Bowe Supporters, this is an article that youll want to read. Its quite long so its very helpful if you read it twice to be sure you dont miss anything. Below were sharing only a part of the lengthy 2,650 word report so if you only read whats posted here, youll really miss a lot. FROM HARPERS MAGAZINE: The day after the prisoner exchange, a headline in the New York Times read, “planned celebration for sgt. bowe bergdahl just got a whole lot bigger.” Correspondents who had covered the story since 2009 returned to Hailey and descended on Sue Martin’s coffee shop, where Bergdahl had worked before joining the Army, to cover the feel-good angles. “Media people were giving me big hugs,” said Martin, adding that some were in tears. Camera crews hit Main Street to get shots of the fresh ribbons and Drussel’s posters, and to capture quotes expressing cheer and relief. By Monday, though, it had become clear that the politics of war, the business of politics, and the seductions of an election-year scandal were converging, and the media in New York got to work on their own angles. In the absence of information, free-associative suspicions filled the airwaves. On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly told his 2,658,000 viewers that Bowe’s father “looks like a Muslim.” Later that week, he generously offered that, while “Sergeant Bergdahl and his father appear to be Taliban sympathizers . . . they should be given the benefit of every doubt.” O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and national-security correspondent Jennifer Griffin even took to mispronouncing the family’s name with an occidental inflection, as “berg-DAAHL.” The New York office of the Daily Mail, the world’s most-visited news website, posted some of the earliest articles alleging that Robert Bergdahl had Taliban sympathies. The site also scrutinized the family’s hunting activities and history of home-schooling, and published a photo caption ridiculing their modest home. {AND MORE} We still have no definitive account of what happened after Bergdahl, then a private, disappeared from infantry outpost Mest Malak in the early hours of June 30, 2009. A man claiming to be one of his captors later told the Sunday Times that he had been spotted walking into a village with an Afghan soldier. A group of Taliban gunmen were reportedly alerted; they killed the Afghan soldier, then struck Bergdahl in the face with a rifle butt and apprehended him. American intelligence records offer different stories, many of which informed the most thorough account to date, a 2012 Rolling Stone article by the late Michael Hastings. But even Hastings’s version has its gaps and inconsistencies. One of the first radio messages intercepted the day Bergdahl went missing said, “An American solider with a camera is looking for someone who speaks English.” This tidbit, first reported by Hastings, has been widely presented as evidence that Bergdahl defected. But the writer Robert Young Pelton, who was in eastern Afghanistan in the days after Bergdahl went missing, wrote on Vice’s website last week that this intelligence was based on a faulty translation. According to Pelton, it was the kidnappers, not Bergdahl, who were looking for a camera and an English-speaker, because they needed to make a hostage tape. The day after Bergdahl disappeared, American intelligence operatives picked up another radio conversation that casts doubt on the “willing defection” narrative and that, in light of Pelton’s reporting, seems to support the simpler theory of a kidnapping. In the conversation, one Taliban fighter tells another that when they found Bergdahl, he “was sitting taking [shit] he had no gun with him. He was taking [shit], he has not cleaned his butt yet,” one man says. “What [shame] for them,” says the second. In the first days after the swap, the Pentagon stated forcefully that Bergdahl was not directly responsible for any American military deaths. An investigation by the New York Times backs up those statements, as does Pelton’s reporting. FoxNews acknowledged as much, too, in an article confirming that two soldiers who were killed while the Bergdahl search was under way had not died while on patrol. READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE: harpers.org/blog/2014/07/my-un-private-idaho/
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 20:48:25 +0000
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