John Kerry on release of Taliban from Gitmo endangers US troops, ‘baloney’

Critics of the Obama administration have zeroed in on the release of the five Taliban leaders from the US prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for Bowe Bergdahl. Now Secretary of State John Kerry spoke on CNN about the risk to US troops still stationed in combat areas of Afghanistan.

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“Our combat role in Afghanistan is over,” Kerry said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” when asked if U.S. troops were being put at increased risk.

“We’re going to have very few people in that kind of position,” he said. “On occasion, but I honestly, I just think that’s a lot of baloney because, to whatever degree it may be true, they will wind up putting themselves at the mercy of those  people who are very effective who are there, who will deal with those guys.” (Emphasis Added, The Dispatch)

GOP members and conservative talking heads have accused the Obama administration of putting U.S. soldiers more at risk of getting killed or captured by swapping the five Taliban commanders, but Kerry said the new threats coming from the Taliban were little more than propaganda.

“I am not telling you that they don’t have some ability at some point to go back and get involved,” he said, “but they also have an ability to get killed if they do that.” 

Kerry furthered the support to trade for Bergdahl.

“What I know today is what the president of the United States knows, that it would have been offensive and incomprehensible to consciously leave an American behind, no matter what, to leave an American behind in the hands of people who would torture him, cut off his head, do any number of things,” he said.