In Defense of Bowe Bergdahl

In Defense of Bowe Bergdahl: for Each & Every Warrior Whose Strength is Not to Fight

by MITCHEL COHEN

For years, Arizona Senator John McCain hammered President Obama for failing to exchange prisoners being tortured in Guantanamo for American POW Bowe Bergdahl, imprisoned in Afghanistan. Now that the President has finally done so (after years of trivial squabbling while Bergdahl as well as the so-called "enemy combatants" wasted away in prison), Sen. McCain flip-flops and attacks President Obama for finally doing exactly what McCain had been advocating!

Meanwhile all those chicken-hawks in Congress and the corporate media -- mostly those who skipped serving in the military themselves while sending other people's kids to kill and to be killed in wars that they started and voted for -- blast away at what they perceive to be Sgt. Bergdahl's political beliefs as a pretext for letting him rot in an Afghan prison. Perhaps every soldier taken prisoner should be required to fill out a form as to their beliefs, to be scrutinized word by word by members of Congress, the Taliban and the media before being certified "politically correct" and redeemable by the Good Housekeeping Presidential Seal of Approval, freed from prison and brought home?

I wonder if Sen. McCain himself would have passed muster, during his confinement in Vietnam after dropping bombs on civilians in that country.

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on their show Democracy Now! have broken so much new ground over the entire week in exposing Congress and the corporate media's hypocrisy in interview after interview and report after report, that they deserve, in my opinion, to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for their brilliant work.

Meanwhile, the corporate media’s national hit parade against the freeing of Sgt. Bergdahl from his incarceration as an American soldier in Afghanistan belies their curious notion that soldiers are all gung-ho for the wars they’re sent to fight, and that any soldier who doubts or criticizes U.S. policy is a traitor to their country and to the oil and natural gas pipelines they’re sent to secure at the behest of Exxon-Mobil and BP. Forget the hundreds of “fragging” incidents in Vietnam, in which U.S. soldiers assassinated their commanding officers who were sending them to kill or be killed for no discernible cause other than the financial interest of giant corporations using soldiers (and civilians) as cannon-fodder to maximize their profits.

In that vein, I am linking here < http://www.MitchelCohen.com> to a series of essays I wrote of the tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers who deserted, went AWOL, or resisted in other ways the orders of the U.S. military during the 1990-91 Gulf War. In renouncing the orders of their military commanders, these soldiers, like Bergdahl, are heroes. They are courageous and moral individuals -- the very best America has to offer -- standing up for humanity in the face of enormous pressures to do chicken-hawk Dick Cheney’s, Bill Clinton’s and George Bush’s fighting for them.

Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl – THANK YOU!

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