Tag Archives: exchange

One prisoner exchanged for Sgt. Bergdahl has made suspicious communications

One of the five prisoners exchanged for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in May 2014, is reportedly being investigated for making suspicious phone calls to Afghanistan over the past few months.

According to CNN, this is the first known time one of the five detainees who were released has been suspected of attempted to make contact with any militant groups in the Middle East, but this one instance has raised the question of whether the other four will follow suit.

All five former detainees are said to be in Qatar, where their communications have been monitored by a U.S. intelligence program for months. The program in question is saying they have evidence showing the former detainee in question had “reached out” to militant groups and encouraged further militant activity.

However, one official told NBC News the former detainee had called family members in Afghanistan and there is no evidence showing the phone calls were to members of any militant group in the area. This official also added the content of the phone calls contained no “threatening activity or planning.”

No matter what the content of the suspected phone calls, the governments of Qatar and the U.S. are working together on this new issue.

Rear Admiral John Kirby had an interview on the show ‘Erin Burnett Out Front,’ where he said, “We have a strong security partnership with Qatar, and are in constant dialogue with Qatari government officials about these five detainees and we are confident that we would be able to mitigate any threat of re-engagement by any of these members.”

The Pentagon released a statement saying they would not comment on cases involving the detainees. The statement also said, according to the Daily Mail, “we take any incidence of re-engagement very seriously, and we work in close coordination through military, intelligence, law enforcement and diplomatic channels to mitigate re-engagement and to take follow-on action when necessary.”

Obamacare Day 1: Online Exchange Is Already Broken

Have you tried to sign up on the Obamacare exchange yet? After hearing reports from potential patients around the country that the website is already malfunctioning we decided to investigate. The domain is available, seemingly unaffected by the government shutdown. Other government sites are currently unavailable, which makes one wonder- Does the federal government pay for and register their domains on a daily basis? If so, they deserve to be shut down. Obamacare webstite

Like an ominous sign of things to come the Healthcare.gov website is already telling potential patients they’ll have to wait in line… It took approximately 8 minutes for the site to allow us to advance, and no- our internet connection wasn’t slow. Once we were able to advance the site asked a series of questions. Again, once we tried to advance we got this message:

Obamacare Website 2So, we tried again, and we got the same message. This time waiting for more than 10 minutes to get through the website. How is it that the federal government didn’t prepare the website for the high traffic it claims to be receiving? When videos go viral on Youtube with millions of people using the site at once how often do you hear of it crashing? How about Google, which receives millions of hits a day? How often are those sites down? The difference? Government vs. the free-market.

As Obamacare celebrates its first birthday during a government shutdown, signs are already looking worrisome with regards to the efficiency of the new “market”.