FORT BRAGG, N.C. – Army officials grappled Tuesday with how to handle an estimated 300,000 pages of classified information in the desertion case of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, as well as whether the soldier should be allowed to wear a Prisoner of War Medal, Purple Heart and two other decorations that could be associated with his five years of confinement in Pakistan.
The issues came up at a pretrial hearing at this Army base, where Bergdahl is expected to face court-martial beginning Aug. 8. He is charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy for deliberately walking off his infantry platoon's outpost in eastern Afghanistan in June 2009. He was captured within hours by the Taliban, and held under brutal conditions by the Haqqani network, a group affiliated with the Taliban, until a controversial swap was approved by the White House in May 2014 in which Bergdahl was released in exchange for five Taliban officials.
The main purpose of the pretrial hearing Tuesday was to hammer out details of a protective order governing the handling of classified material and other issues in the case. One is expected to be signed in the coming days by Col. Jeffrey Nance, the judge overseeing proceedings. One of Bergdahl's defense lawyers, Lt. Col. Franklin Rosenblatt, argued repeatedly that the defense team needs more access to classified information, while prosecutors said that strict safeguards need to be put in place to prevent the unauthorized spillage of classified details into the public.
Rosenblatt said that he and the rest of Bergdahl's defense team have not been given access to tens of thousands of pages of relevant classified information, making it difficult for them to prepare for court-martial. The defense team also wants to be able to directly request classified information from Defense Department agencies, but has been unable to do so to date, he added.
"The guy who has the most need to know this information in DOD has the least access to it," Rosenblatt argued on behalf of his client.
But a prosecutor, Capt. Michael Petrusic, said that a senior official with the ability to classify and declassify sensitive information should be consulted for approval before information is released to the defense through discovery, and before the defense interviews witnesses who may have access to classified information. He also noted that there are more than 25,000 classified documents, each with an average length of 13 pages, associated with the case, underscoring the complexity of the proceeding.
Nance said he will decide in coming days how information will be handled. Nance said four individuals, who were not named, may have already disclosed classified information about the case in public. He did not describe the information.
"The bottom line," he said, "Is everybody who wants access to classified information has to have the appropriate security clearance."
Rosenblatt also asked Nance to consider intervening on Bergdahl's behalf to find out why he has not been allowed to wear the POW Medal, the Purple Heart, the Afghanistan Campaign Medal and the NATO Medal.