Stefan Molyneux discusses the release of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, his exchange for five senior Taliban officials and the controversy around the latest in a series of questionable decisions by the Obama Administration.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| These are some fascinating, if not downright disturbing facts about the recent prisoner transfer between the Obama administration through the Qatar government to the Taliban in Afghanistan of one Bo Bergdahl, who was a sergeant stationed in a remote outpost near the Vanished from his base in 2009. | |
| He has recently been returned. | |
| He's currently in Germany undergoing a valuation. | |
| He's going to be returned to the United States. | |
| In return for his return, the Obama administration has unleashed from the fires of the Guantanamo hell Five senior Taliban terrorist operatives, one of whom is known to have participated in war crimes that forced the displacement of over 300,000 people in Afghanistan, so not what would be called a righteous dude. | |
| So Bo Bergdahl wanted to renounce U.S. citizenship, according to his fellow soldiers. | |
| They claimed that the I don't know. | |
| What do we call him? | |
| A prisoner of war? | |
| Well, not if he deserted his post, which seems to be the case. | |
| So he left a note behind when he disappeared saying that he no longer wanted to be an American citizen. | |
| And there are some reports, though it was yet unconfirmed, that the search for him after he went missing on June 30, 2009, may have cost the lives of up to six of his fellow soldiers. | |
| Bo Bogdahl declared that he wanted to renounce his U.S. citizenship in a note he left behind in his tent before disappearing, to start a new life, as he quoted according to former members of his army unit. | |
| Some soldiers who served alongside him believe that he may also have walked off their remote outpost in eastern Afghanistan on previous occasions, possibly trying to contact the Taliban, and returned immediately. | |
| Unharmed. | |
| Senior U.S. military officials who debriefed two former members of Sergeant Bergdahl's unit told reporters that on the night he disappeared he left behind a note in which he expressed significant disillusionment with the Army and being an American and suggested that he wanted to renounce his American citizenship and go to find the Taliban. | |
| He had been openly scathing about America and the military in recent emails to his parents at one time writing to his father, I am ashamed to be an American. | |
| After five years in captivity, the former prisoner of war, or guy who tried to join the enemy, was released in a controversial exchange for five Afghan Taliban leaders held at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center for more than a decade. | |
| Now, after he left, apparently voluntarily, to go and seek his bliss among the Taliban or the mountains of Afghanistan, After he left, Taliban attacks on the base became more accurate and frequent. | |
| Troops were fearing that the missing soldier was supplying information to the enemy, let's say either under duress or involuntarily. | |
| One radio operator said that his team picked up radio intercepts in which Afghans in a nearby village were talking about an American soldier seeking an English speaker so that he could communicate with the Taliban. | |
| The army investigated Bergdahl's disappearance a year later and concluded that it was incontrovertible that he walked away from his unit near the Pakistan border. | |
| So, just a couple of comments from people who served with him. | |
| He was very, very quiet. | |
| He kept everything very close to the vest. | |
| So after he actually left the following morning, we realized we have Bergdahl's weapon, we have Bergdahl's body armor, we have Bergdahl's sensitive equipment, but we don't have Bo Bergdahl. | |
| And this is quite a challenge to sustain as a story about an honorable soldier who left. | |
| Listen, I mean, I've never served in uniform. | |
| I do come from a family with a fairly extensive military background, so I know a little bit about this. | |
| Desertion is second only in crimes in the military to actually joining the enemy and firing back on your own troops. | |
| Burgl asked one of his companions or one of his comrades, I wonder how much of a cash advance I can get, and I wonder how I could mail home my personal computer and other belongings. | |
| He was also asked what would happen if his weapon and other sensitive items such as night vision goggles went missing. | |
| So this is quite challenging to figure out. | |
| I'm not sure why there's going to be a huge amount of investigation. | |
| If somebody leaves their post and doesn't return, certainly after 30 days, that's considered to be a deserter. | |
| Absent without leave is prior to that. | |
| Could he have been captured? | |
| There's some vague hints that he might have been captured taking a crap, but you're supposed to have your weapon with you, and they said that there was no weapon there. | |
| So this is a huge challenge. | |
| Now, what is going on in terms of the ethics, the legality, and the foreign policy? | |
| Well, once again, we have the rampant misuse of the imperial presidency. | |
| A 2013 law that Obama signed in December required that he provide Chairman of Congressional Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committee's 30 days notice before transferring Guantanamo Bay prisoners to foreign countries. | |
| He's been widely accused, Obama has been widely accused, of breaking a federal law that he signed in December. | |
| And this is a big problem. | |
| Now, his administration has justified the action by citing fears about Bergdahl's health. | |
| Those concerns were first raised when the Taliban delivered a video to the U.S. government in January showing a frail-looking Bergdahl apparently in need of medical attention, but it appears to have been or some people believe that it was a ploy to accelerate negotiations. | |
| In a subsequent video released by Taliban forces last Tuesday night, he appeared strong and in good health when U.S. Special Forces retrieved him from his captors. | |
| So, basically, we have a soldier who appears to have deserted, renounced his citizenship, and gone in search of joining the enemy. | |
| This is not a prisoner of war. | |
| He was not captured fighting the enemy. | |
| He walked out of the base, apparently, and went to go and join the enemy. | |
| This will, of course... | |
| Probably never be established because the Taliban probably won't talk. | |
| And he himself probably won't talk. | |
| I mean, why would he? | |
| What's the point of being released from being a captor in Afghanistan to going into jail in America for desertion and joining forces with the enemy if he talks about that? | |
| So probably there would be no answer with this at some point. | |
| So, some people have said, I'm particularly troubled by the release of five senior Taliban leaders, men with the blood of many on their hands, and the implications for our deployed forces. | |
| I am no less, this is Mr. | |
| McKeon, I'm no less concerned that the Obama administration broke a national security law passed with bipartisan support and signed by the President in transferring these detainees. | |
| Now, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel The House Committee on Armed Services on Wednesday questioned Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on why the Obama administration failed to obey this new law requiring this. | |
| I can tell you it's because, both as a Democrat and as the first multiracial president, he can pretty much get away with anything. | |
| You may have noticed that the anti-war movement has evaporated since Obama took power. | |
| So, Dianne Feinstein, the senator of California Democrat, chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said Tuesday that the White House apologized to her for its, quote, oversight in not providing the notification. | |
| Oversight. | |
| What a fantastic word for law-breaking. | |
| Oversight. | |
| No, officer, you see, I was going 200 in a 100 zone, but I'm not breaking the law. | |
| It's just an oversight. | |
| Oh, sorry, I couldn't pay my taxes this year. | |
| I'm really not planning to, but don't worry. | |
| I'm using the magic word oversight so that you don't have to worry about me breaking the law. | |
| It's not breaking the law. | |
| The constitutional lawyer, Obama, signed the document. | |
| And ignorance of the law cannot possibly be cited as an excuse. | |
| Now why would people accept the president breaking a law with bipartisan support which he himself signed? | |
| Well, of course, nobody wants to be in the position of challenging or being upset or being negative about an American soldier coming home, which is a challenge. | |
| The President also dismissed a swarm of objections from Congress as par for the course when he has to make tough decisions. | |
| I don't mean to break it to the president or anybody else with a few brain cells rolling around in their cranium, but the law, you see, is kind of designed so that you're not supposed to make what you call tough decisions. | |
| That's not really what the law is about. | |
| The law is supposed to tell you what you can and cannot do. | |
| There should be no tough decisions involved. | |
| Like, if I want to go strangle a hobo, It's not making a tough decision. | |
| It's breaking the law. | |
| It's committing murder. | |
| The whole point of a framework of law and limited government and limited powers and the balance of powers is so that you're not allowed to make what you call tough decisions. | |
| It was a tough decision to run over that pregnant woman in my car. | |
| How will we accept this thing? | |
| You're not supposed to be making decisions. | |
| You're supposed to be obeying the law. | |
| That's why you have a law. | |
| That's why you have a bipartisan support for law. | |
| That's why you signed the law. | |
| You're not supposed to be making tough decisions. | |
| The madness continues. | |
| Senator Ted Cruz says he will introduce a bill ordering the halt of all prisoner deportations from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. | |
| Great job! | |
| Great job, Senator Cruz, because the last law worked so well. | |
| Let's have another one, shall we? | |
| This one will work. | |
| Hey, that train went right through that little ribbon, but don't worry, I have another ribbon. | |
| Ah, now it will stop. | |
| Obama said, with respect to how we announced it, I think it's important for people to realize that this is not some abstraction. | |
| This is not political football. | |
| You have a couple of parents whose kid volunteered to fight in a distant land who they haven't seen in five years and weren't sure whether they'd ever see again. | |
| And as Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces, I am responsible for those kids. | |
| Oh man, the neuro-linguistic programming of this man, his abilities are just absolutely staggering. | |
| It is a genuine pillar of evil that we can all salute, however regretfully it might be eating away at our foundations of freedom. | |
| What do we say? | |
| They're not kids. | |
| The guy's 26. | |
| So, first of all, unless America is going to openly admit that it is using child soldiers, then don't refer to people who have volunteered in the military or who have served in the military as being kids. | |
| They're not kids at all. | |
| If they were kids, you'd be committing a war crime. | |
| It's just a way of making you feel like it's a kid and we should be nice. | |
| Now, Volunteer is one of these words that people seem to get quite confused. | |
| Like, language seems to invert. | |
| Up becomes down, black becomes white, when we approach the military. | |
| So, first of all, I use the word serve, but they don't serve. | |
| They don't serve. | |
| The military is for blowing things up and killing people. | |
| You can get served a pizza, you can get served in tennis, you can get served in a debate. | |
| But you don't get served by anything in the military except a bullet. | |
| And that's not really the kind of service that we're usually talking about when we want a little bit of extra foam on our latte. | |
| Volunteer is another word that seems to be quite confusing for people when talking about the military. | |
| Can you imagine if I say, well, I'm going to go volunteer, go to the local animal shelter. | |
| I'm going to volunteer for you. | |
| What does that mean? | |
| It means I'm going to work there without pay. | |
| I'm volunteering my time. | |
| I am volunteering my resources. | |
| I may be even volunteering my kidney. | |
| All of that means, the word volunteer means there's no price tag involved. | |
| Volunteer is just one of these words that's supposed to create a feeling of reciprocal emotional obligation to whoever you say is a volunteer, like we owe them something back because they've been so generous and so on. | |
| This is nonsense. | |
| People in the military do not volunteer. | |
| They are paid. | |
| They are paid. | |
| Room, board, money, healthcare, pensions, benefits, you name it. | |
| Free housing. | |
| They are paid. | |
| Therefore, they are not volunteers. | |
| So I think that's kind of important. | |
| But again, kids, volunteers, it's all designed to bring out your instincts of protection and reciprocal social obligation, and it's complete nonsense. | |
| But, you know, when you say things in a slow and measured and patient tone, it just seems to fall into people's hearts without intellectual combat like dropping stones down a well. | |
| He's more of a hypnotist than a speechifier. | |
| So, one of the guys who was released, named Mohamed Faisal, Taliban forces led by this fine fellow swept through a village on the Shemali Plain north of Kabul in 1999 in a scorched earth offensive that overall prompted some 300,000 people to flee for their lives. | |
| This is the equivalent of several million Americans having to flee some Genghis Khan-style rampage. | |
| And now, of course, The guy's been released. | |
| They're all completely terrified. | |
| Local residents are responding with fear and dismay to the U.S. release of the notorious commander, along with four other Taliban leaders in exchange for Sergeant Bobo Gdall. | |
| The group released a video. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| So they're terrified. | |
| The villagers in this area were once the orchard of central Afghanistan, and the plane's carefully tended vineyards were famous for their grapes. | |
| When the Taliban seized control of this area from the Northern Alliance rivals in 99, they systematically demolished entire villages, blowing up houses, burning fields, and seeding the land with crop snow, tragically with landmines. | |
| And those who followed the landmine tragedy of the 20th century into the early 21st century knows that this is an intergenerational present of severed limbs and shattered lives because landmines tend to last a hell of a long time and they're still blowing up in Vietnam. | |
| So this is war crimes and atrocities. | |
| So this guy who's been released played a major role in the destruction of an entire agricultural area of Afghanistan and the displacement of the equivalent of millions of Americans in Afghanistan. | |
| He said, there was not a single undamaged house, according to a shopkeeper. | |
| My entire shop was burned to the ground. | |
| There was nothing left. | |
| Now, of course, the one way to guarantee that people are going to be kidnapped is to have a disproportionate exchange value in your trades. | |
| Trading some senior terrorist for a guy who most likely deserted and joined the enemy is completely insane. | |
| I don't know exactly how to get across how crazy it is, but can you imagine, just off the top of my head, can you imagine when the British were fighting the Nazis in the Second World War, can you imagine the British Releasing high-level Nazis to go and return to the fight against England. | |
| You know, Hess or Goering or Himmler. | |
| Can you imagine them releasing them back to Nazi Germany during a war in return for a British soldier who had renounced his citizenship or wanted to and had gone to join the Nazis? | |
| This would be absolutely incomprehensible. | |
| You know, I'm not a big fan of war, but if you're in it, be in it to win it. | |
| And this is not how you do it. | |
| So somebody asked a Taliban leader whether they would be inspired by the exchange to kidnap others, and he laughed. | |
| Definitely, he says, it's better to kidnap one person like Bergdahl than kidnapping hundreds of useless people. | |
| It has encouraged our people. | |
| Now, everybody will work hard to capture such an important bird. | |
| Horrendous. | |
| Just horrendous. | |
| Now, why are people disturbed about this? | |
| Well, the U.S. has this sort of official policy of not negotiating with terrorists. | |
| Like all policies or laws, remember, they're black and white for you, but all kinds of shades of gray for the leaders, right? | |
| Laws are spelled out clearly for you, even if you don't really understand them and can't figure them out, which is, you know, we all commit three felonies a day. | |
| But for the leaders, it's all supposed to be kind of fuzzy. | |
| So there is a policy in the U.S. of not negotiating with terrorists, but they regularly do so. | |
| Now, this guy was held by a group called the Haqqanis, and the Haqqanis have been designated as a terrorist group. | |
| So this is kind of a problem. | |
| We don't want to negotiate with terrorists. | |
| They keep referring to them as the Taliban, but the Taliban is a big ecosystem of competing tribal factions, one of whom is the Haqqanis, who are a designated terror group. | |
| So this is a big problem. | |
| Did Obama cut a deal with terrorists to return... | |
| A traitor in exchange for high-level terrorists. | |
| So Michigan Rep Mike Rogers, the Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman, said recently he was not a prisoner of war. | |
| He was with the Haqqani Network, which is a terrorist organization. | |
| That's why Rogers has accused Obama of violating stated policy of not negotiating with terrorists. | |
| So, according to the Institute for the Study of War, the Hekani Network is an officially subsumed under the larger Taliban umbrella organization, led by Mullah Omar and his Qeta Shura Taliban, although the group maintains its own independent command structure and operations. | |
| Now, the way that Obama and his administration got around this was to go through the Qatar government and the Qatar government then negotiated with the Haqqanis. | |
| So therefore, in some bizarre act of not even pretending to be logical, the Obama administration says, we did not negotiate with terrorists because we negotiated with someone who was negotiating with the terrorists. | |
| In other words, we passed a note And then that note was passed to the terrorists. | |
| Therefore, we didn't pass the note. | |
| Well, of course, that's completely insane and completely ridiculous and would never stand up in a court of law if you tried to use that as some kind of defense for criminal action. | |
| But I guess it's enough bullcrap that it can allow the liberal media to pretend that nothing completely immoral happened. | |
| So why do they keep talking about the Taliban over the Haqqanis, right? | |
| Well, you know, he was held by the Taliban and so on, because one is an official terrorist organization and one is not. | |
| In September 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved an official U.S. State Department designation of the Haqqani Network as a foreign terrorist organization. | |
| The Afghan Taliban has not been so designated. | |
| Now, the Haqqanis are kind of unpalatable for another reason, which, again, you won't see a whole lot I've talked about in the left-leaning media. | |
| And the reason that the Haqqanis are so unpalatable is because they are heavily tied and have close ties to Al-Qaeda. | |
| In other words, President Obama didn't just negotiate with a terrorist organization They negotiated with what is generally considered the greatest and most dangerous threat to America, which is al-Qaeda. | |
| So to negotiate for al-Qaeda, with an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group, And provide five high-level operatives in return for one seeming traitor. | |
| It's such a ridiculously lopsided deal that we can only hope that there's some rationale behind it that will come out in time, because it's so completely bizarre. | |
| I guess maybe it wipes the VA scandal or the Benghazi scandal off the front pages for a few days, but it's hard to imagine how this could possibly have occurred. | |
| I mean, maybe he wants to close Guantanamo, as some people have suggested, and that's why he's doing this. | |
| But I just want to leave you with one last thought. | |
| You know, if you remember Clive and Bundy recently, the government was talking about how much it cared about the tortoises in Nevada when it had dropped several hundred nuclear weapons in Nevada, which I don't believe tortoises are immune to. | |
| The amount of insult leveled at the intelligence of Americans is truly astounding. | |
| Because here, President Obama is claiming that the reason he wanted to rush this transfer, to rush this deal, With an Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist network to release war criminals and genocidal maniacs from prison, to release Lex Luthor, Khan, Hitler's ghost, and this guy from Guantanamo is because he was very concerned, you see, With the good sergeant's health. | |
| See, the Obama administration is so concerned with the health of the soldiers, which is why they did such a great job and fessed up and owned up and fixed all the problems in the VA health care system. | |
| This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Radio. |