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.)
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?
I must say, the Gitmo Five released in exchange for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, look frightening. The five senior Taliban commanders are Mullah Mohammad Fazl, Mullah Norullah Noori, Abdul Haq Wasiq, Khairullah Khairkhwa, and Mohammed Nabi Omari.
Don’t worry. “… the Qataris,” writes Eli Lake, [will] “keep them under house arrest.”
Couldn’t Obama find a gentler-looking bunch to release from Gitmo? A few friendly metrosexuals called Mohammads?
Barack Obama, Ethics, Journalism, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Rights
Did CNN just break a pattern by reporting on Barack Obama’s law-breaking?
Today, Jeffry Toobin, a senior legal analyst and one among an army of Obama sycophants at CNN, was briefly seen admitting that Obama did indeed break the law when he arranged the Bergdahl prisoner swap without giving Congress 30-day notice, required when releasing detainees.
Then, when I went in search of this historical event—a CNN pundit calling a spade a spade vis-a-vis Barack Obama—I was unable to trace the snippet.
Was The Event a figment of my imagination, or did this BHO shill tell it like it is, for once?
It happened! Via National Review:
The Obama administration’s failure to notify Congress of the release of five Guantanamo Bay detainees ahead of his exchanging them for American soldier Bowe Bergdahl is a direct violation of the law, according to CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.
“I think he clearly broke the law,” Toobin said on Monday, adding that the president’s signing statement in which he called the law unconstitutional does not automatically make it so. “Certainly this is an example of a signing statement where the president is taking power for himself that the law didn’t give him — he’s explicitly contradicting it.”
As the articulate Nathan Bradley Bethea seconded today, also on CNN, unaltered is the ethical obligation to retrieve this man (whose parents are pretty off-putting).
The 30-day, notice-to-Congress law is procedural in nature. In exchanging Taliban terrorists for Bowe Bergdahl, Obama, who most certainly tramples rights daily, was, this once, flouting protocol, not rights.
UPDATE: WHAT DOES ROBERT REDFORD THINK? Yeah, that’s CNN’s headline with respect to “Obama’s big green move”:
What Robert Redford thinks about it.