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‘Serial’ Podcast Returns With Second Season
By Steve Johnson, Chicago Tribune (TNS)
Season up, servers down.
That appeared to be the case briefly Thursday morning when the first episode of the second season of the hit podcast Serial was posted without advance fanfare on the show’s website.
As has been widely speculated, the episode deals with the travails of former U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, charged with deserting the Army in Afghanistan in June 2009. For the first time in the media, Bergdahl tells his own story, a complicated tale that morphed from a missing persons case into a returning soldier story into a political lightning rod.
The episode, available at serialpodcast.org and through other channels, puts the Bergdahl story in context, including a quote from presidential candidate Donald Trump saying, “In the old days deserters were shot.”
Attempts to access the episode on the show’s website in its first hours, across several devices, were at first rebuffed, suggesting massive interest. But that situation didn’t last and the website soon delivered the episode smoothly.
The episode begins with excerpts from Bergdahl’s 25 taped hours of conversation with screenwriter Mark Boal, one of the filmmakers behind The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Their essence is that Bergdahl thinks of himself, first, as a whistleblower hoping to alert higher-ups to leadership he considered “dangerous.”
“I had this fantastic idea that I was going to prove to the world that I was the real thing,” like a movie character, listeners hear Bergdahl telling Boal. “I saw things falling apart as far as my command goes.”
It has been reported that Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow have been working on a movie about Bergdahl. Boal’s production company shared its tapes with Serial and is a partner in Season 2, host Sarah Koenig says.
Serial comes from This American Life and WBEZ-FM 91.5 in Chicago. The show’s premise is that it examines one story in detail, week by week, like an old-time radio serial. Season 1, which became the first podcast popular enough to merit parody on Saturday Night Live, reinvestigated a murder case involving high-school students in Baltimore.
Serial is also available on Pandora, iTunes and other podcasting outlets.
©2015 Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Photo: United States Army via Wikimedia Commons
Jeb Bush Says He Opposes Closing Gitmo, Doesn’t Read New York Times
By Michael Bender, Bloomberg News (TNS)
WASHINGTON — Traveling through Texas on Thursday, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush aired his side of a live interview on Fox Radio by using a social media app known as Meerkat. He attracted more than 300 viewers while he weighed in on a handful of issues. Among them: Bush said he watches “Fox & Friends” in the morning, doesn’t read The New York Times, and said the U.S. should not continue “disparaging” Israel’s prime minister.
Here’s a roundup:
- On closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility:
“The president is totally focused on closing Guantanamo as an organizing principle, and it’s all based on politics. It’s not based on keeping us safe, which should be his first obligation. We shouldn’t be closing Guantanamo. We shouldn’t be releasing Taliban that are openly organizing once again to attack us. This is just not the right policy.”
- On James Baker, one of Bush’s foreign policy advisers, criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his lack of support for a two-state solution and the U.S.’s negotiations with Iran:
“(Baker) has a different view. I did not believe it was appropriate to go speak to J Street, a group that basically has anti-Israeli sentiments, but I have a vast array of people advising me and I’m honored that Jim Baker is doing so. The fact that I have people that I might not agree with on every subject advising me shows leadership, frankly. I don’t think we need monolithic thinking here.”
- On Netanyahu’s opposition to a two-state solution:
“It turns out he didn’t quite say that. That was how the narrative was built here in the United States. What he said was as long as the Palestinians don’t recognize Israel, their right to have secure borders as a Jewish state, that a two-state solution is not possible. Look, Israeli politics is rough and tumble, maybe more so than here. And so, he apologized for what he said about Arab Israelis, and we should take him at his word. We shouldn’t be continuing to disparage him.”
- On the desertion charges facing Sargent Bowe Bergdahl:
“My first reaction is to the people who lost their lives trying to get him back and their families that didn’t get the same attention from this administration and this president. It’s heartbreaking to think about people, the blood and treasure of our country, being lost in any circumstance. But to try to bring back someone who turns out to have been a deserter is just heartbreaking.”
- On a perceived weakness with the evangelical base of the Republican Party:
“There are very few people that can actually tell that story the way that I can, because for eight years I served and consistently advocated my views on moral issues. This will all sort out. In order for a conservative to win, we have to unite the conservative cause, not divide ourselves up into spare parts, and then go after and persuade people that aren’t as conservative. I mean, we got to get to 50. Winning is what this should be about so that we can govern in a way that allows people to rise up again.”
- On Senator Ted Cruz’s announcement this week that he’s running for president:
“He’s an articulate, good man. And everybody will have their chance to make their case going forward. He’s the only one that’s announced, and that may have been a smart move, but I’ll let others make the determination of who is the good candidate is, who can win and all of that.”
- On lessons from Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful 2012 campaign:
“Governor Romney’s team thought that making this an election about a referendum on the president’s failed economic policies, exclusively focused on that, was enough. And I think the lesson learned is, yes, that’s important to point out the failures of a policy that has kept us down. But you also have to show who you are, and connect with people, and understand the plight that they’re in. And offer an alternative that is hopeful and optimistic, and give people a sense that if you’re elected you can fix things. I wish that Governor Romney was president of the United States….We’d be growing faster and people’s incomes would be growing and we would be safer internationally.”
Photo: Jeb Bush via Facebook
Bergdahl Is Questioned In Army Probe
By James Rosen, McClatchy Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — Army investigators questioned Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for the first time Wednesday in the Pentagon’s probe of his 2009 disappearance in Afghanistan, subsequent capture, and nearly five years in Taliban captivity.
Bergdahl’s May 31 release in exchange for five senior Taliban militants set off a political firestorm in Washington, with mainly Republican lawmakers accusing President Barack Obama of negotiating with terrorists to secure Bergdahl’s freedom.
The nation’s top military commanders backed the deal, saying it fulfilled the commitment never to leave a fallen warrior behind enemy lines. Some former soldiers who served with Bergdahl said he’d walked away from his post in a remote section of eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border.
Army Maj. Gen. Kenneth Dahl, head of the probe, and his aides interviewed Bergdahl at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Bergdahl was accompanied by his civilian lawyer, Yale University law lecturer Eugene Fidell, and an Army lawyer, Capt. Alfredo Foster.
Fidell said the interview lasted from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with a lunch break. Fidell said he thought the interview would be finished after two or three more hours Thursday.
“It was about as stress-free as possible,” Fidell told McClatchy late Wednesday. “It was not an interrogation.”
Bergdahl was read his Article 31 warnings — the equivalent of Miranda rights in a civilian judicial process — and he waived his right to remain silent, Fidell said.
Fidell declined to respond directly when asked if Dahl had asked Bergdahl about how he came to leave his base in eastern Afghanistan before he found himself in Taliban custody. “I’m not going to get into any of the questions or details,” Fidell said. But he expressed confidence that Bergdahl won’t face prison time even if he is found to have gone AWOL or deserted his post.
“It would be very strange if Sgt. Bergdahl, having endured five years of captivity by the Taliban, were to be sent to jail,” Fidell said. “I don’t think this country is ready to do that, and I don’t think the Army is ready to do that.”
Photographs from the interview session, taken and released by Fidell, show Bergdahl appearing healthy and wearing a khaki-green civilian shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows.
Army officials have said that if found to have deserted, Bergdahl could lose tens of thousands of dollars in back pay held in escrow during his captivity.
The Army did a preliminary investigation in 2009 after Bergdahl went missing from his base, but it suspended it because he could not be interviewed while in captivity. Some soldiers claim that U.S. service members died searching for him, but Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said at a contentious June 11 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee that he knew of no such fatalities.
Bergdahl, 28, was released by Taliban fighters to U.S. special forces commandos in Afghanistan during a tense exchange captured in a video clip that went viral when the Islamic insurgents posted it online. After Bergdahl was secure, the United States freed five Taliban from the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Bergdahl was flown to the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, treated and debriefed there for 12 days, and then flown to Joint Base San Antonio. Following more than a month of treatment and what the Army calls “reintegration” at San Antonio Medical Center, Bergdahl received a new active-duty desk assignment July 14 at U.S. Army North headquarters at the base.
Michael Doyle of the Washington Bureau contributed.
AFP Photo
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