Uhoh:MoreaudioemergesofJonGruber

Uh oh: More audio emerges of Jon Gruber saying only state ObamaCare exchanges will be eligible for subsidies; Update: Gruber responds by ducking

posted at 2:01 pm on July 25, 2014 by Allahpundit

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Oh dear. This is another speak-o, isn’t it?

Give credit to Morgen Richmond and John Sexton for digging it up. There’s a key difference between this audio and the audio Ed posted this morning, too:

Funny thing about this other "off the cuff" Gruber comment, it was part of his prepared remarks. Weird.

— Morgen (@morgenr) July 25, 2014

Gruber’s moronic excuse to TNR, that he committed a “speak-o” while rambling through a Q&A, obviously doesn’t work for this one. Which makes me wonder: Did he knowingly lie to TNR or has he somehow convinced himself that he never believed that only state exchanges would be eligible for ObamaCare subsidies? The answer doesn’t matter insofar as the quotes are damaging either way to the left’s bogus “drafting error” theory for what happened in the parts of O-Care at issue in the Halbig case, but I’m amused by how he’s painted himself into a corner now. His choices are ‘fessing up to lying, probably by admitting that yes, okay, he did at one point believe that only state exchanges would be eligible but has since changed his mind, or basically saying, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” Mind you, this is the guy whom the media routinely credits as having all but drafted the ObamaCare statute.

In lieu of an exit question, I’m setting the over/under on the final total of damaging Gruber soundbites to emerge at four. Place your bets.

Update: This is a non-answer.

Gruber told The New Republic [after the first video clip emerged] that he had made a mistake.

“I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake. People make mistakes. Congress made a mistake drafting the law and I made a mistake talking about it,” Gruber told The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn. “But there was never any intention to literally withhold money, to withhold tax credits, from the states that didn’t take that step. That’s clear in the intent of the law and if you talk to anybody who worked on the law. My subsequent statement was just a speak-o—you know, like a typo.”

A second recording has surfaced showing Gruber making similar statements about subsidies not being available on federally run exchanges. Asked over email whether those remarks were a mistake, too, Gruber wrote back, “same answer.”

He wasn’t speaking off the cuff in the second clip, though. It obviously wasn’t a speak-o/typo. This is him basically saying “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

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Uhoh:MoreaudioemergesofJonGruber

Uh oh: More audio emerges of Jon Gruber saying only state ObamaCare exchanges will be eligible for subsidies

posted at 2:01 pm on July 25, 2014 by Allahpundit

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Oh dear. This is another speak-o, isn’t it?

Give credit to Morgen Richmond and John Sexton for digging it up. There’s a key difference between this audio and the audio Ed posted this morning, too:

Funny thing about this other "off the cuff" Gruber comment, it was part of his prepared remarks. Weird.

— Morgen (@morgenr) July 25, 2014

Gruber’s moronic excuse to TNR, that he committed a “speak-o” while rambling through a Q&A, obviously doesn’t work for this one. Which makes me wonder: Did he knowingly lie to TNR or has he somehow convinced himself that he never believed that only state exchanges would be eligible for ObamaCare subsidies? The answer doesn’t matter insofar as the quotes are damaging either way to the left’s bogus “drafting error” theory for what happened in the parts of O-Care at issue in the Halbig case, but I’m amused by how he’s painted himself into a corner now. His choices are ‘fessing up to lying, probably by admitting that yes, okay, he did at one point believe that only state exchanges would be eligible but has since changed his mind, or basically saying, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” Mind you, this is the guy whom the media routinely credits as having all but drafted the ObamaCare statute.

In lieu of an exit question, I’m setting the over/under on the final total of damaging Gruber soundbites to emerge at four. Place your bets.

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On the other hand: Fourth Circuit upholds ObamaCare subsidies for federal exchange consumers

Ontheotherhand:FourthCircuitupholdsObamaCare

D.C. Circuit guts ObamaCare: Consumers in federal exchange are ineligible for subsidies

D.C.CircuitgutsObamaCare:Consumersinfederal

Obama’slawprofessor:There’sa“veryhighrisk”

Obama’s law professor: There’s a “very high risk” that a federal court is going to gut ObamaCare

posted at 6:41 pm on July 11, 2014 by Allahpundit

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Via the Corner, a perfect note on which to end the week, not only as a palate cleanser after bumming you out with that impeachment post but because it’s quite likely we’ll have a ruling from the D.C. Circuit next week on the case. Prepare accordingly.

Don’t read any further, though, if you haven’t read this post already as background. The issue, remember, is one line in the ObamaCare statute that says subsidies shall be available only to consumers who buy their new health insurance on “an Exchange established by the State.” Thirty-four states refused to build their own exchanges, so the federal government went ahead and built Healthcare.gov for people in those states as a substitute. Question: Is that “an Exchange established by the State”? If not, a lot of people who were counting on subsidies to help pay for their insurance are about to have the rug pulled out from under them. Right, Laurence Tribe?

Harvard legal scholar Laurence H. Tribe warned Tuesday of a “very high risk” that a crucial aspect of Obamacare – its government subsidies provision – could fall victim to a major legal challenge being mounted by conservatives. That is why, he also said, that the Supreme Court will almost certainly get “a second bite of the apple” in determining the fate of President Obama’s signature health law, with uncertain consequences…

Tribe, whose new book, Uncertain Justice, takes a deep dive into the Roberts court, said the plaintiffs make a strong argument. The legislative language is clear, he said, that the subsidies apply to exchanges established by states. Yet in drafting the law, Tribe said the administration “assumed that state exchanges would be the norm and federal exchanges would be a marginal, fallback position” – though it didn’t work out that way for a plethora of legal, administrative and political reasons.

“You could argue that as long as a state triggers it by asking the federal government to come in [and establish insurance exchanges] that it’s a state-established exchange, even though it’s a federally run exchange,” Tribe added. That might give some of the justices who aren’t strict constructionists some leeway in looking beyond the law’s specific language, he said.

“I don’t have a crystal ball,” Tribe said, “but I wouldn’t bet the family farm on this coming out in a way that preserves ObamaCare.” “I would!”, says law prof (and O-Care supporter) Timothy Jost. Healthcare.gov is merely a conglomerate of individual state exchanges, he argues. The feds established each of those exchanges on behalf of a state, which is close enough to the language in the statute to survive judicial scrutiny.

The Affordable Care Act was meant to “provide affordable . . . coverage choices for all Americans.” A key section says, “Each state shall . . . establish an . . . Exchange,” but another section provides that if a state “elects” not to establish the “required Exchange,” the secretary of health and human services must “establish and operate such Exchange.” These sections both require states to establish exchanges and allow them not to do so.

Congress gave the IRS the responsibility to resolve such contradictions, and the IRS adopted the only reasonable approach. If a state does not create the “required Exchange,” HHS steps into its shoes and sets up “such Exchange.” The law, in other words, requires the federal government to create the “Exchange established by the state,” with the same authorities and responsibilities as state exchanges, including offering premium tax credits…

ACA opponents, however, hope that the other two judges on the D.C. Circuit panel, both Republican appointees, will share enough of their Obamacare phobia to detonate the imaginary bomb. If that happens, their success will be short-lived. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit seems poised to uphold the IRS rule in an identical challenge, and the entire D.C. Circuit is likely to reverse the three-judge panel if it issues such an outlier ruling. There is no secret bomb in the ACA, as the courts have told us and will tell us, and the imaginary bomb will not destroy the law.

It’d be weird to pass a law called the “Affordable Care Act,” Jost says, that disallows affordable coverage for tens of millions of people just because it was the feds who set up their state’s exchange instead of the state itself. For a reply to that, read Michael Cannon’s comments at the Corner. He and Jonathan Adler have spearheaded this suit, arguing all along that the reason subsidies were limited to true state exchanges was to create an incentive for each state government to build their exchange themselves rather than forcing the feds to do it. It’s not just a semantic distinction, in other words. Subsidies were supposed to be restricted to state exchanges for a reason.

Exit question: If the D.C. Circuit strikes down the subsidies for Healthcare.gov customers, 34 state governors — all of them Republican, I believe — are going to suddenly face a lot of pressure at home to build their own exchanges, huh?

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Bytheway,theD.C.Circuitmightnuke

By the way, the D.C. Circuit might nuke ObamaCare tomorrow

posted at 8:21 pm on July 2, 2014 by Allahpundit

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Remember the Halbig case? If not, catch up right now by re-reading this post from January, written after a D.C. district court judge ruled in Obama’s favor. O-Care is a famously complex law but the lawsuit that could end up demolishing it is surprisingly simple. In a nutshell, there’s a line buried deep in the statutory text that says federal subsidies for insurance premiums will be available to anyone who buys a plan on “an Exchange established by the State.” Question: Does Healthcare.gov, the exchange built by the federal government after 34 states refused to build their own exchanges, qualify as an “Exchange established by the State”? Or do only state exchanges qualify? If it’s the latter, then millions upon millions of people who’ve signed up for O-Care through Healthcare.gov since October in the expectation that Uncle Sam will be paying part of their bill are in for a nasty surprise. The only fix that’s available (unless His Majesty tries some executive gambit, of course) is for Congress to amend the statute so that subsidies are available on the federal exchange too, but what are the odds of the House GOP agreeing to that? If the D.C. Circuit, which is set to rule any day now on the appeal of the earlier ruling, sides with the challengers against O, consumers will be forced to either come up with the money for their premiums themselves or drop their coverage. And if most of them choose to drop coverage, leading to a mass exodus of healthy people from various insurance risk pools, suddenly the White House is facing a death-spiral problem where hiking premiums on the remaining enrollees is the only way to pay for all the sick people still in the pool. That’ll lead to more dropped coverage, which means even higher premiums, and then it’s spiralmania.

It’s a magic bullet, aimed right at the heart of ObamaCare. What will the D.C. Circuit do? TPM wonders:

The challenge was initially written off by some as a fool’s errand because there’s a lack of evidence that the Democrats who crafted and passed the Affordable Care Act intended to block subsidies on the federal exchange, which was designed as a backstop on behalf of the states. (They’ve signed a brief saying as much.) But the challengers seized on an ambiguity in the language of the statute which says the subsidies are to be provided by “an Exchange established by the State.”

“If the legislation is just stupid, I don’t see that it’s up to the court to save it,” Judge A. Raymond Randolph said during oral arguments in March.

Randolph, a George H.W. Bush appointee, said the text of the statute “seems perfectly clear on its face” that the subsidies are confined to state-run exchanges. Carter-appointed Judge Harry T. Edwards slammed the challengers’ claims as “preposterous.” So the deciding vote appears to be with George W. Bush-appointed Judge Thomas B. Griffith, who wasn’t resolute but sounded unconvinced of the Obama administration’s defense, saying it had a “special burden” to show that the language “doesn’t mean what it appears to mean.”

In a way, this is an analog to Obama’s power grab on immigration, which he defends as necessary because Congress is paralyzed. Will the D.C. Circuit read the statute as it’s written and leave it to Congress to resolve the ambiguity over “state” exchanges or, knowing that Congress won’t do a thing to resolve it, will the court feel obliged to minimize disruption to America’s new insurance regime by interpreting the word “state” broadly? The lower court reasoned that the federal ObamaCare exchange isn’t really a “federal” exchange, it’s an amalgamation of 34 different state exchanges that the federal government established on behalf of each of those 34 states. In that sense, the federal exchange is a “state” exchange (or a group of state exchanges) and therefore its customers are eligible for subsidies. Law prof Jonathan Adler has led the charge in arguing the opposite, that the whole reason the statute was drafted the way it was is because Congress wanted to give states an extra incentive — namely, subsidies for its residents — to set up their own individual insurance exchanges. If a state refused to comply and forced the feds to set up an exchange on its behalf instead, its residents would be punished by having their eligibility for subsidies removed. (Adler wrote a thorough reply to the district court’s ruling for WaPo back in March.) The D.C. Circuit needs to choose between those two interpretations. And depending upon how they rule, SCOTUS may get a crack at it — which, per Jonathan Turley, is potentially also bad news for O-Care fans:

But the D.C. Circuit Court may see things quite differently, especially in light of recent Supreme Court opinions holding that the Obama administration has exceeded its authority and violated separation of powers.

In Michigan vs. Bay Mills Indian Community, for example, Justice Elena Kagan noted that “this court does not revise legislation … just because the text as written creates an apparent anomaly as to some subject it does not address.” In Utility Air Regulatory Group vs. EPA, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, stressed that “an agency has no power to tailor legislation to bureaucratic policy goals by rewriting unambiguous statutory terms.” And a third strike came last week in National Labor Relations Board vs. Canning, when the Supreme Court unanimously found that President Obama had violated the Constitution in circumventing Congress through his use of recess appointments…

Moreover, a ruling against the administration would mean that Obama has been responsible for ordering what could amount to billions of dollars to be paid from the federal Treasury without authority. And it would mean the administration has committed yet another violation of the separation of powers.

It’s impossible for me to believe that the Supremes generally and John Roberts specifically, having eaten boatloads of crap from the right for upholding ObamaCare on the challenge to the individual mandate, are now going to pull a “never mind” and torch the whole thing because of a drafting ambiguity, but hope springs eternal for separation-of-powers aficionados like Turley. So much for the legal angle to all this. Here’s the political angle: What happens if the D.C. Circuit does nuke the subsidies eligibility for federal-exchange consumers? Would the House GOP even consider a bill reinstating those subsidies in exchange for other concessions of some kind? Before you say “hell no,” bear in mind that there’ll be a lot of voters out there PO’d that they’ve just lost their sugar from Uncle Sam and a lot of Democrats whispering to them that they could have that sugar back if only the damned Republicans didn’t want to see them suffer. Plenty of hay could be made before the midterms. Phil Klein, who has more faith in Boehner and crew than me, thinks there’s no way House Republicans would dare cave on subsidies, certainly not before SCOTUS has ruled on this at least. Hopefully he’s right — emphasis on “hopefully.” But maybe it’s all moot: If the GOP held out and refused to reinstate the subsidies, His Majesty would be tempted to issue some sort of dubious executive order (say, right around November 1st) proclaiming that the subsidies will be reinstated under HHS’s authority. That might be illegal, but even if it is, what’s anyone going to do to stop him? And even if there is a way to stop him by suing him over it, how will that stop him in time to prevent him from reaping the benefits at the polls on election day? Gulp.

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VenezuelanprostitutesarerunningafoulofMaduro’sregime

Venezuelan prostitutes are running afoul of Maduro’s regime — but not for the reason you might think

posted at 8:31 pm on June 10, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

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It’s come to this, I suppose, in a country in which residents wake up in the morning not knowing whether they’ll have access to flour, rice, toilet paper, electricity, or even drinking water.

While prostitution is completely legal in Venezuela, the socialist government running the whole farcical show has worked strenuously to try and prevent the sort of relatively lucrative black-market exchanges to which the country’s prostitutes are privy. The government has been jailing traders and shutting down brokerages in an effort to staunch the rise of the runaway unofficial exchange rate since Chavez began controlling the bolivar’s price over a decade ago — but to no avail. Read on for a horribly disheartening article on the brand of economics currently governing many Venezuelans’ desperate, survival-mode behavior from Bloomberg:

The arrival of a Liberian-flagged freighter with Ukrainian, Arab and Filipino sailors spells one thing for Elena — dollars. And greenbacks are king in Venezuela, the 32-year-old prostitute says.

Within hours of hearing of the ship’s imminent arrival, she has packed her bags and is heading to the crumbling city of Puerto Cabello. It is a 450-kilometer (280-mile) journey from her home in the Western state of Zulia that Elena finds herself doing more often now as Venezuela’s economy contracts, the bolivar slumps and prices soar.

Prostitutes more than double their earnings by moonlighting as currency traders in Puerto Cabello. They are the foreign exchange counter for sailors in a country where buying and selling dollars in the streets is a crime — and prostitution isn’t. Greenbacks in the black market are worth 11 times more than the official rate as dollars become more scarce in an economy that imports 70 percent of the goods it consumes. …

The dollar shortage is turning Venezuela into a two-tier society similar to the Soviet Union and Cuba, said Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Those with access to dollars such as prostitutes, tour agents, airport taxi drivers and expatriates are able to shield themselves from inflation by trading their greenbacks at ever higher rates. Those who can’t are seeing their living standards decline.

In a country where prostitution is legal, it is the black market in dollars that Maduro has called “perverse,” saying it was designed by the bourgeoisie to destroy his Socialist government.

Ah, yes — the “perverse” economic war being waged against the ever-victimized President Maduro by his political opposition, greedy conniving businessmen, and nefarious foreign powers all in cahoots with one another and out to get him… which mysteriously just keeps getting worse the more control Maduro tries to exert over it. Funny how that happens, eh?

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U.S.intelofficialtoldSenate:Fourofthe

U.S. intel official told Senate: Four of the Taliban Five are likely to return to the battlefield

posted at 11:31 am on June 10, 2014 by Allahpundit

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As damning as that headline is, I think this Eli Lake/Kimberly Dozier piece ends up being the best defense yet of why Obama agreed to make the swap. Per their sources, the Taliban had all but given up on an exchange for Bergdahl after so many years of false starts and wanted to kill him. It was the Haqqanis, who were holding Bergdahl prisoner, who still wanted a deal. That meant O could either make the deal and take a ferocious political beating for trading five dangerous savages for an American who had, after all, deserted — or he could walk away and take a ferocious political beating for abandoning an American to his fate after the eventual propaganda video of Bergdahl being beheaded started circulating.

In fact, it could be that O boxed himself in here by letting Bergdahl’s parents get too close to the process. They were, apparently, being looped in on CENTCOM briefings about their son; they knew enough about the White House’s efforts to bring him home to have blabbed about a possible prisoner swap more than two years ago. If, after all that, Obama decided the price was too steep and walked away from negotiations, Bob Bergdahl would have raised holy hell in the media about how there was a deal for his son on the table and the president wouldn’t take it. The strategic argument for not doing the deal was strong — you don’t send killers back into battle to target your boys when hostilities haven’t ended — but it was no-win politically, so Obama opted for what he thought would be the most easily spinnable option, namely, bringing Bergdahl back on the principle that we leave no man behind. The Taliban we released can, after all, always be droned later if need be:

A top intelligence official told lawmakers in a classified Senate briefing last week that he expected four out of the five Taliban leaders released by the Obama administration to eventually return to the battlefield…

It also means that President Obama was faced with a particularly excruciating choice as he weighed whether or not to swap these five for American hostage Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The government of Qatar, which agreed to look after the five Taliban leaders as part of the deal for Bergdahl, warned that factions within the Taliban were growing impatient, and campaigning to kill Bergdahl instead of trading him.

“Time is not on your side,” they told U.S. negotiators, according to two senior defense officials. They described a growing split within Taliban and Haqqani Network (which held Bergdahl) over how to best use the soldier—a split confirmed by multiple Taliban and Afghan sources in the region.

Another U.S. official told Lake and Dozier that Bergdahl was held for two years in a tiny cage, with a hood on except for when he needed to eat. How that squares with James Rosen’s bombshell last week about Bergdahl laughing, playing soccer, and even carrying a gun after converting to Islam in captivity is unclear. Rosen’s report also had details about a cage, but supposedly Bergdahl was trustworthy enough to have been freed from that by 2012. We’ll know more soon.

Most of this, according to Lake and Dozier, was spelled out to the Senate in last week’s classified briefing, including the likelihood that four of the Five will be back shooting at American soldiers sooner or later. Which is … curious, because if Foreign Policy is right, the classified briefing given to the House last night was very different:

Facing growing skepticism on Capitol Hill about its decision to swap five Taliban prisoners for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the White House told lawmakers at a classified briefing late Monday night that some of the freed militants were political figures, not hardened soldiers, according to lawmakers who attended the session…

“They don’t seem to have been combatants at all,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who attended Monday’s briefing. “The guys we traded, you hear all kinds of things about ‘they killed Americans.’ Three of them were governors of provinces under the Taliban government…They were governors.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who also attended the briefing, agreed. “Who are these people? As it turns out … they were government officials. They weren’t soldiers, and they aren’t soldiers now.”

I don’t know how to square that with the Lake/Dozier piece. Neither does John Hudson, the author of the Foreign Policy story on the House briefing. It makes no sense that the White House would lie to one chamber of Congress but not the other; word will get out about what was said in each briefing and people will notice the contradiction. Maybe different intel personnel are drawing different conclusions about the jihadist tendencies among the Taliban Five and then relaying that info to Congress? You would think the White House could call a huddle and get everyone on the same page before briefing the legislature, but they’re two years into lame-duckery. Maybe they don’t care enough to do that anymore.

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Tags: Afghanistan, battlefield, bergdahl, exchange, haqqani, intelligence, swap, Taliban Five

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Report:GitmodetaineesmayhavelearnedofBergdahl

Report: Gitmo detainees may have learned of Bergdahl swap before Congress did

posted at 8:01 pm on June 9, 2014 by Allahpundit

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Of course they did. Only one of these two groups has any accountability leverage over Obama. That’s the group, naturally, that had to be kept in the dark.

The information was available on a need-to-know basis and the people’s representatives, in the White House’s judgment, simply didn’t need to know.

Sources with knowledge of the transfer tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD that prisoners at Guantanamo understood in the days before the transfer that something significant was imminent and may well have known who was being transferred. The security profile at Guantanamo had been raised, these sources say, and the daily routines of several prisoners had been broken up.

Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York who has represented detainees, told the Associated Press that the coming transfer was hardly a secret among the prison population. Kassem told the AP that the guards explained the heightened security as cautionary measures taken in advance of a coming hurricane. “The prisoners saw right through that and knew something big was up,” Kassem said. “Within a day or two of the event, everyone knew.”

The five Taliban members spent most of their time in recent years held at Camp 6, a relatively low-restriction facility where detainees are free to interact with one another. Each prisoner to be transferred typically goes through a series of pre-release procedures, including a physical examination. One source tells TWS that there is virtually no chance the five Taliban commanders didn’t understand what was coming, particularly because they would have all been subject to that pre-release processing.

A U.S. official disputes the theory that the Taliban Five would have necessarily gone through the telltale pre-release procedures, but if that’s true, it’s interesting in itself. Why would the standard protocol have been skipped? Were they worried that knowing the Five were on their way out might have fired up the other detainees and risked some sort of riot, or were the procedures skipped because O’s inner circle feared the news would somehow make it back to Congress via U.S. personnel stationed at Gitmo?

This wasn’t the only unorthodox procedure followed in the Bergdahl case, if you believe the Washington Times:

The Obama administration gave the parents of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl extraordinary insider access to the military’s hunt for their son by having them take part in a series of secure video conferences with senior commanders as well as White House and State Department officials.

A former government official involved in American hostage issues said he had never heard of giving a family such access and questioned whether sensitive information could have been conveyed to Robert and Jani Bergdahl and somehow leaked out. A family spokesman said he knows of no such breach…

There [at National Guard headquarters in Boise] they were hooked into secure video conferences that included representatives of U.S. Central Command, which runs the war in Afghanistan, as well as with White House, State Department and intelligence officials.

It’s appropriate that the Bergdahls were kept updated on Bowe’s whereabouts but they didn’t need to patch them through to the CENTCOM uplink to do that. Having an Army spokesman stay in touch by phone or visit to deliver the latest news would have sufficed. Was it because his parents were so outspoken for so long about bringing him home that the White House felt obliged to give them unusual access? Better to keep the Bergdahls friendly to the administration than hostile, stirring up political trouble by accusing them of having abandoned a man behind enemy lines. Remember, too, that it was the Bergdahls who first tipped the media in May 2012 to the fact that a prisoner swap for their son was in the offing. The NYT speculated at the time that the White House might have nudged them to leak that, since it would have left Obama and his aides free to talk more openly about the deal. Which is fine, except that … the big takeaway from the past week is that the White House was desperate to keep the deal secret, for murky and ever-evolving reasons. Did Bob Bergdahl really leak the news about a swap deliberately in 2012 or did he accidentally spill the beans about something he learned during this CENTCOM briefings? And why did Obama feel it important to keep him posted on the precise mechanism by which Bowe would be brought home instead of just reassuring him that “we have a plan”?

Via the Free Beacon, here’s the State Department’s spokesman insisting she hasn’t heard anything about a ransom being paid for Bergdahl. Maybe that’s on a need-to-know basis too.

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Report:U.S.cavedonTaliban’sGitmodemands,didn’t

Report: U.S. caved on Taliban’s Gitmo demands, didn’t demand more hostages

posted at 5:21 pm on June 5, 2014 by Allahpundit

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We offered them some prisoners at Bagram. They demanded the Taliban Five. The White House caved. Then, per WaPo, the White House proposed handing over only two of the five uprfront, with the other three to follow later. No dice, said the Taliban. All five go free or we walk. So all five went free.

But we did get them to agree to a nifty one-year travel ban in Qatar, so put that on a plaque for Obama’s office wall.

My favorite line in the WaPo piece, incidentally, is this one: “There were concerns, officials said, that notifying Congress would lead to public disclosure of the operation or new political roadblocks that administration officials say could have killed the exchange and potentially imperiled Bergdahl.” Breaking federal law to avoid “political roadblocks” is as perfect a distillation of Obama’s second term as you can get.

When the talks began as part of what U.S. officials hoped would be a broader Afghan peace effort, U.S. envoys were forbidden to offer any detainees held in the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as part of a trade for Bergdahl. According to people familiar with the process, negotiators were allowed to include only Taliban fighters held at the detention center at Bagram air base, outside Kabul…

The Taliban countered with a list of six senior Taliban officials being held at Guantanamo Bay. The list included the five Taliban commanders released as part of the Bergdahl agreement, as well as a sixth who died during the talks, which stretched from February 2011 until June 2012…

U.S. negotiators proposed that Bergdahl be released at the same time two of the five Guantanamo detainees would be sent from the prison to Qatar, where they would face a travel ban to any destination outside the country. The three remaining detainees would be released three months later.

The Taliban wanted all five to be released at the same time as Bergdahl, with the stipulation that once in Qatar, they would be permitted to travel to Saudi Arabia for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and to Europe, if necessary, for medical care. U.S. negotiators rejected those conditions.

Apparently, the “moderate Taliban” whom the White House is counting on to broker a phony fig-leaf “peace deal” as we leave Afghanistan concluded they couldn’t sell a swap for Bergdahl to “hardline Taliban” unless the Taliban Five were part of the deal. So the White House stood down and — eventually — scrapped its demand that the prisoners come from Bagram. Any theories, by the way, on why Obama would have been initially reluctant to free Taliban bigwigs at Gitmo circa 2011-12 but is willing to do so now? Was there anything he stood to lose at that time by doing so that he doesn’t stand to lose today? I can think of something.

If you’re going to free five dangerous Gitmo prisoners and take a massive political hit, logically you’d want to get as much as you can for them to soften the blow. And yet:

The Department of Defense was putting together a plan to include Caitlan Coleman of York , Pa., her baby who was born in captivity and her Canadian husband, Joshua Boyle, in any deal to free Bergdahl, said Joe Kasper, chief of staff to Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who sits on the House Armed Services Committee…

“The DoD was looking at this in the whole of scope of things, to deal with these people as well,” Kasper said. “Instead of five for one, why not five for five?”

In a June 2 letter to President Obama, Hunter said the Defense Department plan, which Hunter said did not have time to materialize before negotiations headed by the State Department gained Bergdahl’s release, did not include a prisoner exchange.

Coleman’s been missing since 2012. Why was it left to Defense to float a (too-late) package to bring her back with Bergdahl? Or maybe I’m missing the point here. Maybe, if this really is all about finding political cover to release dangerous prisoners from Gitmo and ultimately close the prison, it’s better to have Coleman still out there so that other Taliban degenerates can be traded for her separately. She’s an even more sympathetic figure than Bergdahl, having given birth in captivity, so O might be thinking he can get away with repatriating more of the worst of the worst in exchange for her. Note to the Taliban: Ask for Khaled Sheikh Mohammed as part of this one. The answer may surprise you!

Here’s Chuck Todd cutting to the heart of this lame lame-duck diplomatic offensive.

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Tags: bagram, bergdahl, exchange, negotiations, obama, prisoner, swap, Taliban, White House

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Soldier:ArmytoldustolieaboutBergdahl’s

Soldier: Army told us to lie about Bergdahl’s capture

posted at 2:01 pm on June 4, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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The State Department’s attempt to shut up the soldiers who served with Bowe Bergdahl at the time of his capture may end up backfiring on the White House, which has apparently decided to attack their integrity rather than explain their own spin on the issue.  One soldier appeared on Fox and Friends this morning who took part in the post-desertion search for Bergdahl and said that the military instructed them to lie about the circumstances of Bergdahl’s disappearance (via Noah Rothman at Mediaite):

“The sentiment that everybody knew was that he walked off the base in the middle of the night, left all his gear there, and went – just walked off the post,” Fuller said. “So, we had all known that it was — that he had deserted his post, and there was never anything about him getting captured or POW until a little while later whenever it came down from the chain of command that we needed to keep quiet and not say anything.”

“We’re going with the narrative that he was captured,” Fuller said of the military’s position on Bergdahl’s alleged desertion.

“So, they basically told you not to tell the truth,” Fox host Brian Kilmeade said.

“Yes, sir,” Fuller replied.

Fuller concluded by corroborating the claims of Bergdahl’s former team leader, Sgt. Evan Buetow,who told CNN on Tuesday that the Taliban’s attacks became more directed after Bergdahl was captured.

“The ambushes we use, the certain tactics we use, the Taliban was picking up on those things,” Fuller said. “You could tell it was from somebody on the inside that had that info.”

There may have been some operational and security issues involved in attempting to keep the disappearance quiet at that point in time. For instance, they could have hoped to keep the value of Bergdahl to the local Taliban or the Haqqanis low enough to arrange for an inexpensive trade — perhaps even some cash. There is some indication that the low-value approach was initially successful, but was lost when the captors published the first captivity video of Bergdahl and the Haqqanis realized what they had. But that’s an argument for keeping the disappearance and capture entirely quiet, and not just cover it with a false narrative, especially among those who already knew what had happened.

Besides that, the other reason to keep the nature of the disappearance quiet could have been to keep from embarrassing the family back home and creating problems for an already-troubled young man had he been retrieved soon afterward. Given what’s transpired since, largely in reaction to the White House attempting to make Bergdahl into something he’s not, that may not have been an unreasonable consideration either. But the non-disclosures signed by the squad — a highly unusual step, apparently — should have covered those concerns too, without demanding that the men lie about what happened.

One can understand why so many of them are now speaking out, given this context, and why so many of them may get even more vocal as the White House pushes back against their first-person accounts. Speaking of which, Fuller reacted with disdain to the assertion made by State Department spokesperson Marie Harf, which was that Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers at the time were not credible voices on the matter:

QUESTION: Does the State Department consider Sergeant Bergdahl to be a deserter?

MS. HARF: The State Department – no, Lucas. Look, what we said is we are going to learn the facts about what happened here. We said very clearly in a statement from the Secretary on Saturday that Sergeant Bergdahl was a member of the United States military who volunteered to serve his country. We don’t know the facts about what happened yet on that day.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) according to those around him, his platoon mates, his squad mates, company mates, they said he walked off the base.

MS. HARF: Lucas, some of them – other – there are conflicting reports out there about this. Look –

QUESTION: Are there?

MS. HARF: There are. Go Google it on the web and you’ll find a ton of conflicting reports. The fact is we’re still establishing a fact pattern about what happened, how he ended up in Taliban captivity. So when he is able to share those, as Chairman Dempsey said today, he will. He also said, like any American, he is innocent until proven guilty. Our army’s leaders will not look away from misconduct if it occurred. In the meantime, we will continue to care for him and his family.

So I think people need to be really careful about believing every second or third-hand report out there, and also what the President, what the Secretary, what Chairman Dempsey have said: Regardless of how he went missing, it is our responsibility to him to bring him home, period.

QUESTION: And when you say second- and third-hand reports, when his squad mates who served with him overseas said he walked off the –

MS. HARF: Lucas, I’m sure some of them – I mean, look, there’s a lot of rumor and telephone game that’s being played here about what happened. Not all –

QUESTION: So you’re saying that the guys on television last night – his squad mates, platoon mates – were not correct?

MS. HARF: I’m saying we don’t know the fact pattern yet here. We don’t. Nobody knows exactly what happened that night. As the facts emerge, as he’s able to discuss them with the Department of Defense, we will see where that takes us.

QUESTION: Going back to –

MS. HARF: That happened five years ago. This is a situation –

QUESTION: So you’ve had all this time, five years, to determine whether he was a deserter or not. That’s a long time.

MS. HARF: He’s been in captivity, Lucas. I think he’s probably the person who knows best what happened on that night.

QUESTION: But – well, I think that his squad mates have the best indication what happened that night.

MS. HARF: I don’t think that that’s the case.

No one in this administration has much room to evaluate credibility when it comes to this deal.

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Tags: Army, Bowe Bergdahl, capture, exchange, State Department, swift boat, Taliban

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It’scometothis:WhiteHouseaidesnow

It’s come to this: White House aides now accusing Bergdahl’s squad of “swift-boating” him

posted at 11:21 am on June 4, 2014 by Allahpundit

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Via the Weekly Standard. “Swift-boating,” as you may recall, is when critics tell the truth about someone’s military service when the truth is unhelpful to Democrats. Consider this the beginning of phase three of the Bergdahl fallout. Phase one was when soldiers from Bergdahl’s unit caught the White House off-guard by publicly accusing him of desertion. Team O probably thought the combination of nondisclosure agreements that they were forced to sign and the prospect of retaliation if they made life hard for the Pentagon would keep them quiet. That was the key misjudgment from which everything else over the past three days has flowed.

Phase two was the White House desperately searching for someone, anyone, from Bergdahl’s unit who’d stand up in front of the media and vouch for his character. That’s happening entirely out of public view, but rest assured, it’s happening. The fact that they’ve come up with nothing so far speaks volumes about how uniform opinion is within Bergdahl’s old squad about him and his motives. If Team O could produce just one witness willing to face the cameras and argue that Bergdahl was a good soldier who was probably taken against his will, it’d plant enough doubt in casual observers’ minds that this whole thing might be reduced to a he said/she said matter for many — even though there are at least six veterans already who’ve come forward to support the desertion theory. But they can’t find anyone to do it. It’s been a complete barrage of anti-Bergdahl witnesses on cable news since Monday morning. The State Department is so bereft of third-party support that they were forced last night to tell reporters to trust Bergdahl himself over his squad mates, as if a repatriated deserter wouldn’t have an incentive to lie about why he went missing upon his return.

So now, phase three: Start discrediting the soldiers who’ve accused him. It’ll have to be done subtly and tactfully. If they go dumpster-diving on these guys for things like substance-abuse problems or financial trouble, the nastiness of it might backfire on the White House and make their Bergdahl problem even worse. Babbling about “swift-boating” is a good way to get the ball rolling, at least among liberals who are grasping for ways to defend Obama and have come up empty thus far. “Swift-boating” implies that the vets who’ve accused Bergdahl have some political motivation in doing so; it’s of a piece with that BuzzFeed story yesterday hyperventilating about Republican Ric Grenell helping Bergdahl’s comrades get in touch with media outlets. The point is to suggest that this is some sort of dirty trick, maybe even invented whole cloth by nefarious conservatives to wound the president, rather than a bunch of guys who’ve spent five years boiling inside because their friends got killed on patrol searching for Bergdahl finally choosing to come clean. To protect a guy who allegedly served dishonorably, the White House and the left now have no choice but to go after the honorable ones.

Any predictions on what the next bit of oppo is, or who the target will be? I think Evan Buetow’s interview with Tapper yesterday was the most damaging to the White House so far. Hope you don’t have any unpaid parking tickets, buddy.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Bowe Bergdahl, Chuck Todd, exchange, pow, prisoner, swap, swift boat, Taliban, White House

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