Monthly Archives: June 2014

Bowe Bergdahl’s Story Grows In The Telling

From being treated like a caged animal to enjoying the privileges of a comrade, the odyssey of Taliban hostage Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl just gets weirder. Down to his progressive, off-putting parents, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, traded “five fierce-looking Muhammadans from Afghanistan’s Jihad Central,” conjures John Walker Lindh, alias Abdul Hamid, a 20-year-old American who had been captured by U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan, during the 2001 invasion. Walker was a combatant, fighting for the Taliban.

Reports James Rosen, a very credible reporter at Fox News:

U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl at one point during his captivity converted to Islam, fraternized openly with his captors and declared himself a “mujahid,” or warrior for Islam, according to secret documents prepared on the basis of a purported eyewitness account and obtained by Fox News.
The reports indicate that Bergdahl’s relations with his Haqqani captors morphed over time, from periods of hostility, where he was treated very much like a hostage, to periods where, as one source told Fox News, “he became much more of an accepted fellow” than is popularly understood. He even reportedly was allowed to carry a gun at times.
The documents show that Bergdahl at one point escaped his captors for five days and was kept, upon his re-capture, in a metal cage, like an animal. In addition, the reports detail discussions of prisoner swaps and other attempts at a negotiated resolution to the case that appear to have commenced as early as the fall of 2009. … MORE.

No wonder Bergdahl looks so lost and pitiful in the clip of his release (via the New York Times). The military is home to some confused individuals. This poor guy thought he was joining UN Peacekeeping.

Marie Barf : Sibilant Tart At State

Feminism, Gender, Government

Marie Barf, sibilant spokeswoman for the State Department, already has a dossier on Barely a Blog. Our last entry, “Stupid Bitch At Foggy Bottom,*” marveled at the way this low-watt, schoolmarmish yet tartish young spokeswoman (who, no doubt, hails from an Ivy League school), seemed incapable of responding to reasoned repartee. Barf’s performance was repeated today. “Google it on the web,” she lectured, with reference to “a ton of conflicting reports” about Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl’s alleged desertion.

To be so confident and incompetent at the same time is a marvel of the Millennial …

Junge Freiheit On South Africa

Europe, Ilana Mercer, Multiculturalism, Race, South-Africa

For our German readers, the German weekly Junge Freiheit, to which I hope to contribute regularly, features an interview about Into the Cannibal’s Pot, conducted by Moritz Schwarz. Highlights of the English version should run in the US and South Africa in the coming months.

MORE @Junge Freiheit. (I suspect the archive has to be searched for this issue: © JUNGE FREIHEIT Verlag GmbH & Co. www.jungefreiheit.de 20/14 /09. Mai 2014.)

The War Party Galvanizes Against A Grunt

Military, Terrorism, War

I disagree with Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo that US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is a martyr, or anything like the man Edward Snowden is. But who can dispute the following sentiment, expressed in “Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl: Prisoner of the War Party”?

It’s hard to believe any decent human being would even consider putting Bergdahl through more trauma than he’s already endured – but in the case of the War Party, exemplified by the foam-flecked Ralph Peters [a Fox News “military analyst”], we aren’t talking about decent people. They will exact their pound of flesh from an ordinary, powerless individual caught in the headwinds of our turbulent era, just to make an ideological point: that the war was and is justified, that we’re pulling out too soon, and – more importantly – that no individual “insider,” whether a private in the Army or a top level technologist for the NSA, has the moral right to obey their conscience when it conflicts with their orders. The government decides, as Michael Kinsley argued in Snowden’s case, and not the individual – who is merely a cog in a gigantic “democratic” machine. After all, as the neocons and their “progressive” allies say of Snowden, who is he to make these decisions unilaterally?