Green Beret Jason Amerine was placed under criminal investigation for telling Congress about a prisoner exchange he arranged with the Taliban to free Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. The prospective deal would have traded an Afghan drug lord to free Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl and American and Canadian civilians who were being held hostage by Pakistani terrorists. Surprisingly, the State Department cancelled that arrangement and instead released five high-level Guantamo Bay detainees in exchange for Berghdahl.
The Bergdahl exchange did not save the other hostages. As reported by Yahoo News, Amerine said, “Warren Weinstein is dead. Colin Rutherford, Joshua Boyle, Caitlin Coleman, and the child she bore in captivity are still hostages in Pakistan. I failed them. I exhausted all efforts and resources available to return them but I failed.” Amerine made this statement while testifying to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Amerine said that he was the leader of a secret team that was ordered to recover Americans that were being held captive in Pakistan. However, his mission failed because of the actions of a “dysfunctional bureaucracy.”
In his testimony, Amerine said, “In early 2013, my office was asked to help get Sergeant Bergdahl home. We informally audited the recovery effort and determined that the reason the effort failed for four years was because our nation lacks an organization that can synchronize the efforts of all our government agencies to get our hostages home. We also realized that there were civilian hostages in Pakistan that nobody was trying to free, so they were added to our mission.”
Green Beret Jason Amerine’s testimony:
He also stated, “To get the hostages home, my team worked three lines of effort: Fix the coordination of the recovery, develop a viable trade and get the Taliban back to the negotiating table. My team was equipped to address the latter two of those tasks but fixing the government’s interagency process was beyond our capability.”
Amerine said that they had designed a plan to exchange Bashir Noorzai, an Afghan drug lord, for the hostages. He claimed they had persuaded the Taliban to discuss the issue, but the State Department cancelled the deal and instead choose to swap Bergdahl for five Taliban fighters.
Amerine was also investigated by the FBI for his disapproval of U.S. hostage rescue protocols, according to the Daily Mail. The FBI did not comment in response to Amerine’s claims and an Army spokesperson stated that they cannot say which individuals “may or may not be under investigation.”
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