National Shame: The Bergdahl Frenzy

The right-to-life party is screaming that, having freed Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, we now ought to kill him.

The rush to judgment in this case is a form of mass bloodlust unlike any I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. 

Leave it to Fox Falsehoods to cap the madness by suggesting that the death penalty should be “on the table” for the soldier held for five years by the Taliban. And for the scum we’ve put in Congress to pick up the idea and run with it.

With virtually no facts at hand, monstrous fools have decided on their own authority that Bergdahl is a “deserter”and a “traitor.”  There is not on the record a single utterance from the soldier himself, except a second-hand report that he may have told his doctors in Germany that he was tortured by his captors and held in something resembling “a shark cage.”

There was no eyewitness when Bergdahl vanished from his unit in Afghanistan on June 30, 2009.  Within the unit, some soldiers now say they believe that he deserted.  But that’s hearsay.  Nobody SAW him desert. There are reports that the unit itself — Second Platoon, Blackfoot Company in the First Battalion, 501st Regiment — was in disarray, ill-governed and lacking discipline.  This, too, is largely hearsay.

The only eyewitnesses to his capture were his captors.  Ditto for his time in captivity — five long years. We know no facts for certain about his captivity.  We know no facts for certain about the state of his mental or physical health. Hearsay — word from unnamed people “familiar” with details from his hospital treatment, given on “condition of anonymity” — holds that his physical condition is better than doctors expected.

That would seem to contradict the government officials who said fears for Bergdahl’s safety, fears for his life, dictated the urgency with which they negotiated his release in exchange for five prisoners held by the United States in its black hole in Cuba.

The military is conducting an investigation.  Congress is nattering its usual ill-informed nonsense.  The Internet is a-Twitter and the pundit class is pontificating every which way, like John McCain.

None of this serves the public good.  Or the military’s.  Or the nation’s.

The best a sane citizen can do is ignore all the bovine excrement and theatrics until a few more facts are known.

Until then, Bowe Bergdahl is just one more severely damaged human chattel among the millions victimized by a long, immoral and illegal war of choosing launched by the good ol’ U.S.A.