White House media flacks out in force

So, the Bergdahl thing isn’t going the way that the White House wanted. They envisioned a “bin Laden moment redux” but like I said yesterday, they thought that the silence from the military community would continue after Bergdahl’s return. But the folks who bore the burden that Bergdahl foisted upon them with his bizarre journey into the hands of the Haqqani network had held their tongues for five years and felt that the truth needed to be told to the American people, because obviously, the truth wasn’t coming out of the White House too soon.

So the media comes to the administration’s rescue. The New York Times comes right out and tells readers that the troops are lying about casualties they suffered looking for Bergdahl;

CNN has reported in scrolling headlines that six soldiers died looking for Sergeant Bergdahl after senior American military officials say he wandered off his base.

But a review of casualty reports and contemporaneous military logs from the Afghanistan war shows that the facts surrounding the eight deaths are far murkier than definitive — even as critics of Sergeant Bergdahl contend that every American combat death in Paktika Province in the months after he disappeared, from July to September 2009, was his fault.

The troops know what they were looking for – it was right there in their operation orders that they were briefed before they left the wire. They probably rehearsed much of what they expected to encounter. Just because the lily-white, string bean reporters didn’t see it in the AFN reports from the theater while they sat in their offices safe and secure in their cubes, that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.

They complain that casualties that occurred as late as September were blamed on Bergdahl. What? Did they think that the troops only looked for as long as the New York Times expressed interest and then quit looking for him? I suspect that they got ti[s from locals for months afterwards that they needed to follow up on, leaving no rock unturned.

Then, this woman who is employed as a journalist for the Miami Herald tells Andrea Mitchell that so what if Obama broke the law to get this deal done…Bush did it first;

I suspect that the Obama Administration wanted to get this deal done quickly because it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission. And when you figure that you don’t have to ask for forgiveness anyway, that makes it so much easier.

BBC, Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo unsurprisingly see a Republican dirty trick. But all of their evidence boils down to Bergdahl’s former mates reaching out to anyone who could help them get their side of the story out and Richard Grenell, a Bush Administration official and Fox news commentator responded to help them out. Ya know what, we do the same thing here at TAH when we want to get your story out, so I don’t see some grand scheme to undermine the Obama Administration – well, except their own grand scheme which seems to have backfired.

What didn’t help their case was that motor-mouth Robert Bergdahl who has turned his son’s release into a political circus verbally hugging our nation’s enemies and advocating for releasing more Guantanamo criminals. I’m pretty sure that his comments had an influence on Bergdahl’s former platoon-mates to come forward.

But, I do feel sorry for the residents of Hailey, Idaho. They’ve spent five years of their lives keeping America’s awareness of Bergdahl alive. They supported his family unaware of the circumstances leading to his capture. The town was emotionally invested in his release and now they don’t get to celebrate that event and close the chapter for them. Aside from the families who lost their sons to the search for Bergdahl, the town of Hailey is the greatest victim in this story.

Category: Terror War