The Army on Wednesday charged Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl with desertion, but the former Taliban captive avoided the possibility of execution as punishment for his alleged crime.
The Army also charged Bergdahl with improper conduct with the Taliban, who captured him shortly after he left his eastern Afghanistan post June 30, 2009, and then held him for almost five years.
A controversial deal approved by President Barack Obama freed Bergdahl on May 31 last year in exchange for five former senior Taliban commanders who were freed from the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Eugene Fidell, a Yale University military law professor who is representing Bergdahl, said the desertion charge did not surprise him, but acknowledged that he had not expected the charge of having misbehaved while in Taliban captivity.
“We are just heading into an Article 32 investigation,” Fidell told McClatchy. “The convening authority would still have to make a decision what to do based on the Article 32 report. So this is still a very preliminary juncture.”
Col. Daniel J.W. King, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Forces Command, did not take questions from reporters after announcing the charges in a short statement at Fort Bragg, N.C.
“Sergeant Bergdahl is charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice with one count of Article 85, desertion with intent to shirk important or hazardous duty, and one count of Article 99, misbehavior before the enemy by endangering the safety of a command, unit or place,” King said.
The fact that Bergdahl is now part of a formal military criminal proceeding precluded him from taking questions from reporters or saying more about the case than his prepared statement.
Military critics of the prisoner exchange, among them former platoon mates of Bergdahl, have said that soldiers died searching for him after he left his remote post in Afghanistan’s Paktika province near the Pakistan border.
Mainly Republican members of Congress have accused Obama of negotiating with terrorists to secure the Idahoan’s release, and of violating a law requiring the president to give Congress at least 30 days’ notice before any Guantanamo detainees are freed.
The five Taliban released last year included the jihadist group’s former former deputy defense and intelligence ministers when it ruled Afghanistan before the October 2001 invasion.
Then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and the nation’s top military commanders defended the deal as fulfillment of a sacred commitment to leave no soldier captured or fallen behind enemy lines.
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