State Department Refuses to Say if Cash Payoff Was Part of Bergdahl Hostage Deal

"Prisoner of war."

A State Department spokeswoman on Monday would not say whether any cash ransom was paid for the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

The question came in the midst of a flurry of questions about the circumstances surrounding the deal. A high-level intelligence officer familiar with the years-long hunt for Bergdahl told the Washington Free Beacon last week that a ransom was almost surely paid.

“I have not heard anything about cash, I’m happy to check,” said State spokeswoman Marie Harf when asked about the prospect at Monday’s press briefing.

It was at least the third time since last week that State has refused to confirm or deny that any cash changed hands.

This woman, Marie Larf, seems to be the White Susan Rice, except even dumber and more preposterous. She'll claim anything on camera. And even when you catch her lying (as Andrew Mitchell, of all people, did in that clip), she just pretends that that was the point that she was trying to make all along.

See this video for another preposterous performance by Larf.

This woman seems extremely dim to me.

There's a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that cash was part of the deal for this "prisoner."

Prior to his release, Bowe Bergdahl was being held by members of the Haqqani network, a US-designated terrorist organization. Haqqani and the Taliban are not one in the same, with the former group acting as a crime syndicate with a radical Islamist agenda. They're "80 percent Tony Soprano and 20 percent Al Qaeda," is how [author Brad] Thor put it in a telephone conversation last week. According to this official, Haqqani would be more interested in being compensated monetarily than in a prisoner/hostage trade, especially one in which they were not the primary beneficiary. Recall that of the five jihadi commanders freed in the deal, four were Taliban, and only one was (arguably) primarily Haqqani. Fox News also reported that the US paying a cash ransom for Bergdahl was under discussion as recently as December....

The ransom plan was reportedly abandoned, but the intelligence official insisted that there is reason to believe that cash changed hands as part of the deal....

Lachlan Markay's report also mentions the fact that higher-ranking Haqqanis were not included in the trade, which raises additional questions about how exactly that group benefitted from the swap.

posted by Ace at 04:35 PM

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