The Long Bowe Hunters

Let's talk about Bowe Bergdahl, shall we? The Right Wing, like always, has been looking for a reason to attack Obama. And their latest one just happens to be the polar opposite of one of their earlier ones. For the past five years, Bowe Bergdahl, the only captured American prisoner, has been a cause célèbre for the GOP, a consistent placard that they could hold up to punctuate the phrase "Obama doesn't care about the troops!"

At least, that's how it was until there was a possibility that Bergdahl might be released. Now, suddenly, people who've been crying out for his release are calling him a traitor. They have literally reversed their position on the subject. And why? Because it might have ended up looking good for the black guy.

Sarah Palin. Senators John McCain (Arizona) and Kelly Ayotte (New Hampshire). Every un-American, small-minded, troop-hating maniac on the right has spun their position 180 degrees away from what they were saying as recently as the beginning of this year. And why? Because they don't care about the military; they only care about attacking the president.

Now, suddenly, all they can say is "Obama has endangered the country! He released terrorists! And for a deserter!"

Let me explain this as clearly and rationally as I can. Anyone who says that we should not have made a deal to get Bowe Bergdahl released can suck my balls.

Are you saying that we should have left an American citizen in the hands of the Taliban? That he deserved to stay in their custody forever? If you believe that, you are a pustulent sore on the asshole of humanity. Oh, and fuck you.

Let's be clear on this - no investigation has been done. There has been no trial. You don't get to convict American citizens on the basis of rumors, half-truths and outright lies. If you want Bowe Bergdahl punished, then you bring him back to the States, and let the military do their job. And if it turns out that he is guilty, then they get to punish him. Not you, not Fox "News," and not every cowardly, Cheeto-eating, overweight loudmouthed blogger on the planet.

Fuck every one of you, you chicken-shit, scum-sucking, America-hating losers.

The military has jurisdiction here, and they've never been shy about using it. Look up the case of another PFC, a guy named Robert Garwood: a POW in Vietnam, he was returned to the US in 1979, where he was tried for desertion and several other charges, court martialed and convicted (they lost the desertion conviction, but got him on other things).

That's the military's job. They're pretty good at it.

Oh, but incidentally, bad news for all you amateur lawyers out there: the maximum punishment for desertion can only be death in a time of war - and the US never declared war in Afghanistan. Plus, there's only been one person given the death sentence for desertion since the Civil War: Eddie Slovik in 1945. The military prefers to avoid that. Most likely, he'd get confinement, demotion and forfeiture of pay. But he'd only get it after a trial. That's how these things work.

The various branches of the Special Forces have taken the position that "you don't leave a man behind" for decades, for one simple reason: it's difficult to get people to risk their lives, if they don't believe that you'll be supporting them later when things go wrong. We support our soldiers for having sworn an oath to protect their country to begin with, and we continue to support them, even if we don't agree with their statements on every subject.

It's called "free speech" - if you stop wiping your ass with the Constitution for a few minutes and read the fucking thing, maybe you'll discover that it gives the American people all kinds of rights that don't involve guns.

We keep hearing that he was responsible for the deaths of soldiers who were searching for him. Unfortunately, you can't really blame him for every death that happened in theater at the time; the records from the region don't really support that.

Mr. Bethea wrote that of the six men killed in August and September, two died in a roadside bombing while on a reconnaissance mission, a third was shot during a search for a Taliban political leader and three others were killed while conducting patrols — two in an ambush and one who stepped on a mine.

He suggested some connection to Sergeant Bergdahl for several of the deaths, saying the Taliban leader and a village that was in the area of one of the patrols were "thought affiliated with Bergdahl's captors." He also said a village in the areas of the other patrol was "near the area where Bergdahl vanished."

Still, those villages and insurgents were in the overall area of responsibility for the soldiers, and the logs make clear that the region was an insurgent hotbed. A log on May 21, 2009, for example, said it had historically been a "safe haven" for the Taliban.

A retired senior American military officer, who was briefed at the time on the search for Sergeant Bergdahl, said that even though soldiers were instructed to watch for signs of the missing American, they would have been conducting patrols and performing risky operations anyway.

"Look, it’s not like these soldiers would have been sitting around their base," he said.

And incidentally, while we're cutting through the lies, can we stop with the phrase "we don't negotiate with terrorists"? Is it because George W. Bush kept repeating that canard? Did you know that he would say it almost immediately after completing a series of negotiations with terrorists for (as one of his chief negotiators pointed out) "information, supplies, personnel — a lot of different topics."

In fact, every president has negotiated with terrorists, whether drug traffickers or radical Islamic factions. Whether it was Carter getting 52 American hostages released in Iran by unfreezing assets from American banks, or Reagan selling missiles to Iran, America has a long history of negotiating with terrorists. As does every other country in the world.

But to hell with that. It doesn't matter what it took to get Bergdahl's release. We got it. Because we had to get it. Here's two quotes for you that explain why: the first is from President Obama. I know, you don't like him, because he's all black and uppity and stuff. Doesn't matter - he's the Commander in Chief of the military, and as he put it:

"Regardless of circumstances ... we still get an American prisoner back," Obama said during a news conference in Warsaw, Poland. "Period, full stop -- we don't condition that."

And if that isn't enough for you, how about the words of the Pentagon spokesman, Rear Admiral John F. Kirby:

"When you're in the Navy, and you go overboard, it doesn't matter if you were pushed, fell or jumped," he said. "We're going to turn the ship around and pick you up."

So, are we clear on this? If you say we should have just left him in the hands of the Afghani's, you are a crappy American. You're allowing your hatred of a black president to make you into a traitor, a coward, and an idiot. Fuck you, and go find a country that shares your beliefs. Try Somalia: you'll like it there - everybody has guns, and women don't have rights.

Asshats of the Week

OK, so this couple in Nebraska, the Alstatt's, took a legal immigrant from Laos named Ae Xaypanya, and used him as an indentured servant.

Xaypanya said the Alstatts took his green card, passport and Social Security card and, at one point, demanded $25,000 for them. They also set up a joint bank account with him and withdrew his wages...

Xaypanya then went to the Alstatts’ tailor shop in Omaha to retrieve his documents and signed a contract saying he’d pay $9,000 for them...

Xaypanya also learned that papers he previously signed thinking they were medical insurance forms were actually life insurance documents, naming the Alstatts’ daughter as the beneficiary.

In a 2009 search of the Alstatts’ home and business, agents found hundreds of files on foreign nationals containing immigration documents, court records say. Investigators also found blank Laotian birth certificates, altered identity documents and evidence that the couple was practicing writing other people’s signatures...

Immigration officers tried to interview other alleged victims but found they were reluctant to speak against the couple. Some immediately called the Alstatts after being interviewed, according to court documents. One woman who allegedly worked for the Alstatts without pay told authorities she was afraid to testify against them.

They aren't slavers. They're just good capitalists.

You can bet they vote Republican.

Time to get back to a system of laws

It's becoming apparent that many of the Guantanamo inmates will be getting away with no more punishment than time already served. Not only are many of the confessions tainted by torture (and therefore inadmissible), a new problem has come to light: thanks to incompetent record-keeping, we just don't have any evidence. And in the end, if you can't make a case, you can't prosecute.

At this point, it's difficult to ascertain why this situation came about. The command staff at Guantanamo may have been overwhelmed by the array of duties that they were being called upon to perform, they may have had no experience at the job and simply bungled it, or they may have assumed that the military courts would simply hand down "guilty" verdicts without actually considering the evidence.

In the words of one former prosecutor (.pdf) who resigned in disgust:

Similarly, neither OMC-P nor CITF maintained any central repository for case files, any method for cataloguing and storing physical evidence, or any other system for assembling a potential case into a readily intelligible format that is the sine qua non of a successful prosecution. While no experienced prosecutor, much less one who had performed his or her duties in the fog of war, would expect that potential war crimes would be presented, at least initially, in "tidy little packages," at the time I inherited the Jawad case, Mr. Jawad had been in U.S. custody for approximately five years. It seemed reasonable to expect at the very least that after such a lengthy period of time, all available evidence would have been collected, catalogued, systemized, and evaluated thoroughly -- particularly since the suspect had been imprisoned throughout the entire time the case should have been undergoing preparation.

Instead, to the shock of my professional sensibilities, I discovered that the evidence, such as it was, remained scattered throughout an incomprehensible labyrinth of databases primarily under the control of CITF, or strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks vacated by prosecutors who had departed the Commissions for other assignments. I further discovered that most physical evidence that had been collected had either disappeared or had been stored in locations that no one with any tenure at, or institutional knowledge of, the Commissions could identify with any degree of specificity or certainty. The state of disarray was so extensive that I later learned, as described below, that crucial physical evidence and other documents relevant to both the prosecution and the defense had been tossed into a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten. Although it took me a number of months -- so extensive was the lack of any discernible organization, and so difficult was it for me to accept that the US military could have failed so miserably in six years of effort -- I began to entertain my first, developing doubts about the propriety of attempting to prosecute Mr. Jawad without any assurance that through the exercise of due diligence I could collect and organize the evidence in a manner that would meet our common professional obligations.

Although certain pundits are pushing the "61 who returned to terror" meme as a reason to keep them imprisoned, it's been easily debunked. (Of course, even if it were correct, their stated 11% recidivism rate is significantly lower than the Bureau of Justice statistic telling us that 67.5% of criminals released from US prisons are "rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years.")

The Republicans, of course, are going insane about the upcoming closure of Gitmo, screaming about "what are we going to do with the TERRORISTS!?!?"

I'm not clear why this is a problem. There are federal facilities all over the place. It's time to just ignore the whining of the congresscritters, and stick them in there. (That's what "exclusive jurisdiction" means, after all — the state authorities don't have any pull in there unless they've been granted some.) If Brownback wants to complain, tell him to figure out where these boys would be welcome, which is already set up as a detention facility, and we can send them there.

In the meantime, tough. Stop knuckling under to the GOP, Obama — they're already proving to be classic Republican contrarians. Just roll over them, and let them get all stampy-feet angry for a while. It's not like they were planning to agree with you any time in the near future anyway.

Once the Guantanamates are safely stowed away, you can give them the trial that they've been denied so far (not that that's going to be an easy matter, of course, since the policies of the Bush administration has made many of them unindictable).

Trial outcome? Easy stuff. If it's determined that they're guilty and sentenced, they take the punishment. If not, we drop a moderately fat check on them, and send them back to their country of record, or to a third country, if necessary. If we don't even give them a chance to settle in the USA, it defuses the arguments of the unhinged right.

All Obama needs to do is fix each problem as it comes up, and move on. Call it the Whack-A-Mole Theory of Governance.