Saving Sergeant Bergdahl: Unanswered Questions

Speaking in Brussels on Thursday, President Obama defended his decision to swap five aging Taliban prisoners, who were being held at Guantanamo Bay, for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, saying, “I think it was important for people to understand that this is not some abstraction, this is not some political football. You have a couple of parents whose kid volunteered to fight in a distant land, who they hadn’t seen in five years, and weren’t sure whether they’d ever see again.… I make absolutely no apologies for making sure that we get back a young man to his parents, and that the American people understand that this is somebody’s child, and that we don’t condition whether or not we make the effort to try and get them back.”

It was a forceful statement. But if the White House is hoping it will calm the controversy in Washington over the prisoner exchange, it will surely be disappointed. Obama’s Republican critics are still piling on, and the Democrats, with a few conspicuous exceptions, such as Senator Harry Reid, are keeping quiet or registering some doubts of their own. After a classified briefing for senators and congressmen on Wednesday evening at the Capitol, Senator Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, left visibly angry, according to a report in the Times, and said, “I think we can all agree we’re not dealing with a war hero here.”

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