Fascinating:

@BuzzFeedAndrew The admin and Pentagon went to great lengths to keep the circumstances of his “capture” quiet. So…now they know.

— Michael Goldfarb (@thegoldfarb) June 4, 2014

@BuzzFeedAndrew New shit’s come to light—not really fair to trash folks for changing their minds. And our people don’t read Rolling Stone.

— Michael Goldfarb (@thegoldfarb) June 4, 2014

That’s the excuse they’re going with - that people didn’t understand the nature of Bergdahl’s capture by the Taliban, so we now have to accept the 180 and treating him like a traitor.

Except, that it doesn’t pass the smell test.

The circumstances of Bergdahl’s capture weren’t clear.

On July 2, two U.S. officials told the AP the soldier had “just walked off” his base with three Afghans after his shift. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

On July 6, the Taliban claimed on their Web site that five days earlier a “drunken American soldier had come out of his garrison” and was captured by mujahedeen.

Details of such incidents are routinely held very tightly by the military as it works to retrieve a missing or captured soldier without giving away any information to captors.

Afghans in contact with the Taliban told the AP that the soldier was held by a Taliban group led by a commander called Maulvi Sangin. They said the fighters decided to move him north into Taliban-controlled areas of Ghazni province.

The Afghans spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of arrest or reprisal. It was impossible to independently confirm their information.

Walked off base. Which leaves the possibility of desertion open, though the report also claims that the Taliban had captured a guy who was drunk.

Now, given what we seem to know about how his other unit members treated him for not drinking, is it possible that they pressured him into drinking, and that after that incident, he did go off base? That’ll all be part of the investigation to be sure, but the early reports didn’t gloss over the possibility that he deserted.