After seeing the images of the Taliban's new trophy, Private Bergdahl, and hearing the hypocritical condemnations of the US Military for merely making a video that shows him scared and vulnerable, I have to ask myself how the fuck anyone in Washington can sleep tonight, much less the rest of the country.
Why isn't this brave young man on the cover of every newspaper and at the head of every newscast in America today? If the sight of the five year old investigation report turned Eric Holder's stomach, how can he keep anything down thinking of our own soldier who will undoubtedly face the same, or worse?
I am having a sleepless night, due to my own now-seemingly insignificant problems, so to put my mind at rest, I had to write a LTE to the local rag. Perhaps the only good it will bring is to let me rest tonight....but that's at least something, right?
Here is what I sent off....
This past weekend, while my cousin's grandson played with my kids, his father was slogging through the heat in a desert in Afghanistan half a world away. I imagined the look on that proud father's face as he watched his son playing on the videos I uploaded to the internet, and the regret that he was unable to be there with him. Meanwhile, somewhere in that same landscape, Private Bowe R. Bergdahl, another fellow American soldier, is living second to second, with every breath he takes at the mercy of his captors. For three weeks now, ever since his capture by the Taliban, he has been 'fair game' (as Rove famously called Valerie Plame) for any of the interrogation techniques our previous president favored, and the current administration refuses to investigate, you know, the ones Rush calls 'frat boy hazing'.
I hope that everyone who has excused the torture that has been committed in our names can sleep good at night picturing Private Bergdahl naked and covered with his own excrement, having his head repeatedly slammed into a wall, deprived of sleep for days on end, or God forbid, raped with foreign objects while his captors stand by taunting. I, for one, can not, and I hope that Eric Holder can't either and that it inspires him to do the right thing with respect to his deliberations about a special torture prosecutor.
It is time for the bloviating diehards on the right to put up or shut up about what it really means to be an American. As inconvenient as it is for the image of America to have what was done dragged out into the open, the alternative is to risk that others, including our best and bravest, endure the same, and for what? The prior administration, especially Dick five-deferments Cheney, 'had better things to do' than answer their country's call to defend the wars they supported so adamantly. How dare they now continue to put at risk those who are actually willing just to save their own legacy?
I, for one, hope and pray that I never have to explain to my kids, much less the little boy who played with my children so carelessly, that his dad had to go through something like this just because we couldn't bring ourselves to prosecute our own for doing the same in the past.
Now that the yellow ribbons and 'W' stickers have seemingly disappeared from everyone's car, what now? We need to paint the recalcitrant politicians as putting the legacy of Bush above the safety of our troops...this is a loyalty issue above all loyalty issues. I will call my congressmen in the morning and ask the following question:
Who more deserves your loyalty, Private Bergdahl or the Bush administration?