Allah:
Can’t be true. Ransoms are paid for hostages, and Jay Carney assured me Bergdahl was a prisoner, not a hostage.
This isn’t out-of-left-field speculation. Fox News reported two days ago that a ransom for Bergdahl was on the table inside U.S. intelligence circles as recently as December. The key point to grasp here, writes Lachlan Markay, is that the Haqqani Network, which was holding Bergdahl, and the Taliban are two different outfits. The Taliban are true jihadis, bent on reconquering Afghanistan. The Haqqanis are more of an Afghan mafia, bent on enriching themselves. Both have killed lots of American soldiers but only the Haqqanis are aterrorist organization designed by the State Department. The Taliban should be designated, but if we do that and then keep pressing ahead with “peace talks” with them on our way out of the country, Obama will be accused of negotiating with terrorists. (Like he did here, in negotiating with the Haqqanis.) So, voila — the Taliban technically aren’t “terrorists.”
The important thing to understand is the oddness of trading four Taliban to the Haqqani Network. Why would they want the Taliban’s guys out of Gitmo instead of their own guys? Or, to put that differently, did they want these guys out of Gitmo at all?
“The Haqqanis could give a rat’s ass about prisoners,” the official said, referring to the Haqqani Network, a designated terrorist group in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the five Guantanamo Bay prisoners who were freed in exchange for Bergdahl’s release.
“The people that are holding Bergdahl want[ed] cash and someone paid it to them,” he said…
Only one of the freed terrorists, Nabi Omari, was part of the Haqqani Network. But the presence of other more senior Haqqani prisoners at Guantanamo has observers wondering whether the network’s goal in the exchange was actually the release of Gitmo prisoners.
“One of these things doesn’t belong,” the intelligence official said. “If you were to put one of these [freed Taliban prisoners] with Haqqani in a room together, they’d beat the shit out of each other.”…
Haqqani, he said, “benefits zero from the prisoner exchange. … Based on 10 years of working with those guys, the only thing that would make them move Bergdahl is money.”
“We just funded them for the next 10 years is my guess,” he told Markay, which explains why the White House might have wanted to frame this deal as a straight prisoner swap for a missing POW while omitting any details about a big payday.
But that doesn’t answer the key question — namely, if the Haqqanis didn’t care about prisoners and if they really didn’t care about Taliban prisoners specifically, how on earth did four Taliban bigwigs end up being part of the handover? If you believe that O’s prime motive in all this was unloading some weight from Gitmo in preparation for closing it, you already know the answer.
Michael Leden (spelling?) at Pajamas Media was writing exactly about that; the Haqqani’s only negotiate for cash and lots of it. Since they held Bergdahl in Pakistan and not the Taliban it is almost a given that ransom/cash was paid.
Obama wanted to release these ‘5’ since 2011; his focus was solely this dream team. Although Hillary wants to wash her hands of this – she was right in the middle and part of it.
I suppose releasing these ‘5’ come hell and high water needed a somewhat justified reason. When one reads Michael Hastings last report on Bergdahl – Obama and crew wrote him off in 2010; there was no longer any interest to free him.
Bergdahl became the convenient tool used to justify the release – I think Bergdahl did not wanted to be rescued. To capture an American soldier in the middle east is the absolute trophy.
LTC Allen West (ret) stated clearly how they sadistically, extensively torture and then kill the soldier. Why was Bergdahl still alive after all this time.
A soldier stated on face book – his name withheld due to his current active duty – that they were issued the order to ‘kill Bergdahl on contact’.
Taken all together – I think that there is so much more to this story. Damage control is in full swing but is it enough to bury it?