Why didn’t the Obama administration drone Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl?
The Obama administration’s illegal deal, in which it traded five Taliban top terrorists in exchange for Bergdahl, raises some difficult questions. Reports from 2010 from the Daily Mail stated, “The 24-year-old has converted to Islam and now has the Muslim name Abdullah, one of his captors told The Sunday Times.” The report continued:
A Taliban deputy district commander in Paktika, who called himself Haji Nadeem, told the newspaper that Bergdahl taught him how to dismantle a mobile phone and turn it into a remote control for a roadside bomb. Nadeem claimed he also received basic ambush training from the U.S. soldier. ‘Most of the skills he taught us we already knew,’ he said. ‘Some of my comrades think he’s pretending to be a Muslim to save himself so they wouldn’t behead him.’ Afghan intelligence officials also believe that Bergdahl is ‘cooperating with the Taliban’ and is acting as adviser to fighters at a base in the tribal area of Pakistan.
If that report was true, Obama could have droned Bergdahl rather than freeing five terrorists to return him to the United States.
The Obama administration has claimed the legal authority to drone American citizens overseas connected with terror. In April 2012, John O. Brennan, then the assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, explained the administration’s justification for killing terrorists like Anwar al-Awlaki:
[W]e have seen lone individuals, including American citizens, often inspired by al-Qaida’s murderous ideology, kill innocent Americans and seek to do us harm….Attorney General Holder, Harold Koh, and Jeh Johnson have all addressed this question at length. To briefly recap, as a matter of domestic law, the Constitution empowers the president to protect the nation from any imminent threat of attack.
And yet Obama claimed today that Bergdahl’s American citizenship meant he had to be brought home, no matter the circumstances: “Whatever those circumstances may turn out to be we still get an American soldier back if he’s held in captivity. Period. Full stop.” Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added, “This young man, whatever the circumstances, was an American citizen — is an American citizen — was serving in our military. The idea that you really care for your own citizens and particularly those in uniform, I think is a very noble one.”
This is the problem with an arbitrary executive branch unfettered by legislative constraints: an American citizen can either be hailed as a hero and returned to the United States by a president trading with terrorists, or treated as a terrorist and droned – all at the behest of one person. That should frighten us all.
This is a copy of the full article provided by the Conservatives at Truth Revolt
