Continuing from our post below, Civil war in Iraq … 

As so often of late, the fullest reporting of events in the Middle East is to be found in the Daily Mail. (Its report is also lavishly illustrated with dramatic pictures.)

    The battle for Baghdad is nigh: Thousands of men answer Iraqi government’s call to arms as ISIS jihadists bear down on capital

• Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have taken over Iraq’s second biggest city Mosul and town of Tikrit
• Government forces have stalled the militants’ advance near Samarra, a city just 110km (68 miles) north of Baghdad
• ISIS’s goal is to create a Islamic caliphate (state) – it already controls territory in eastern Syria and western/central Iraq
• Iraq’s parliament were to hold an emergency session today but it was postponed due to an opposition boycott
• Kurdish forces are in full control of Iraq’s oil city of Kirkuk after the federal army abandoned their posts 
• Iran has sent special forces and a unit of elite troops to Iraq to assist the Iraqi government halt the advance
• Turkey is negotiating for the release of 80 nationals held by Islamist militants in Mosul
• Iraqi air force is bombing insurgent positions in and around Mosul – 1.3 million citizens still remain in the city

(Much detail follows.)

Now that Iranian special forces are coming to the aid of their Shiite brethren in Baghdad, the outcome of the battle for the city is less likely to be another victory for the Sunni forces of ISIS.

*

From the same source:

Iraqi Kurds seized control of the northern oil city of Kirkuk today as the central government’s army abandoned its posts in a rapid collapse that has lost it control of the north.

Peshmerga fighters, the security forces of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish north, swept into Kirkuk after the army abandoned its posts there … 

Kurds have long dreamed of taking Kirkuk, a city with huge oil reserves just outside their autonomous region, which they regard as their historical capital.

The swift move by their highly organized security forces demonstrates how this week’s sudden advance by fighters of the Al Qaeda offshoot Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has redrawn Iraq’s map.

We reckon the map of Iraq, and of the whole region, will need to be drawn many times in the coming months – and maybe years. Iran is not likely to tolerate an ISIS – ie Sunni – conquest of Iraq. And if it has it’s armies there, it is in a strong position to attack Israel.

If ISIS were to take Baghdad, it plans to move on to attempt seizing control of  Jordan, Gaza, Sinai, and Lebanon. It’s ultimate target in the region is also, of course, Israel.

What will Hamas do? More importantly, what will Egypt do?

Britain is offering humanitarian aid to Iraq’s Prime Minister Maliki.

The US will … ?

Now about our enemy on the Right …

This is from Wall of Separation, a web page belonging to Americans United for Separation of Church and State:

US Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) saw fit to hold an impromptu inquisition on Capitol Hill yesterday.

Gohmert and his colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice were supposed to be discussing the state of religious liberty in America. But Gohmert, a staunch Religious Right ally who has said that his faith guides his political activities, used his allotted five minutes to grill Americans United [for Separation of Church and State] Executive Director Barry W. Lynn on his personal theological views.

“I’m curious, in your Christian beliefs, do you believe in sharing the good news that will keep people from going to hell, consistent with the Christian belief?” Gohmert asked.

We will not pause now to unpack all the nonsense in that question. It speaks sufficiently for itself to all but Gohmert’s fellow bigots.

Lynn responded: “I wouldn’t agree with your construction of what hell is like or why one gets there.”

So Barry Lynn believes in some sort of hell consistent with his Christian belief.

Lynn, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, was invited by subcommittee Democrats. He spoke on behalf of religious minorities and non-believers who are so often oppressed by fundamentalist Christians in this country.

He spoke for us non-believers? No. We think not. But what we are most concerned with here is this Republican, Louie Gohmert and his sort.

And yet he was attacked on a personal level by Gohmert, who decided an official hearing was an appropriate place to drag Lynn into the theological weeds.

Gohmert continued to press Lynn: “So, you don’t believe somebody would go to hell if they do not believe Jesus is the way, the truth, the life?”

Another portmanteau of nonsense which we will pass for the present with no more than a grimace of distaste.

Lynn explained that someone’s failure to embrace “a specific set of ideas in Christianity” did not guarantee a ticket to hell. Gohmert didn’t much care for that answer, so he pushed on with his surprising line of questioning.

“No, not a set of ideas,” he said. “Either you believe as a Christian that Jesus is the way, the truth, [and] life or you don’t.” …

The hearing was designed primarily by Republicans to give right-wing Christians an opportunity to ask for more special treatment from the government …

O-oh! Red light flashing.

At least Lynn is insisting on the wall of separation. Or we hope he is.

Lynn and Gohmert … may soon sit down to hammer out their differences.

Christians have been trying to do that among themselves ever since their St. Paul invented Christianity, with very little success. What end can there be to arguments over fictions? It’s not as if an experiment can be designed to establish the truth.

At least they don’t kill each other over their differences of opinion as often as they used to.

After the hearing, the two talked about the possibility of getting together to discuss theology sometime. Lynn said he’s up for it.

Whether or not that discussion ever takes place, Gohmert has already proved why church and state must remain separate. Lynn and Gohmert’s disagreement over what hell is and how one ends up there is one of many, many ideological divides that exist within Christianity.

“Many, many” indeed. As many a “many” as would cover a mile would not be sufficient to indicate the number of disputes that Christianity has given rise to within itself.

But then comes this:

Other groups have similar disagreements, be they believers or non-believers.

Again, and emphatically, no. There are no shades or degrees of non-existence. There can be no disagreement about non-belief among non-believers. 

But then questions are asked which makes sense:

The US  government could never accommodate all faiths and belief systems through policies that favor [any particular] religion. Who would be accommodated? Who would decide? It would be an absolute mess that would surely result in oppression.

That’s why church-state separation is best for everyone – even Gohmert.

(Hat-tip Frank)

The Left is intensely immoral, as unabashedly unscrupulous as a wild beast. It will shamelessly blacken the name of anybody it perceives as a danger to it with baseless lies. Example: Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, publicly announced that the Republican candidate for the presidency in 2008, Mitt Romney, had not paid his taxes.

The Left will sacrifice any number of people, destroy their hopes, their health, their lives, if in their calculation doing so might give them an advantage. Example: Far-left President Obama is drawing tens of thousands of children over the Mexican border – to become, he hopes, future voters for his Party – by announcing that children who are in the US as illegal aliens will not be deported. All the children suffer. Many are ill. Some die.

The Left will deprive a law-abiding citizen, with armed force, of everything he has striven for in the name of some new oppressive regulation it has suddenly launched with a dim ideological end in view such as “environmental protection”. Example: A man who made a pond is being fined $75,000 a day by the EPA for doing just that, on the absurd grounds that the little stretch of water on his property is contaminating a river miles away.

These are just three examples, picked at random from the top of our composite editorial head, of present-day Leftist immorality in America. (How to choose from among the misdemeanors of the Clintons? An embarrasment of riches!) ) The theme of the Left’s iniquity is so vast that volumes could be written about it, and have been. In other countries, Leftist powers have committed mass-murder on an unimaginable scale by poison-gas, firing-squad, torture, overwork, and deliberate starvation.

And what compounds the evil and swells the monstrousness of it all is that they do it  in the name of compassion. Their aim, they claim, is to better the lot of the the underdog. They will make the poor richer by taking riches from the rich and giving them to the poor until all are materially and socially equal. They do not want the only form of equality that is just – equality before the law. It offends them, they say (even the richest among them, and most of them are rich) to see inequality between the richest and the poorest.

With them, equality  is not a moral principle but an aesthetic one.

They call the ideal of it “social justice“.

Paul Mirengoff writes at PowerLine, in part commenting on an article by Peter Wehner defending “social justice” (though Wehner is not a Leftist):

Justice has always been understood in our tradition as justice for the individual, qua individual. When a person goes to court, either in a criminal or a civil case, our system strives to provide him with a result that is fair given what he has done or failed to do. This is what we understand justice to be. Thus, when we say that justice should be blind, we mean that it should be rendered without regard to a person’s social status and without regard to the demands of this or that social agenda.

If justice is an individual-centric concept, then there is no room for the concept of social justice. The pursuit of social justice may lead to action that is consistent with justice, for example a non-discrimination statute. But the concept of “social justice” isn’t required to justify such a law; nor is it invoked to do so, since arguments for simple justice are always more persuasive (for example, the sponsors of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 took pains to assure the nation, probably disingenuously in some cases, that the law would preclude racial preferences).

The pursuit of social justice may also lead to action that is inconsistent with justice, such as granting racial preferences or expropriating someone’s property for “the greater good”. Such action is not justice, but rather justice’s antithesis. Thus, we should object when it is marketed as “social justice”. 

In sum, the concept of social justice has no value. In the first scenario, it is superfluous; in the second, it is false advertising.

[Peter] Wehner argues that “any society that fails to dispense some measure of sympathy and solicitude to others, particularly those living in the shadows and who are most vulnerable to injustice, cannot really be a good society”.  I agree. But vulnerability to injustice can be countered by the rigorous pursuit of simple justice. And sympathy and solicitude can be dispensed under these labels, rather than as a form of justice.

Wehner recognizes this when he concludes: “Whether this effort travels under the banner of social justice or some other name, to do justice and to love mercy is what is required of us, as individuals and as a society”. But the banner under which the charitable project travels matters.

When it travels under the banner of social justice, it gains extra moral authority that it does not deserve. The genuine tension between our desire to do justice (as commonly understood) and to be merciful is elided because justice is subsumed under mercy.

The result will be confusion and mischief, such as the aforementioned racial preferences and expropriation of property for “the greater good”. If rationalized as “social justice”, such components of the redistributionist project become entitlements, not favors to be granted, if at all, in small doses and under limited circumstances.

As [Friedrich] Hayek, who (as Wehner notes) deplored the concept of social justice, understood, therein lies the road to serfdom.

Besides, we cannot believe that devotees of the Left (once grown out of the ignorant idealism of adolescence) give a fig for “sympathy”, “solicitude”, or “mercy”. If they did they would take pains to find out what economic system really does better the lot of the poor (namely, the free market); and they wouldn’t repeat as they do that “the end justifies the means” – their excuse for sacrificing any number of their fellow human beings.

In fact many of them have dropped even the pretense of sympathizing with human beings. The victims of their “compassion” were first the proletarians. Then, as the proletarians in the Western world became too prosperous (because they had a degree of freedom) to qualify as pretexts for vast destruction, they focused on the lumpenproletariat. That class also became too well-off to care about. So then they moaned about the lot of  “women” – by which they meant feminists – and people of unconventional sexual preferences. Many of them moved on to animals. But their ever-restless avant-garde did not stop there. They are now working to sacrifice more people than ever before on the grounds that it will be good for the wilderness, for rocks and stones, and even the vast, spinning, molten-cored planet – the ultimate victim of “social injustice”. (See our post, Fresh wild raw uninhabited world, January 2, 2012.)

It would be enormously laughable as a theory, if it wasn’t colossally tragic as historical and contemporary reality.

Barack Obama is a great leader of Islam.

A report that he told an Egyptian Foreign Minister on January 19, 2010, “You will see what I will do for Islam” and “I am a Muslim” is very likely true.

Here are just some of the great things he has done for Islam:

He has made it easy for Iran to acquire a nuclear arsenal.

He has brought the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization, into the government of the United States to help formulate its policies.

He supports and sympathizes with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

He has made Israel’s beleaguered existence far more difficult (see for instance here and here), and when Iran has its nuclear bombs, vulnerable to extinction.

He supports Hamas with funding and diplomacy, thus legitimizing a terrorist organization.

He has done the same for Hizbollah, except (as far as we know) for the funding.

He is helping the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan.

He restrained the government of Nigeria from cracking down on Boko Haram, the murderous Muslim organization whose mission is to kill as many Nigerian Christians as it can.

He continues to provide massive aid to Pakistan, one of the most repressive states among repressive Islamic states.

He is allowing Muslim terrorists to enter the US, in some cases more easily than other, law-abiding, applicants.

He is encouraging the issue of student visas to Muslims in ever greater numbers, while refusing them to most Israeli applicants.

He refuses to admit that the mass-killing of US servicemen and women by a Muslim at Fort Hood was an act of Islamic terrorism, although it was carried out in the name of Islam, insisting that it be dealt with by the law as “workplace violence”.

He’s had army instruction materials on the subject of terrorism purged of all reference to Islam.

He is allowing the Muslim murderers of US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, to go unpunished.

He will not allow the condign punishment of a Muslim who deserted from the US army.

He instructed NASA to make “reaching out to the Muslim world” one of the space agency’s top priorities.

He has set five Taliban leaders free, described as “the worst of the worst“, in exchange for a US army deserter.

He celebrates the bringing home of an American soldier who converted to Islam and embraced the Taliban cause.

Can there be any doubt that Islam has become an ever increasing menace to the non-Muslim world, and an ever increasing cause of death even within the Muslim world, since and because Obama became president of the US?

We register in our margin the daily toll of lethal Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11/2001 as recorded by The Religion of Peace.

The  number has reached 23,121 today.

*

The Washington Times reported and commented on August 12, 2012:

Mr. Obama has used the occasion of Ramadan to rewrite US history and give Islam a prominence in American annals that it has not earned.

In this year’s greeting, Mr. Obama said –

The rituals of Ramadan remind us of the principles that we hold in common and Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. Ramadan is a celebration of a faith known for great diversity and racial equality. And here in the United States, Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.

That Islam has had a major role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings may come as a surprise to Muslim women. Young Afghan girls who are having acid thrown in their faces on the way to school might want to offer their perspectives. That Islam is “known” for diversity and racial equality is also a bit of a reach. This certainly does not refer to religious diversity, which is nonexistent in many Muslim-majority states. This is a plaudit better reserved for a speech at the opening of a synagogue in Mecca.

Most puzzling is the president’s claim that “Islam has always been part of America”. Islam had no influence on the origins and development of the United States. It contributed nothing to early American political culture, art, literature, music or any other aspect of the early nation.

Throughout most of American history, the Muslim world was perceived as remote, alien and belligerent. Perhaps the president was thinking about the Barbary Pirates and their role in the founding of the US Navy, or Andrew Jackson’s dispatch of frigates against Muslim pirates in Sumatra in the 1830s. Maybe he was recalling Rutherford B. Hayes’ 1880 statement regarding Morocco on “the necessity, in accordance with the humane and enlightened spirit of the age, of putting an end to the persecutions, which have been so prevalent in that country, of persons of a faith other than the Moslem, and especially of the Hebrew residents of Morocco”. Or Grover Cleveland’s 1896 comment on the continuing massacre of Armenian Christians: “We have been afflicted by continued and not infrequent reports of the wanton destruction of homes and the bloody butchery of men, women and children … “

The picture of US Secretary of State John Kerry with Nabih Berri, head of the terrorist Amal movement and speaker of the Hezbollah-dominated Lebanese parliament, and the text beneath it come from an article at Front Page, by Daniel Greenfield.

We overheard the conversation in our imagination:

Kerry:  “You really would allow ME to lick your boots?”

Berri: Why not?

 The Amal movement kidnapped US Marine Colonel William R. Higgins who was slowly and brutally tortured to death. (Follow the link if you are feeling strong.)

What could these two chums be laughing about?

Maybe it’s the autopsy report that found Higgins had been “starved and had suffered multiple lethal injuries that could have caused his death.  The skin on his face had been partially removed along with his tongue and he had also been castrated.” 

Andrew Klavan has fun warning about warming in this video from TruthRevoltOriginals:

Children’s Home, Dublin Road, Tuam, Ireland circa 1950. (Courtesy of Catherine Corless/Tuam Historical Society)

This heart-searing story comes from the Washington Post.

In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours [“Good Help”] nuns in Tuam.

Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.

More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins. …

The grim findings, which are being investigated by police, provide a glimpse into a particularly dark time for unmarried pregnant women in Ireland, where societal and religious mores stigmatized them. Without means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home. …

Malnutrition and neglect killed many of the children, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia. Infant mortality at the Home was staggeringly high. …

Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for the Home Babies, as locals call them. Many in surrounding communities remember them. They remember how they were segregated to the fringes of classrooms, and how the local nuns accentuated the differences between them and the others. They remember how … they were “usually gone by school age — either adopted or dead”. …

A 1944 local health board report described the children living at the Home as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” and with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.” …

The historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the septic tank grave, remembers the Home Babies:

“If you acted up in class, some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies.” … She recalled one instance in which an older schoolgirl wrapped a tiny stone in a bright candy wrapper and gave it to a Home Baby as a gift. … I copied her later and tried to play the joke on another little Home girl. I thought it was funny at the time…. Years after, I asked myself what did I do to that poor little girl that never saw a sweet? That has stuck with me all my life. … “

Locals suspect that the number of bodies in the mass grave, which will likely soon be excavated, may be even higher than 800.

A photo of some of the children at “the Home” in 1924 (Connaught Tribune, 21st June 1924)

We think the recovery of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl from the Afghan enemy, by exchanging him for five Taliban prisoners of war, has to be looked at the other way round: by which we mean that the main object of the exercise was not the recovery of Sergeant Bergdahl, but the freeing of the five Taliban prisoners.

This is our reconstruction of what happened:

Obama wants to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay aka Gitmo. He said he would close it way back when he was campaigning for his first presidential election. He gave orders for it to be closed soon after his election to the presidency. He failed to get other countries to hold the prisoners. He attempted getting them moved to the US to be tried in civil courts, but failed. Now he is coming towards the last two years of his eight years in office, and is thinking of his “legacy” – what the historians will say of his presidency. It has been a series of failures both domestically and abroad. His far-left “base” is saying that he hasn’t even managed to close Gitmo – a cause dear to its heart.

If only Gitmo could be emptied of its prisoners! But what excuse could the administration find for releasing them?  Then someone – possibly even Obama himself – had the bright idea that the prisoners could be exchanged.

Question: How many Americans are being held captive by the Taliban?

Answer: One.

Only one? Can we exchange all the prisoners in Gitmo for just one American?

Maybe not all. But we could exchange a bunch of them for him. Let’s exchange the worst of them. The most dangerous. Then perhaps we could just release the rest as being lesser dangers.

Make it so.

If Obama was told that Sergeant Bergdahl was a deserter and not worth exchanging for five high-value Taliban leaders, it would not have troubled him. Far from it. He could all too easily understand a man deserting from the US army.

And then he met Bowe Bergdahl’s parents, and found them to be his sort of people: hippy types – and better still, one of them, the father, a convert to Islam.

To us Bergdahl Senior comes across as a 1960s type rebel who has never grown up. Who rebels against his country  as an adolescent rebels against his parents; not  because he really admires Muslims and Afghans – whom he probably knows little about – but because he wants to stick his tongue out at his own world, to annoy it, to pretend he is superior to it, to make it take notice of him. Which it is doing now.

For Obama – what a show, what a photo-op. In the Rose Garden. The press, the cameras.  I, Obama, with the parents of the soldier I am bringing home … A grand charade on a bright summer’s day. A happy occasion. How splendid we look, I and they.  

And what a gorgeous distraction from the real purpose: the freeing of the Taliban leaders, getting to the closing of Gitmo.

No, we cannot prove any of this. But we think it highly plausible.

The entire episode, it seems to us, is an encapsulation of quintessential Obama.

On display, all at once, the elements of his character and his fixed ideas as he has consistently shown them to us: bragging, showing off to a vast audience, lying, hypocrisy, love of Islam, hatred of the US, hatred of the US military, churlish contrariness in giving an enemy the advantage over America, adolescent leftist ideology that is more spite than idea.

The consequences of releasing the five most dangerous Taliban leaders from the cages they belong in (graves would have been better for them) will be bad, but Obama will never take the blame for what must ensue.

The consequence of  bargaining with terrorists for the release of a hostage (Sergeant Bergdahl counting as one rightly or wrongly) will be the seizing of Americans to be traded for prisoners and money. But Obama will never admit that he set the fatal precedent.

For that too is part of his essential nature: never to admit or even understand that he was wrong.

To add another scandalous detail to the post immediately below (Trading with the Taliban – as fellow Muslims?), here’s our Facebook one-paragraph summary of a Jihad Watch article:

A former U.S. officer who served in Afghanistan with Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl claims that soldiers were threatened by U.S. authorities if they questioned his story. After he was captured, Bergdahl said on a video from his captors that he lagged behind on patrol, although other sources in the military suggested anonymously that he walked away from his post. Not only has this nebulous non-story been put out for years but soldiers of 4th Brigade 25th Infantry Division were threatened with legal repercussions if they spoke about Bergdahl. Many of Bergdahl’s fellow troops signed nondisclosure agreements agreeing to never share any information about Bergdahl’s disappearance and the efforts to recapture him. But Bergdahl was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down. Its probably  unlikely that Bergdahl will face a court martial – because it would cast doubt on the deal the United States made with the Taliban to secure his release.

*

Still more sickening facts –

Mark Tapson writes (in part) at Front Page:

Let’s get this clear about Bergdahl – he didn’t “wander” off base that June day in 2009, as the media so often put it, like a lost toddler; if reports from the ground are to be believed (and they are), he intentionally and premeditatedly deserted.

In the wake of that, at least six good American soldiers died or were wounded in search attempts. Their names:  Staff Sgt. Clayton Bowen, Pfc. Morris Walker, Staff Sgt. Kurt Curtiss, 2nd Lt. Darryn Andrews, Pfc. Matthew Michael Martinek, and Staff Sgt. Michael Murphrey. Their families and friends have suffered a far greater loss than the Bergdahl parents.

As Jake Tapper reports, “other operations were put on hold while the search for Bergdahl was made a top priority… Manpower and assets – such as scarce surveillance drones and helicopters – were redirected to the hunt. The lack of assets is one reason the closure of a dangerous combat outpost, COP Keating, was delayed. Eight soldiers were killed at COP Keating before it was ultimately closed.”

What punishment will Bergdahl face? An anonymous senior Defense official [said] that he will not likely face any: “Five years [in ‘captivity’] is enough.”

Meanwhile our enemy rejoices. Five more dangerous Guantanamo terrorists are back in the field to plot havoc against American infidels, to kill and wound more American soldiers, soldiers who are already fatally hamstrung by Rules of Engagement in Afghanistan that don’t even allow them to engage unless they’re already under attack – and sometimes not even then.

Taliban leader Mullah Omar rightfully declared the trade a “great victory.” It will result in more Americans – and not just soldiers – being targeted for hostages, because terrorists everywhere now know that that will pay off.

On Saturday May 31, Obama triumphantly announced that he had procured the release by the Taliban of a captured American soldier, Bowe Bergdahl, “the only known American prisoner of war in Afghanistan”.

When terrorists hold hostages, the worst thing a government can do is bargain with them. If a ransom of any sort – money or release of prisoners – is paid to hostage holders, an industry begins. If the US government starts giving terrorists what they want in exchange for one American life, more Americans will be taken hostage. Can a government give ransom for one hostage and refuse to give it for others? On what grounds would such discrimination be made? One immorality will be compounded by another, either by the government’s continuing to bargain or refusing to continue to bargain.

It was and should be a firm policy not to deal with terrorists. Obama broke that rule when he started negotiating with the Taliban years ago. Negotiating with terrorist organizations legitimizes them.

Not only has Obama let the Taliban win the war in Afghanistan, but he has also made himself their creature. All the  American lives lost in that ghastly country have been spent for Obama to preen himself as a hero for “ending” the war – ie surrendering – and for getting back one hostage in exchange for five Taliban leaders* freed from Guantano military prison. They should have been shot long ago. Keeping them alive was always a bait for their terrorist comrades to capture Americans and hold them as bargaining chips.

Obama broke the law again when  he traded five jihadis held in Guantanamo for Sergeant Bergdahl. Federal law requires Congress to be notified before prisoners are transferred. (He breaks the law so often it is becoming habitual. How weak is the Republican House of Representatives that they let him get away with it over and over again?)

And of course, the five released Afghan prisoners will rejoin the Taliban.

What Obama has done, on all these counts, is bad. Very bad.

But the story gets even worse.

It looks highly probable that Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl was not being held as a hostage. He may well have been a deserter and collaborator. He may have been released because he converted to Islam – and gave positive help to the terrorists.

From the Washington Post:

Bergdahl, 28, is believed to have slipped away from his platoon’s small outpost in Af­ghanistan’s Paktika province on June 30, 2009, after growing disillusioned with the US military’s war effort. He was captured shortly afterward by enemy ­forces and held captive in Pakistan by insurgents affiliated with the Taliban. At the time, an entire US military division and thousands of Afghan soldiers and police officers devoted weeks to searching for him, and some soldiers resented risking their lives for someone they considered a deserter.

Bergdahl was recovered Saturday by a US Special Operations team in Afghanistan after weeks of intense negotiations in which U.S. officials, working through the government of Qatar, negotiated a prisoner swap with the Taliban. In exchange for his release, the United States agreed to free five Taliban commanders from the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. …

Disappearing from a military post in a war zone without authorization commonly results in one of two criminal charges in the Army: desertion or going absent without leave … Desertion is the more serious one, and usually arises in cases where an individual intends to remain away from the military or to “shirk important duty,” including a combat deployment such as Bergdahl’s.

One Afghan special operations commander in eastern Afghanistan remembers being dispatched.

“Along with the American Special Forces, we set up checkpoints everywhere. For 14 days we were outside of our base trying to find him,” he told The Washington Post …

But U.S. troops said they were aware of the circumstances of Bergdahl’s disappearance — that he left the base of his own volition — and with that awareness, many grew angry.

“The unit completely changed its operational posture because of something that was selfish, not because a soldier was captured in combat,” said one U.S. soldier formerly based in eastern Afghanistan … “The problem came of his own accord.”

The search in Paktika was eventually called off, after US officials acknowledged that Bergdahl had been taken to Pakistan.

The “deaths and woundings of several US soldiers” happened in the search for Bergdahl. And “the frequency of enemy ambushes and improvised explosive devices increased after he was gone”.

“The Taliban knew that we were looking for him in high numbers and our movements were predictable,” [a soldier who was there commented]. “Because of Bergdahl, more men were out in danger, and more attacks on friendly camps and positions were conducted while we were out looking for him … His actions impacted the region more than anyone wants to admit.”

Those sentiments were underscored in a long series of tweets that were posted Saturday night and went viral online. … The writer said he was on base at the time and believes that Bergdahl planned his escape for days, leaving between 3 and 4:30 a.m., when there was the least amount of light. The following day, the troops there questioned Afghan children nearby, who said they had seen an American crawling through weeds.

“While searching for him, ambushes and IEDs picked up tremendously,” one of the tweets said. “Enemy knew we would be coming.” …

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, speaking to reporters Sunday in Bagram, Afghanistan, declined to talk about any possible action by the military against Bergdahl. A senior defense official indicated that punitive action was unlikely, no matter what the circumstances were. “Five years is enough,” he said.

Justice is of no interest or concern to the Obama regime, and prosecuting Sergeant Bergdahl for desertion and endangering his fellow American soldiers would spoil the aura of kudos with which Obama has surrounded himself over this “rescue”.

Current and former service members also questioned whether the United States should have released five members of the Taliban in exchange for Bergdahl. Former Sgt. Aaron King, who deployed to Iraq twice as part of the 101st Airborne Division, said that … US troops join the military knowing that they could be kidnapped. He also said that troops accept that although their fellow service members will search for them, they are not to be used in negotiations.

“We’re giving up too much for this individual,” said King … “Five guys are getting back out into the world to probably conduct terror operations and harm others.”

And we have no idea what Obama did to get this evil bargain agreed and implemented. We are told that “Qatar” was the go-between. Who in Qatar? Why? What did the negotiator say, and to whom? Was much made of Bowe Bergdahl’s conversion to Islam?

Has his father, Bob Bergdahl, converted to Islam? If so, was it a cause or effect of his son’s conversion and betrayal? And was it a help in getting his release?

Bob Bergdahl triumphant: if he looks like a Muslim, and talks like a Muslim, and prays like a Muslim ….

Former  Army Lieutenant Col. Allen West caught a tweet by Sergeant Bergdahl’s father, Bob Bergdahl, before it was deleted:

I am still working to free all Guantanamo prisoners. God will repay for the death of every Afghan child, ameen!

Which happened first – Bob Bergdahl becoming a Muslim and learning to speak Pashto, or Bowe Bergdahl joining the Taliban? Who affected whose decisions?

The plain fact is that we are at war with Islam, because Islam is actively at war with us. And out of this dark event, yet again the question arises: On whose side is the president of the United States, Barack Obama?

* The five Taliban prisoners released in the illegal, immoral, and dangerous exchange: Mohammed Fazl – head of the Taliban army. He commanded the main force fighting the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in 2001. Mullah Norullah Noori – governor of Balkh province in the Taliban regime,  helped coordinate the fight against the Northern Alliance. Mohammed Nabi Omari – the Taliban’s chief of communications, helped al Qaeda members escape from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Khairullah Khairkhwa – governor of Herat province from 1999 to 2001, said to have been “directly associated” with Osama bin Laden. Abdul Haq Wasiq – deputy chief of the Taliban regime’s intelligence service. His cousin was head of the service.

*

More pieces of apposite information come from the Daily Mail:

Bowe Bergdahl joined the military so he could help Afghans. He told   his parents he was ‘ashamed to even be American’. He mailed home boxes containing his uniform and books. His father, Bob, has grown a long, thick beard and learned to speak the Afghanistan tribal language Pashto. His parents said their son had joined the military so that he could help the Afghan people.

“The 24-year-old has converted to Islam and now has the Muslim name Abdullah,” according to one of his captors, a Taliban deputy district commander in Paktika, who called himself Haji Nadeem. He said that Bergdahl taught him how to dismantle a mobile phone and turn it into a remote control for a roadside bomb. Nadeem also claimed he received basic ambush training from the US soldier.

Desertion in a time of war can carry the death penalty. But as Congress never passed a declaration of war in respect to Afghanistan, the maximum penalty Bergdahl would face is five years in prison and a dishonorable discharge, if it’s proved that he deserted with the intent to avoid hazardous duty or to shirk important service. If a charge of absence without leave –  ended by the US apprehending him – is brought against him, there would be no requirement of proof that he intended to remain away permanently. The maximum punishment for that would be a dishonorable discharge and 18 months’ confinement.

*

And yet more fascinating information and speculation on The Bergdahl Mysteries come from Michael Ledeen at PJ Media:

I will confess to a dark suspicion that when Robert Bergdahl, standing next to President Obama, said in Pashto to Bowe Bergdahl, “I am your father,” it was some sort of coded message.  I mean, what in the world was that all about?  Does any father have to say such a thing to a son?  Did he think Bowe didn’t know who his father was?

But then I started to ask questions of people who had followed the Bergdahl saga, and they calmed me down a bit.  The elder Bergdahl seems a bit odd.  Look at the pictures.  “A hippy,” one of my best sources said.  A guy who’d gone to Idaho to pursue a lifestyle reminiscent of the romantic sixties:  love, peace, and the expansion of the mind.  …  And it connects well with the story of Bowe, leaving his base in an “intoxicated state,” which, if true, can’t mean alcohol, which is forbidden in such places.  It might mean pot, or hashish, however.  Berkeley, California, on the plains of Afghanistan. …

Forget about the Taliban, they weren’t holding Bowe.  He was a captive of the Haqqanis … What did the Haqqanis get for Bergdahl?  … Four of the Guantanamo terrorists were indeed Taliban, and hence low priority for the Haqqanis.  …

So we need to ask how much money the Haqqanis got, or how many weapons …  something of value had to be given to the Haqqanis.  I don’t believe they turned over Bowe as a favor to the Taliban.

It is also possible that the Iranians were involved …. They have trained both the Haqqanis and the Taliban, and they are eager to extend their control over Afghanistan as we retreat. … One of the released Taliban was in cahoots with them, planning anti-American operations as we prepared to invade in 2001. …

As we sort out the real facts from the abundant background noise, we will discover several disconcerting things: first, that control over the efforts to recover Bowe often shifted between US government agencies. Second, that it is misleading to say that the negotiations were underway for five years; the final push came in the last six weeks, when the Qataris told the U.S. that a deal was now possible. Third, that the list of Guantanamo terrorists to be “paid” shifted continuously.  And fourth, who were the key intermediaries?  I suspect we will find some relatively unknown academics involved in the talks.  It wasn’t entirely the work of Qatari diplomats and U.S. officials by any means.

Finally …  why the sudden urgency at the end, when talks had often collapsed in the past? … We’re missing a key element, something separate from the Bergdahl saga.

For once, I think we have a good chance to find out.  There are lots of angry people out there, from military guys who despise Bowe and think he’s worthless, to members of the various agencies who fought one another to get control and glory and will now tell very different versions of what actually took place.

The people I wouldn’t trust on this one – aside from top decision makers who likely have a lot to hide – are the Bergdahls.  They’re very odd people, to put it mildly.