Some critics of the prisoner swap that exchanged Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban detainees said there was no evidence, as President Barack Obama insisted in a press conference Tuesday, that the soldier’s deteriorating health necessitated swift action to secure his release.
But the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night that the U.S. intelligence community had evidence of Bergdahl’s failing health, based on a secret analysis of two videos of the soldier in captivity that were provided to U.S. officials. One was shot in 2011 and the other in December 2013, the latter of which has never been publicly shown.
Officials who saw the recent video described Bergdahl’s condition to the Journal as “alarming.” The analysis of the videos showing the accelerating decline of Bergdahl’s health partially convinced some holdouts within the Obama administration, like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, as well as leaders in the Pentagon to back the proposed deal, according to the Journal.
One anonymous defense official summed up the calculus behind the exchange: Bergdahl’s value as a prisoner was declining rapidly, along with his health, as U.S. troops were slated to pull out of Afghanistan.
“We believe they saw Bergdahl as a golden egg. That is why they kept him alive and as healthy as possible. But as he deteriorated, some people believe he became more of a burden to them,” the official told the Journal. “And as the war was ending some of them [Taliban] came to doubt his value. He was more of a liability as his health declined.”
Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu (R) appeared Monday on Fox News and compared Bergdahl’s “health issue” to the White House’s initial, flawed explanation for the 2012 Benghazi attacks.
“Well, look, they resorted to a YouTube video as an excuse for the failures of what they did at Benghazi,” he said. “Now they’re resorting to the health issue as an excuse for having done a bad thing here.”
House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rodgers (R-MI) on Tuesday also disputed that concerns about Bergdahl’s health gave Obama justification to release five prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay facility without notifying Congress 30 days beforehand, as required by law.
“Their rhetoric does not match the facts on the ground. This notion that is was an acute health care — yesterday we were informed it wasn’t acute, they had no information that it was acute,” he said. “I don’t know why you’d say that … everything that they’re saying, I don’t know if they understand that, but there are very clear fact trails here. And those fact trails will come out in the course of time.”
I don’t care what the other videos show! I only care what the video Fox shows me says!
While it is always amusing to hear a Rethug say the word ‘facts’, there is nothing amusing about the incendiary political machinations ginned up domestically by the GOP and an increasingly unwatched old media terrified of being on the wrong side of anything thought to be patriotic.
Hasn’t the media that brought us ‘UFO Balloon Boy’ and Dubya’s fake war yet learned to stick a toe in the water before jumping into the pool?
I hope NBC gets some heat for not masking Special Forces faces in the exchange footage and I hope the soldiers who violated their nondisclosure/secrecy oaths by speaking to the broken media will be punished.
Who you gonna believe? Fox News, or your lying eyes?
So basically, their knee jerk opposition to Obama has them arguing that the death of an American soldier in the hands of the enemy was just one part of the equation. And if he had died in captivity you know who would have been blamed as a murderer for not doing enough to get him back. Every time I think they could not be more crazed or stoop even lower, they prove me wrong.
There was no point in telling Congress anyways. They would have made the same stink they are now even after being told this stuff in confidence / classified manner, and, probably would have ended up with the Taliban just killing this guy or putting out tons of videos of them torturing him.
Just don’t see the benefit.