Cheney: Obama didn’t get ‘a very good deal’

Former Vice President Cheney (R) late Monday said he doesn’t think the Obama administration “got a very good deal” in the exchange for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

“I think they have, in fact, negotiated with terrorists. And I don’t think they got a very good deal,” Cheney said on Fox News’s “The Kelly File.”

{mosads}President George W. Bush was “right on,” Cheney said, when he asserted in 2008 that the U.S. shouldn’t negotiate with terrorists.

Cheney explained that the deal to release five top Taliban prisoners from Guantánamo Bay in exchange for Bergdahl was “part and parcel of a larger policy” in which the U.S. is retreating from the Middle East.

“This so-called trade,” Cheney said, “strikes me as part and parcel of that same unwise policy.”

Asked if President Obama has endangered the U.S. by releasing the detainees, Cheney said, “I think there is a distinct possibility that these five will, in fact, go back into the battle.” 

The detainees were released on Sunday and sent to Qatar, where they remain under a form of house arrest for one year.

Cheney said he suspects they will “most likely” go back into terrorism and launch attacks against the U.S. and its allies.

“I think the odds are that they will, in fact, do that and that we’ll end up paying another kind of price because of the transaction that’s been negotiated here,” he said.