21st Century Wire
SPECIAL REPORT
The fanfare surrounding the Taliban prisoner swap for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl neglects to mention the most shocking aspects of this story. As we unravel this unique case, it becomes evident how the government narrative does not at all resemble the reality behind this controversial affair.
The White House’s first stumbling block was explaining why Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay were released without Congressional approval. In this instance, President Obama is actually breaking his own law, signed in 2014 – a renewal of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which stipulates policy as outlined by the House Armed Services Committee confirming that the Secretary of Defense must notify Congress at least 30 days in advance of any transfer or release of Guantanamo detainees.
The second issue is even more incendiary. The current White House regime has cynically attempted to paint Bowe Bergdahl as a ‘hero’, perhaps to gather some political capital – but more likely to distract media and critics from looking closer into what Bowe Bergdahl was up to since he walked off this military post in Afghanistan in 2009.
Aiding the Enemy
“There was never a single doubt. No one ever doubted he (Bergdahl) was a deserter and We called him what he really was a defector. I can’t prove it, but what happened after he joined the Taliban speaks for itself. The enemy changed and men died. The enemy became more complex and more strategically accurate than they had ever been before. It just seemed like we couldn’t get ahead of them anymore.”
“Their attacks got so much more sophisticated and complex. There’s no way to prove that he gave them help. But there’s a whole lot of “huh” going on there like that just doesn’t seem right. So why is it all of a sudden these guys are getting better at it, and they seem like they know what we do.”
These latest revelations come on the back of numerous mainstream reports that challenge The White House’s own insistence that Bowe Bergdahl was a bona fide P.O.W., even as all available facts point to Bergdahl being a deserter.
Rentiers adds here, “Immediately after they realized that he was, gone, you know within a matter of hours, myself and portions of my company arrived on the scene and the very first thing that everyone that was there with him said – because there was never any doubt, he had left of his own volition. Out of every man and woman involved in the search process, no one ever doubted he deserted.”
Rentiers felt compelled to come forward following a string of misinformed media reports and unsubstantiated rumors circulating around the Bergdahl story. He explains, “They were trying to paint him as a POW at that time, as if he had been captured. I had seen reports that he was coming back from a bar, which doesn’t exist, and he got abducted. Or he fell behind on a foot patrol that, was not conducted, like, I mean it was just a bunch of obvious things, when you’re standing right there participating in this stuff, and then you read it on the news, and it’s not changed a little bit, it’s just completely fabricated.”
After Bergdahl left his post, units were immediately dedicated to searching for Bergdahl, a search which also may have cost the lives of fellow soldiers.
“Every soldier from multiple units and multiple countries in that province, were searching for him for two to three months. And immediately after he left our entire operation changed to find Bergdhal.”
“Everything else got put on the back burner, and everyone in the province was, find Bergdhal, find Bergdhal, and there were other units in other places, who normally would have air assets, like surveillance and attack choppers, A10 warthogs and stuff, that were diverted for the search for him, so indirectly he caused the loss of life in, many other places. And as a matter of fact, before he disappeared, we had these mine-rollers on our trucks, that extend anywhere from five to fifteen feet out in front of the trucks. And every time you hit a bomb with one it would just blow up the mine roller and the truck would be fine, and the people would be fine. Well, after he disappeared, they started offsetting the pressure plates inside the charge, so when you hit the pressure plate, it went off under the truck and completely destroyed it. Now often because we had MRAPs, there was little to no injury, but, lots of trucks got destroyed.”
Bergdahl Search Cost Lives
“Six men, Six men or, seven total, but six (died) after Bergdhal decided to leave. They were put in harm’s way in the search for him, that would otherwise not have been. And I want to clear something up. He walked off of a combat outpost that was nothing more than a couple of trucks and some concertina wire, and I was not there at that moment. But I was there just a few hours later, because I was on an outpost nearby. It was just really tiny, just easy for anybody to leave.”
Rentiers states that he did know Bergdahl, but that they were not close friends. “I had talked to him several times but he was so quiet, and real reclusive, and he didn’t seem like he had too many close friends, which is kind of strange in an Army unit, especially out in Afghanistan.”
Listen to the full interview here which recently aired on the GMN Radio Network:
Was the CIA Managing Bergdahl?
US intelligence reports indicate that Bergdahl was handed over to the Haqqani Network in 2009-2010. Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings reported this in 2011:
“Intelligence reports suggest that Bowe was moved into Pakistan sometime in late 2009 or 2010, where he is being held by the Haqqani network, an insurgent group with links to Al Qaeda that has joined the Taliban in fighting the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. It’s also a group that, before the attacks of September 11th, was funded by the CIA. The network, which now has ties to the Pakistani government, is likely living under the protection of the Pakistani intelligence service, as Osama bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders did for years.”
It can then be said that Berdahl was essentially handed over to a CIA-controlled terror group in 2011, because it is a matter of public record that the Haqqani Network was actually founded and funded by the CIA in 2004 in order for the agency to have their own formidable counterweight to some of the major al Qaeda groups operating out of Pakistan.
Huff Post describes Haqqani’s pure CIA pedigree:
“Haqqani’s rise to power can be traced directly back to the secret, multi-billion-dollar U.S. campaign to create a radicalized and well-equipped army of Islamic jihadists — known as the mujahideen — to lead a war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Back then, when a top U.S. foreign policy goal was to bog the invading Soviets down in Afghanistan, the ferocious Haqqani was one of the CIA’s favorite commanders, showered with money and shoulder-fired missiles and other weapons — and sent out to repel the foreign occupiers.”
The case for CIA management of the Bergdahl Affair is also strengthened by the peculiar role of ‘Intel Center’ – a Pentagon-run media organization who somehow has enjoyed a monopoly on all high profile ‘terror videos’, including many of the dubious exclusive Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahri and Adam Gadahn (aka Adam Pearlman, the notorious Jewish-American ‘al Qaeda’ leader) video released to the American public since 2001. Intel Center’s logo has been embossed on a number of the major photo releases for Bowe Bergdahl (see image above).
At least one of the most famous bin Laden videos has been roundly proven as a fake, but this never stopped Washington from using it as a media feature to help hype DHS Threat Alerts and bolster funding for the global War on Terror.
Bergdahl and ‘Clinton 2016’
Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings was the first to give in-depth detail of the Bergdahl Affair and the journalist met an untimely death shortly after his feature on the missing soldier. The media had connected the timing of Hastings’s death with his exposure of US General Stanley McChrystal, but little was mentioned by the media at time of the Bergdahl angle – an omission which has now fuel more speculation regarding the circumstances surrounding the journalist’s bizarre car accident.
Interestingly, Hastings also reported before his death of how then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was at the center of previous exchange deals struck for Bergdahl, and one deal which Clinton had spiked at the eleventh hour. Arizona Senator John McCain was also involved in the early swap deals and was known to be flip-flopping on backing various scenarios. One US Official is on record with Hastings stating that Hillary did not really care about Bergdahl as a ‘P.O.W.’, but was more concerned with her political image:
“Some top-level officials within the administration, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are very wary about making a swap for Bowe. “Panetta and Hillary don’t give a shit about getting him home,” says one senior U.S. official involved in the negotiations. “They want to be able to say they COINed their way out of Afghanistan, or whatever, so it doesn’t look like they are cutting and running.” (Both Clinton and Panetta, by law, would have to sign off on any exchange.) As with Vietnam, many in the military are resisting any attempt to end the war. “Even after Robert Bales” – the Army staff sergeant charged with massacring 17 Afghan civilians in March – “they are making the argument that the war is turning a corner,” says this official. “They don’t realize that the mission is changing. We don’t need all those U.S. soldiers there anymore.”
The Daily Mail details exactly how political the Bergdahl Affair is, with Presidential campaigns of Democrats Barack Obama in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 – both appeared to be heavily concerned with how the Bergdahl Affair plays out in the media:
“Clinton’s plan would have also required the Qatari government to surveil the released Taliban fighters, and the prisoners wouldn’t have been allowed to travel out of Qatar ‘until there was peace,’ The Daily Beast reported.
‘Break ties with al Qaida, renounce violence, and abide by the Afghan constitution, and you can rejoin Afghan society,’ Clinton told the Taliban in 2011. ‘Refuse and you will continue to face the consequences of being tied to al Qaida as an enemy of the international community.’
The plan that president Obama ultimately went with only slaps the released Taliban fighters with a one-year travel ban. Other details of the deal are being kept secret.
‘The talks evolved. The fact that we are going to be pulling out of Afghanistan shortly meant that the likelihood of retrieving Bergdahl was diminishing,’ Rep. Moran said. ‘And once the war in Afghanistan is over, some will argue that we no longer have a legal right to detain the Taliban.”
Afghan Drugs Trade
You cannot talk about Afghanistan without talking about Heroin and Marijuana – two crops for which Afghanistan is presently the planetary leader in illegal export trade. What is also noticeably absent from the current Bergdahl Affair, is this narcotics industry that has been flowing freely out of Afghanistan since the US-led NATO invasion and occupation that began in 2001. The gaping lack of any kind of resolution between the US-installed Karzai government in Kabul, the CIA-linked al Qaeda insurgents, and Washington DC. Meanwhile, American taxpayers have unknowingly been footing the bill for US troops who have been guarding the poppy fields of Afghanistan.
One thing is certain: Washington is not telling the full story of Bowe Bergdahl, and members of the Left and Right are manipulating the story in order to gain – or take, political capital.
What will come of the newly released detainees and what else will be revealed about Bergdahl as this story continues?
READ MORE WAR ON TERROR NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire War on Terror Files