Retired Gen. Jack Keane and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon on Monday slammed President Obama’s decision to release five senior Taliban terrorists in exchange for captured U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
“More than 72 hours after this deal has been done, we have still have not been told what they’re going to do to ensure that these top five Taliban leaders do not re-enter the fight,” McKeon told Fox News, according to a report in The Washington Free Beacon.
“I mean, they have blood of thousands of Afghans and Americans on their hands, and we’re releasing them to Qatar,” the California Republican added.
McKeon said he believes the Obama Administration “violated the law” under the National Defense Authorization Act by failing to inform Congress 30 days in advance about the release of the Guantanamo Bay militants.
Keane slammed the prisoner trade in a separate Fox interview on Monday, calling it a “lousy deal.”
He expressed skepticism that the agreement, which would reportedly keep the five freed senior Taliban operatives in Qatar for a year, would prevent them from rejoining the terrorist fight.
“Our terms and conditions with these five should have been tied to the fact with guarantors that they are not going to be able to get back into that conflict while we are still there,” Keane said, adding that the deal should have had provisions ensuring that the jihadists would be denied access to telephones and the Internet.
“We could have put that in place,” Keane said. “We just made a very, very bad deal here, and we should have discussed this with the Congress, because they would have got some feedback about the terms of this deal.”
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