Bowe Bergdahl and the structural problems of secrecy and obstruction
by David Atkins
Digby did a fantastic job yesterday calling out the right-wing nuttery over the return of our POW in exchange for five Guantanamo detainees. Still, there’s no question in my mind that what should be a simpler issue has been clouded by overzealous executive secrecy and the nihilistic extremism of the modern Republican party. I examined that issue yesterday over at the Washington Monthly:
The first of these problems is the legal swamp that is the War on Terror, and the particularly murky moral and legal zone that is the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. But for the cowardice of Congress, all the prisoners at Guantanamo should have been transferred into stateside prisons and tried for their crimes or released. That would have eliminated many of the legal issues involved in the exchange.
The second is a political question. The GOP has become such a nearly nihilistic obstructionist force that even if the Obama Administration hadn’t needed to act so quickly to secure the transfer, giving the House 30 days notice would have been turned into a carnival for political gain in advance of the midterm elections, and likely would have blown the potential deal.
The third is a matter of government secrets. Partially because of the political problem and partially due to an overweening security state, not nearly enough members of Congress are adequately briefed on nearly enough national security secrets. That in turn leads to an inability by the legislative branch to fully hold the national security deep state accountable for wrongdoing, as well as mutual distrust between the branches.
It is highly unlikely that the Obama Administration released men who still posed extremely strong risks to U.S. interests. But without sharing that information with Congress and the American people, and without knowledge of how detainment at Guantanamo has affected the specific prisoners involved, that’s an impossible question for the lay pundit to answer.
In the end there’s no one to trust. It’s bad policy on the merits to simply trust the Executive Branch on its own say-so. But the GOP has been such a bad faith actor that its objections can hardly be seen as more than political gamesmanship—particularly from the same party that idolizes a president who secretly traded missiles to Iran for hostages.
One of the possibilities that comes to mind, somewhat horrifically, is that the five men we released have been so thoroughly broken by the torture of Guantanamo that they would be completely ineffective on the battlefield. Meanwhile, it’s entirely possible that the far right’s accusations against Bowe Bergdahl have some basis in fact–in which case he would not only be a high-value POW we want to return, but he might even have some actionable intelligence. If either or both of those postulates are true, that wouldn’t be something government officials would ever care to admit, but it would make the trade a very good one in terms of realpolitik.
But that’s not necessarily something Congress would be aware of due to executive secrecy. More importantly, the GOP has so lost its moral compass that even if key players in the House did know about it, they would subvert the interests of both America and Afghanistan in order to score points against the President.
There are words for that sort of behavior. They’re the same words the far right is using to smear Bowe Bergdahl.
.