelligence official in Afghanistan, who said the conclusion each time was that...

For all the yellow ribbons strewn across his hometown in Idaho and the gratitude expressed by his parents in an emotional visit to the White House on Saturday, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl will receive a hero’s welcome when he returns to the United States after nearly five years in Taliban captivity. From military forums across the country, a groundswell of anger is rising over the Obama administration’s silence on perhaps the most controversial question surrounding the deal that freed Bergdahl in exchange for five senior Taliban members: Was he a deserter? So far, the U.S....