03/26/15 – Matthew Hoh – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I've got Matthew Ho.
He is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy.
And he used to work for the State Department.
And then I forget, Matthew, you were a Marine before that, is that right?
Welcome back.
Hey, Scott, how you doing?
Yeah, that's correct.
Right.
And then you resigned in protest over the Afghan surge back in 2009, 2010?
Yes, correct.
In 2009, I was working for the State Department as a political officer in Afghanistan.
And, yeah, after serving twice in Iraq and seeing the war in Afghanistan and realizing this is the same thing as occurred in Iraq, just, you know, couldn't go along with it any longer.
OK, right on.
So now we got your bio straight.
Let's talk about Sergeant Bo Bergdahl.
Who's Sergeant Bo Bergdahl?
Well, Sergeant Bo Bergdahl is a young man, or at least he was a young man five years ago before he was captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
He was a young man from Idaho, joined the Army, became a paratrooper, went to Afghanistan in the spring of 2009 with his unit.
And after a short while there, just a couple of months after being there, he disappeared.
He left his base.
They were in eastern Afghanistan, a difficult part of Afghanistan, very dangerous for American forces, a stronghold of the insurgency, a stronghold of the Taliban and the Pashtun insurgency.
And he was, within a couple of days, was realized he had been captured by the insurgency.
He had been captured by some element insurgency and turned over to the Haqqani Network.
And that thus began a five-year confinement for him where he was repeatedly tortured.
As we are now learning, he tried to escape 12 times.
And in the spring of last year, about 10 months ago, the United States was able to win his release by conducting a prisoner swap.
We provided the insurgency in Afghanistan back with five of their people who were holding Guantanamo Bay, and they gave us back Sergeant Bergdahl.
And it became, of course, this media firestorm, most of it politically motivated.
However, Sergeant Bergdahl's fellow soldiers came out very publicly and forcibly saying he was a deserter and should not be treated as a hero.
Sergeant Bergdahl spent the last 10 months in recovery down in San Antonio, Texas, as well as working a desk job.
And just yesterday, the Army issued a charge sheet against Sergeant Bergdahl for two charges, one for desertion and the other for misbehavior before the enemy.
That last charge is a very broad, very wide catch-all that I tell you what, Sky, every single one of us who served overseas could be found guilty of some part of that, because you'd have to be Audie Murphy to not be in violation of that charge.
But it's a catch-all.
You know, you can pin anything on anyone for it.
But that's where it stands now.
And one of the things that is, for those of us who, and I'm a friend of Sergeant Bergdahl's family.
I became friendly with his parents while he was in captivity for those five years.
One of the things that's always been said about this from the family, from the attorneys, from those who are familiar with the investigation, is that there's much more to this than just Sergeant Bergdahl abandoning his mates, of rejecting his oath and fleeing to the enemy.
And as we saw with the most detail we've seen so far, his attorneys have been very tight-lipped.
They've been saying they do not want to try this case in the media.
But in the most revelatory fashion we've seen so far, in a letter that his attorney furnished yesterday to the media, we learned that the report, this 10-month investigation, backs up this assertion that Sergeant Bergdahl didn't willy-nilly decide to quit the war, that he wasn't rushing to aid the enemy or join the Taliban.
But rather, his motives were pure, and that he did not have any bad intentions.
And that's directly from the report, that he had no intention of deserting permanently, that this was a temporary leaving of his post, that he had no intentions of leaving the army, had no intentions of joining the Taliban, had no intentions of assisting the enemy.
And most importantly, the report states that Sergeant Bergdahl left his post to communicate with the closest American general officer, the closest American general, about disturbing circumstances that were occurring.
And this goes back to some things I had learned from my own experience in the military, and back to some things I had learned from Michael Hastings and from Matt Farwell, who had written the Rolling Stone article about Sergeant Bergdahl a few years ago, that something was amiss here, something was not right.
And the belief that he knew information that something had occurred that had caused him to lose faith in the mission, lose faith in his comrades.
And now we see that, quite possibly, the reason why he did leave the base, and ultimately was captured and tortured for five years, was that he was trying to report a wrongdoing, trying to report some type of crime, trying to report some type of illegal activity by his unit.
And this squares, Scott, with our understanding and our knowledge that that entire unit, the entire brigade out there, was required to sign non-disclosure agreements when they returned from Afghanistan, which is incredibly unique.
These guys are not special operations forces.
This is not intelligence officers.
These are just common Joes, just regular soldiers.
And for them to have to sign non-disclosure agreements was always kind of a flag to a lot of people.
And now this makes sense.
And so I think what we're going to see unravel as Sergeant Bergdahl's charges go to the Article 32 hearing, which is basically a grand jury investigation, and then ultimately may proceed to court-martial or trial, is that something was going on here that much deeper and much more sinister than Bo Bergdahl just deciding to quit the war, that things occurred out on that frontier that he saw, he witnessed, that he could not abide by, and that he listened to his conscience and ultimately got himself captured that way.
All right.
Now, so there's a lot to unpack and go over there and follow up and all these kinds of things.
First of all, I forget now if it was from Michael Hastings' report, I think it was from Hastings' piece in Rolling Stone, something about how he had witnessed a kid run over by an American truck, and this was something that had really bothered him, and the rest of the crew were all joking about it and didn't care, but it really bothered him.
Is that what you think was the, you know, one of the things or the thing that he was so concerned about?
Or it sounds like, you kind of sound like you're implying that there was something, you know, much more nefarious going on than just a couple of measly collateral damage casualties.
Yeah, I think so.
To me, I mean, it may be.
I mean, this was a young man.
He was 22 years old at the time.
He had been in combat, you know, I mean, so it just may, and I don't want to say just may have been just one kid getting run over by a truck, which is terrible itself, but it may have been that.
It may have been more.
Yeah, I don't mean to diminish it.
I'm just being sarcastic.
Yeah, I agree with you, Scott.
You know, it's, we do, you know, we do know that we know from the emails that were disclosed between him and his family that he was concerned about things that occurred like that.
And so I think very well that would have been the impetus for him to feel he had to act out.
He had to obey his conscience and he had to obey his responsibilities as a soldier.
I mean, it's interesting in this country.
We are so quick to cite the Nuremberg principles, right, that following orders is not an excuse to commit wrongdoing.
But when it comes to actually carrying out the principles of Nuremberg, we don't see it occur very often.
And when we do, it's often vilified.
Right.
So the courts have, the American courts have refused to uphold the principle that enlisted men have the right to defy their officers if they think their orders are illegal.
Your orders are legal because the constitution says you better obey the chain of command, boy, and that's all that counts.
Say the American courts at this point.
So you'd still get court-martialed anyway if you invoked Nuremberg.
But now the music's playing.
We got to take this break.
We'll be right back with Matthew Ho, talk more about the case of Bo Bergdahl, who will be prosecuted for desertion.
The military announced yesterday.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Matthew Ho about Bo Bergdahl, who the military announced yesterday they are going to prosecute him for desertion.
Now, Matthew, let me make sure I understand this right.
It was his lawyer or it was the government statement that said that, well, actually, it wasn't desertion.
He was going off to try to find a superior officer from another chain of command somewhere where he could tell the truth to someone, as opposed to, oh, he decided he was going to hike to China.
Yeah, this is revealed by his lawyer attesting to what the report found.
So unless his attorneys are perjuring themselves in a legal document and lying about what you can read black and white in an official army investigation, this is what the army concluded.
This is what the general who oversees the investigation concluded.
But if I leave, if somebody leaves their their command to go find another U.S.
Army unit, how the hell do you pretend for a moment that that counts as desertion?
And I encourage people to read his legal team's letter.
You can find it on PBS.org has it.
It's interesting, Scott, because that's exactly the crux of his letter.
And that by the nature of it, this should not be desertion.
It really should be unauthorized absence if you want to charge him with anything.
But there is also something, too, that shows the pedantic and petty nature of the army bureaucracy.
In his response to the army, his attorneys, Bergdahl's attorneys, talk about how the army is considering revoking his prisoner of war status, not because of anything Bergdahl did, but because the army bureaucracy failed to conduct a board of inquiry.
So that because administratively Bergdahl wasn't declared a prisoner of war correctly, because as he says, as the lawyers say, the T's weren't crossed, the I's weren't dotted, that the army actually considers it a good idea.
The same people who want to charge him with desertion, knowing full well that he did, just as you said, leave to go and report the truth about what was occurring to another unit, to another superior officer, they want to reclaim, recall his prisoner of war status and all the benefits and everything that would entail because of an administrative mistake, a clerical mistake by the army itself.
So that's the type of people you're dealing with here.
Anyone who's served, anyone who's been in the Marine Corps 10 years, anyone who's spent time in the military will understand that mindset.
Amazing.
Yeah.
Well, I've read Catch-22.
Does that count?
Yeah, that's got, there's no, people ask me all the time, what's the best book written about war?
And I say Catch-22, that or I think it was Joseph Hooker's book, MASH, that they made the film and the TV series about.
Same type of thing.
Explains it perfectly.
Complete absurdity.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
There's a great book by Mises called Bureaucracy.
Pretty much explains what we're talking about there.
All right.
Now, so, now what about all this, all the American soldiers who died out looking for this guy?
How careless was he to go and get himself captured by the enemy?
And then all of his comrades end up getting shot up and blown up going to try to save him.
Well, again, according to his legal team, the report that the army conducted, the 10 month investigation that they did, plus the five years he was in captivity, there is no evidence that any American soldiers were killed looking for Bo Bergdahl.
What killed those American soldiers, like the other 2200 that were killed in Afghanistan, was the war.
What killed those young men was that they were put in eastern Afghanistan to accomplish a mission that was a fantasy.
To accomplish a mission that had no purpose.
To win a war that was unwinnable.
So the responsibility for their deaths lies not on a young man who was trying to obey his conscience and then was captured by the insurgency, but rather with a chain of command that went along with the war that was absurd and without point.
An administration that escalated the war because it made great political sense.
And an American public that even though they disliked the war by large amounts, I mean, this is according to various polls, the most unpopular war in American history has not really stood up and said, hey, we should stop our kids dying there.
We should stop our kids killing other people's kids.
We should stop wasting trillions of dollars on this.
Right.
And on one point here, it's a little bit of a tangent, but it's an important point that you made there about the unwinnable nature of this and how the politicians in D.C. knew this.
There's a report.
Well, there's a book by a Washington Post reporter called Little America, and they excerpted it in the Washington Post.
And they report in there that the CIA did an intelligence estimate.
Well, I don't know if it was officially a national intelligence estimate, but it was a CIA report that told Obama, don't bother surging into Afghanistan back in 2009.
It won't work.
So don't do it or don't, you know, well, I don't know if it was specific advice.
But anyway, here's why there's no reason to believe that the surge could possibly be successful, sir.
And Obama knew what it said and then chose deliberately to not read it so that he would have plausible deniability so that he could pretend that he was ignorant, that the CIA warned him that the whole thing was pointless, because, as you said, it was good politics to give in to Petraeus and McChrystal and Bill Crystal and escalate that war.
Absolutely.
You know, and that's I got when I first met Dan Ellsberg after I resigned and came home and then became this celebrity or whatever.
Right.
When I first met Dan Ellsberg, the first thing he said to me, Dan Ellsberg, of course, the U.S. government official ran policy person who published the Pentagon Papers at great risk to his personal safety and liberty.
But Dan, the first thing Dan said to me was asked me was like, did you bring any documents with me?
And at the time when I resigned, I was quitting.
I was done with the wars.
I had no thought that I'd be here five and a half years later, you know, talking on the radio about this.
And now I realize I should have brought things.
I mean, again, I had no intention of being an outspoken opponent.
I mean, this is this is all, you know, but looking back, if I did have a time, I would have because there were things that were available and it was in September of 2009 or October 2009.
The Boston Globe, to its credit, published a leak assessment of the insurgents in Afghanistan that found that nine out of 10 Taliban are fighting us because we're there.
They're not fighting us because of their religion or because of some type of ideology or allegiance to the Taliban, but because we were there and because we were backing this corrupt government that was predatory, that was taking advantage of them.
And these are these were the reasons why I resigned.
Unfortunately, when I left, I left for good and didn't bring any of my emails, didn't bring any documents, didn't bring anything to show that, yes, this is exactly what our assessment was.
And interesting enough, Scott, this may be one of the reasons why when General McChrystal took command in Afghanistan in 2009 and he did his famous assessment, his famous survey, he didn't utilize U.S. military officers.
He didn't utilize U.S. diplomats or U.S. intelligence officers, these people that we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on training and educating and growing.
What he did was he went and brought in outside experts from think tanks in places that were sympathetic to the ideal of escalation of war, of of empire, of having this large American intervention overseas who believed in counterinsurgency that you could that they believed in the magic of it, for lack of a better phrase.
He brought in those people who would rubber stamp, you know, expanding the war and trying this this philosophy, this this alchemy of counterinsurgency.
And so, yeah, I mean, you could see that if he had done it through the military, through the intelligence services, it wouldn't have received the glaring endorsement that it did through basically private contractors.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so last couple of minutes here, back to Bergdahl.
What's going to happen to him?
How much time is he facing?
I guess I read he's even facing possibly the death penalty.
Is that correct?
The army waived off that the death penalty.
But so the maximum he could receive his life in prison, how he could receive life in prison if the facts as reported in the report are correct, how could he even be charged if the facts in the report are correct?
I am unsure.
But you'd have to believe if he is charged, if he is found guilty, that some leniency would be shown, particularly as he was held prisoner in terrible conditions, tortured horribly for five years, made 12 separate escape attempts, that some leniency would have to be shown by the U.S.
Government, U.S.
Army in its sentence.
Now, what can be done here?
I mean, can you testify as an expert witness?
Who's who's going to defend this kid?
I don't know.
I mean, I'm not sure how that's going to happen.
His legal team has been very quiet about this case.
Again, they've said all along they're not going to try it out in the court of public opinion.
They're not going to go to the media.
His his lead attorney was on the media yesterday.
You could see a good interview with him on PBS and NPR, as well as MSNBC.
But hopefully more people speak out about this.
And hopefully maybe we get a few strong-willed and brave people in Congress who recognize that there's something very wrong here.
And this young man may actually be a hero.
All right, Shaul, that's Matthew Ho.
Thank you very much for your time on this subject.
Hey, Scott.
Thank you.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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