Bergdahl Defers Plea In First Court Appearance

Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was arraigned during a brief hearing Tuesday before a military judge, but he deferred entering a plea to charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy.

Court case… Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl (centre) leaves a military courthouse with his lawyer Lt. Colonel Franklin Rosenblatt (left) in North Carolina.

Bergdahl disappeared from Combat Outpost Mest-Malak in Afghanistan’s Paktika province near the Pakistan border in June 2009 and was later captured by the Taliban.

Bergdahl, who spent five years as a Taliban prisoner before gaining his release in a prisoner swap in 2014, faces a court-martial after being charged earlier this year with desertion and endangering USA troops.

Bergdahl was recovered in May 2014 by a U.S. Special Operations team in Afghanistan after being held captive for five years by the Haqqani network, a militant group affiliated with the Taliban. Bergdahl did not decide whether he would prefer to face a court-martial with a jury or one with only a judge, Associated Press reported. Wearing a formal Army dress uniform, Bergdahl quietly conferred with Rosenblatt before and after the hearing.

Col. Frederick set the next pretrial hearing in Bergdahl’s case for January 12.

The hearing is the first step in Bergdahl’s prosecution before a general courts martial.

Legal databases and media accounts turn up only a few misbehaviour cases since 2001, when fighting began in Afghanistan, followed by Iraq less than two years later.

Bergdahl told military investigators he left his post to get the attention of a top general he wanted to speak to about perceived problems with his unit’s leadership.

Bergdahl hasn’t talked publicly about what happened, but over the past several months, he spoke extensively with screenwriter Mark Boal, who shared about 25 hours of the recorded interviews with Sarah Koenig for her popular podcast, “Serial”.

Bergdahl attorney Eugene Fidell has said the Army did not follow the advice of a preliminary hearing officer in choosing to pursue a general court-martial. In contrast, statistics show the U.S. Army prosecuted about 1,900 desertion cases between 2001 and the end of 2014. I could be what it is that every… you know, all those guys out there who go to the movies and watch those movies, they all want to be that. Yet General Robert Abrams, head of the US Army Forces Command, eventually referred Bergdahl’s case to a general court-marital.