President Barack Obama is a "really lousy negotiator" and needs to figure out how to fix that fast, Fox News Channel National Security Analyst K.T. McFarland said Friday.
"Whether it's negotiating with the Cubans or Iran, or over Guantanamo, every single time, the president has come up short, although he has very good leverage," McFarland, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, told show host
Neil Cavuto on his program Friday afternoon. "He just doesn't seem to be able to use it."
McFarland said the Obama administration is tempting fate by releasing prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba,
responding to reports that the five prisoners exchanged for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl last year may be in touch with their former comrades, even though they are being monitored in Qatar.
"We have seen in the past when they open the Gitmo guys have a recidivism rate of 20 percent," she said.
She further wanted to know why the administration has begun redefining who is a terrorist.
On Wednesday, deputy press secretary
Eric Schultz said that while the U.S. considered the Islamic State (ISIS) a terrorist group, the Taliban is "an armed insurgency."
"It's this twisted press conference they have had in the last week where they said, well the Taliban, no they're really not terrorists," McFarland said. "Why? Because they know that the people they're releasing from Guantanamo Bay are going back into the fight, they're going to go back and join the Taliban, and the Taliban are ultimately going to go back into Afghanistan."
But there is a reason not to let prisoners free before a war ends, said McFarland, and that's because "they go back into the fight."
And whether they're called "terrorists or armed insurgents or freedom fighters, they're going to kill Americans," she said.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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