posted at 11:01 am on June 1, 2014 by Ed Morrissey
Members of Congress erupted in outrage over the prisoner swap that traded five high-ranking Taliban officials from GITMO for American POW Bowe Bergdahl, the only US soldier known to be held by the Taliban. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel defended the decision to make the swap, arguing that Bergdahl’s life was in imminent danger and that the President has the exclusive authority to act in regard to prisoners captured in wartime.
We’ll get back to that point in a moment, but Hagel also argued that this trade could produce negotiations long sought by the US to end the civil war in Afghanistan:
US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel expressed hope Sunday the release of US Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl would lead to direct US talks with the Taliban.
“It could, it might and we hope it will present an opening,” Hagel said in an interview from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Hagel noted that the United States had engaged in talks with the Taliban before, until they were broken off in 2012, and that it strongly supported an Afghan-led effort to reach a peace agreement with the Taliban.
“So maybe this will be a new opening that can produce an agreement,” he said.
There has been an avalanche of criticism over the release of these five GITMO detainees, who are the highest of high-value Taliban operatives. The criticism misses a larger point, though, which is that they were going to get released sooner or later anyway. Their detention hinges on our participation in the Afghan civil war. Unlike the al-Qaeda operatives still in GITMO, there aren’t any other grounds on which to hold them. When we end combat operations in Afghanistan this year, and especially when we fully withdraw in 2016, any justification for continuing to hold them indefinitely evaporates along with our presence. At the very least, we’d have to return them to the custody of the Afghan government, which would probably release them for their own purposes, and Bergdahl would probably not have been one of them.
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You've been played as fools, pissed on, dissed on and now ignored over your own protests. And Hagel is stupid enough to think by releasing fiv...