Former POW, Bowe Bergdahl, could face life in prison

Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, 29, will face general court- martial in connection with his 2009 disappearance from his base in Afghanistan, according to US Army.

Bergdahl was charged in March with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy.

The date for his desertion hearing at Fort Bragg in the U.S. state of North Carolina will be announced at a later date.

Major General Kenneth Dahl recommended that Bergdahl serve no prison time and that his case be moved to a special misdemeanour-level military court.

“We had hoped that the case would not go in this direction”, said Eugene Fidell, Bergdahl’s lawyer.

US Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who had been held for almost five years by Afghan militants, was handed over to US Special Operations forces in Afghanistan on May 31, 2014 in a swap for five Taliban detainees.

Bergdahl disappeared June 30, 2009, from Combat Outpost Mest-Malak in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, and subsequently was captured.

He characterised Bergdahl as an unrealistically idealistic soldier who left his post to report concerns about his unit’s leadership to a general at another base. He was tortured regularly, starved and beaten, and he tried to escape repeatedly, an official with the Pentagon’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency who interviewed Bergdahl following his release from captivity said during testimony in September.

Abrams’s decision came just days after Bergdahl was heard for the first time in his own voice publicly explaining why he left his base, in taped interviews that were broadcast by the “Serial” podcast last week. “Doing what I did was me saying I am like Jason Bourne”.

“We again ask that Donald Trump cease his prejudicial months-long campaign of defamation against our client”, Fidell said in his statement.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., said his committee would hold hearings on the case if Bergdahl was not punished for his actions. By contrast, statistics show the U.S. Army prosecuted about 1,900 desertion cases between 2001 and the end of 2014.

Fidell pointed to a page of the report that said the committee would remain abreast of the disciplinary process and ensure that “Sgt. Bergdahl’s behavior is adjudicated as required”.

Bergdahl’s story is also the subject of the second season of the popular journalism podcast Serial, which appeared to break the news of the general court-martial via its Twitter account. “I had this fantastic idea that I was going to prove to the world that I was the real thing”. Dahl also said he had found no evidence to support assertion that any soldiers had been killed while searching for Bergdahl over the course of his 59-day investigation, despite claims by Trump and others that six had specifically died while doing so. Later, the administration changed its line and said that, Bergdahl’s potential failings aside, it had the obligation to do everything possible to win the freedom of a missing soldier.