This is what happens when you have multiple agencies within the administration all working from politically flawed McDonough/Jarrett/Rhodes and communication room “talking points”.

The White House constructs a specific and complex narrative.   The message is then transmitted to State Dept.   The State Dept is then selling that narrative “detained while in combat“, even when the White House (Carney) backs away from it.

WATCH:

We saw the exact same thing happen with the Benghazi story.  As mentioned yesterday this is the exact consequence from using the political outlook of any event to shape your outward messaging.

When you are using politics, or more specifically political risk, as the common consideration to create your message – when the politics of the message turn against you it becomes necessary to shift positions.

The trouble stems with the communication lag between the political shifts toward each accompanying agency. When you shift position the others don’t yet know, that separation creates the double-speak and contradiction.

It only happens when you politicize your position. The more you use politics as the filter to determine your message, the worse, and more frequent, the visible contradiction(s) become.

Ahh, the familiar footprint of “The Fixer”…  You can hear them now:  …‘the first time we found out he was a deserter was when, like you, we read about it in the media’… and the lapdog media will just be OK with that.

We notice many pundits are beginning to wonder if the White House was “caught off guard” about the details surrounding Bowie Bergdahl’s desertion from his post.   Obviously, one would think, the White House would have a full understanding of the back-story surrounding PFC Bergdahl before letting Susan Rice say:

“He served his country with honor and distinction”…

The White House had to know Bergdahl deserted his post, did they not anticipate this would come up? Because the way they are handling it suggests they are being caught off-guard.  (link)

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James Rosen – A senior official confirms to Fox News that the conduct of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl — both in his final stretch of active duty in Afghanistan and then, too, during his time when he lived among the Taliban — has been thoroughly investigated by the U.S. intelligence community and is the subject of “a major classified file.”

In conveying as much, the Defense Department source confirmed to Fox News that many within the intelligence community harbor serious outstanding concerns not only that Bergdahl may have been a deserter but that he may have been an active collaborator with the enemy.

The Pentagon official added pointedly that no relevant congressional committee has sought access to the classified file, but that if such a request were made, key committee chairs would, under previous precedent, likely be granted access to it. Separately, the Pentagon confirmed Monday that it is looking into claims Americans died during the search for Bergdahl.  (more…)

A pro-Taliban website has published a video that claims to show Taliban detainees arriving in Qatar after being released from Guantanamo Bay as part of a prisoner exchange.

In the footage, released by nunn.asia, a group of men wearing traditional Muslim dress gather on a roadside in what is said to be Qatar. The five men, who were switched for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, were to be sent to Qatar where they will remain for at least a year.

When the former prisoners – it’s not clear if all of them are present or just a few – pull up in a convoy of black SUVs, they receive a warm reception, with lots of hugs from the awaiting, clearly jubilant, supporters.

There is no American presence in sight. (read more)

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The process for the deception was actually outlined on the bottom of page #4 of the interim OIG report. The VA facilities, and in many cases the VA regional offices, were keeping two sets of treatment records. One set was what they were using – the second set was what they were reporting to VA in Washington.

To pull off the deception the “audit trail” function on the computer software was disabled. Meaning, there was no way to identify who was manipulating the records and when.

The only way to fix this is to fire all the administrators, fire the top and mid-level managers, fire the auditors and compliance officers, and then deconstruct the SEIU and AFSCME union stranglehold within the VA.

Yeah, good luck with that…

WASHINGTON DC – Appointments’ wait times were manipulated at more than 60 percent of the Department of Veterans Affairs health facilities investigated as part of a new internal audit.

The White House-ordered audit found that schedulers faced pressure to manipulate the system and concluded there was a “systemic lack of integrity within some Veterans Health Administration facilities.”

The audit, issued as VA Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned Friday, found that 64 percent of the 216 VA facilities reviewed had at least one instance where a veterans’ desired appointment date had been changed.

The review found 13 percent of schedulers had received specific instructions to misrepresent wait times.

“Information indicates that in some cases, pressures were placed on schedulers to utilize inappropriate practices in order to make waiting times appear more favorable,” the audit said. (more…)

AFP: Taliban leader Mullah Omar says prisoner swap which freed U.S. soldier Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl was a "big victory"

— Sky News Breaking (@SkyNewsBreak) June 1, 2014

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two Republican lawmakers on Saturday accused President Barack Obama of breaking the law by approving the release of five Afghan detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in exchange for a U.S. soldier believed held by Islamist insurgents for five years.

The White House agreed that actions were taken in spite of legal requirements and cited “unique and exigent circumstances” as justification.

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, 28, of Hailey, Idaho, was handed over to U.S. special operations forces by the Taliban. In return, five Afghans who were held at a U.S. detention facility in Cuba were released to the custody of the government of Qatar, which served as a go-between in negotiations for the trade. (more…)

It should be noted that since abdicating the position of Secretary of State, and the introduction of Clinton’s ‘fixer’, John “Skippy” Podesta, the White House -and more specifically the activity that flows from within it- is now a synergy of both President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s goals.

Yesterday some pundits and media looked strangely at the non-scheduled meeting between Obama and Clinton as if fodder for grand conspiratorial questioning.

As with most issues the answers are not as complex as they seem.

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(Via The Hill) White House press secretary Jay Carney is resigning as the White House’s principal spokesman.

President Obama announced the move in a surprise appearance during Carney’s briefing, and the same day he accepted Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki’s resignation.

Carney will leave his job next month, and he’ll be replaced by his deputy, longtime Obama aide Josh Earnest. Obama hailed Carney as “one of my closest friends” and a “great press secretary”. (more…)

Then again….  The White House has odd definitions of transparency.  They’ll tell the world when they meet with the CIA Station Chief of Afghanistan but won’t mention the unscheduled meetings with Hillary.

PEOPLE's @sswestfall chats w/@HillaryClinton before her @WhiteHouse lunch. Hope she wasn't late for @barackobama! pic.twitter.com/6MAVgsXXzO

— People (@people) May 29, 2014

“The White House confirmed that Hillary Clinton had lunch with President Obama today after People magazine tweeted about the meeting – a tweet that has since been deleted.

“The President enjoyed an informal, private lunch with Secretary Clinton at the White House this afternoon,” a White House official said on background in a response to an inquiry from your pooler.  Your pooler also lodged a complaint about the lack of transparency on the meeting with White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

The lunch was not on the president’s public schedule.” (link)

According to a whistle-blowing Op Ed piece published in the Wall Street Journal, doctors and residents in the VA system were prevented from providing care to patients if their actions were deemed to be “making federal workers look bad” :

…”Scott Barbour, an orthopedic surgeon and a friend, trained at the Miami VA hospital. In an attempt to get more patients onto the operating-room schedule, he enlisted fellow residents to clean the operating rooms between cases and transport patients from their rooms into the surgical suites….

Instead of offering praise for their industriousness, the Chief of Surgery reprimanded the doctors and put a stop to their actions. From his perspective, they were not solving a problem but were making federal workers look bad and creating more work for others, like nurses, who had to take care of more post-op patients.”

Imagine that!  Nurses having to take care of more post-op patients!  You’d think they were working in a hospital or something…. It’s not like they can adjust their census to account for that, or anything. /s/.  But, wait, there’s more ……

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