Obama’s decision to trade five terrorists for one deserter was reviled pretty much as soon as the ink was dry on the paper — Americans everywhere were furious. Now, they’re likely to become even more angry, as it turns out that the Bowe Bergdahl swap may have led to fatal consequences for Kayla Mueller.
The Obama administration’s swap of five Taliban leaders held at Guantanamo Bay for accused Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl may have doomed any hope Kayla Mueller’s family had for working out a deal with ISIS, the murdered aid worker’s family said in an interview.
Carl Mueller told NBC in an interview that aired Monday that he and his wife thought they could win his daughter’s freedom with a $6.2 million ransom payment, although he acknowledged the Arizona family faced a daunting task in raising that much money. But when the White House agreed last year to trade Bergdahl, who had been held for five years by the Taliban and Haqqani network, the family believes the price for their daughter went up.
“That made the whole situation worse,” Kayla Mueller’s brother, Eric, told the network. “Because that’s when the demands got greater. They got larger. They realized that they had something. They realized that, ‘Well, if they’re gonna let five people go for one person, why won’t they do this? Or why won’t they do that?’”
This is what happens when you try to play politics with war. Obama figured that if he got Bergdahl home, it would help quiet the immense criticism his administration was getting, and had very little thought about the consequences of his actions. After all, what’s the deaths of a few Americans when he has polling points to bump up?