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Bowe Bergdahl Disorder, Per Army Sanity Board Evaluation: 'Schizotypal Personality'
Friday, March 18, 2016 06:47 AM
By: The Wire
Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl suffered from "schizotypal personality disorder" when he left his post in Afghanistan, concluded an Army Sanity Board Evaluation from 2015.
Bergdahl had schizotypal personality disorder "at the time of the alleged criminal conduct" and now also has post-traumatic stress disorder, said CNN's reporting on the evaluation.
"Though Sgt. Bergdahl did have a severe mental disease or defect at the time of the alleged criminal conduct, he was able to appreciate the nature and quality and wrongfulness of this conduct," said a July 27, 2015, memorandum from the sanity board.
The memo said he does not currently suffer from a mental disease that would render him unable to understand the proceedings, said CNN.
A Mayo Clinic website says people with the personality disorder have trouble interpreting social cues and can develop significant distrust of others.
The diagnosis was included in a document dump orchestrated by the defense, said CNN.
Bergdahl faces charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, the latter of which carries up to a life sentence. He was held five years by the Taliban and its allies before a swap for five Taliban captives held at Guantánamo Bay, prompting criticism from some in Congress that the move threatened national security.
His military trial had been tentatively scheduled to begin over the summer, but it has been delayed by disagreements over access to classified materials.
Bergdahl is saying he left his post in 2009 to draw attention to what he saw as bad decisions by officers above him, according to other documents released by the defense on Wednesday, reported The Associated Press.
Attorneys for Bergdahl, who faces charges including desertion, said they released the documents to help counteract negative publicity over the case.
Bergdahl told a general who investigated the case that he hoped to cause an alarm by leaving his post, then walk to a larger base in Afghanistan so he could have an audience with a top commander.
“So, the idea was to – it was – literally, it was a sacrificial – it was a self-sacrifice thing,” Bergdahl said, according to the transcript of a 2014 interview with Maj. Gen. Kenneth Dahl.
Bergdahl’s attorney Eugene Fidell said the decision to release the documents was made to fight negative publicity and because prosecutors have already entered part of the interview into the court record.
“The more Americans know about this case, the better,” Fidell said in an email.
An Army spokesman didn’t immediately respond to an after-hours email seeking comment about the new documents Wednesday.
In the interview, Bergdahl expressed misgivings about how he and other soldiers were sent to help retrieve a disabled armored vehicle before encountering explosives and enemy fire that turned a six-hour mission into one lasting several days. None of the men was killed, but Bergdahl said an officer complained they were unshaven upon their return to base.
He said he began to worry that if he didn’t say anything, a future bad order could get someone in his platoon killed.
He described coming up with a plan to leave the observation post his platoon was manning: “The only thing that I could see was, I needed to get somebody’s attention.”
He ruled out going to the media and instead decided to trigger an alarm by sneaking off and then walking to a larger base nearby. He described his thought process, referring to himself in the third-person: “That guy disappears. No one knows what happened to him. That call goes out. It hits every command. Everybody goes, what has happened?”
Within a couple days, he planned to show up at the base: “the Soldier shows up … People recognize him. They ID him. They go, ‘What did you just do?' And that Soldier says, ‘I am not saying anything about what I did until I am talking to a general.’ ”
