WASHINGTON: A combat-decorated US military officer told a congressional committee on Thursday that all American hostages in Pakistan could have been rescued, but bureaucratic infighting failed them.

Lt Col Jason Amerine told the Senate’s homeland security and governmental affairs committee that he was removed from his job when he tried to expose this dysfunction.

“The cadets I taught at West Point, now officers rising in the ranks, are reaching out to see if I’m okay,” he told the committee. “I feared for their safety when they went to war and now they fear for my safety in Washington.”

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Lt Col Amerine, a Green Beret, was one of the five witnesses who participated in the committee’s hearing into whistle-blowing, the practice of divulging government secrets in public interests.

Col Amerine told the committee that he faced criminal investigation by the US army this year after informing Congress about a scuttled deal he tried to cut with the Taliban to free Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl and five American and Canadian civilians held in Pakistan.

“Warren Weinstein is dead. Colin Rutherford, Joshua Boyle, Caitlin Coleman and the child she bore in captivity are still hostages in Pakistan,” he added.

US President Barack Obama recently announced that Mr Weinstein, a USAID worker held for years, was accidentally killed along with an Italian aid worker in a CIA drone strike on an Al Qaeda hideout in Pakistan in January.

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Ms Coleman is an American, who, along with her Canadian husband Boyle and their unborn child, were taken hostage in Afghanistan two years ago, possibly by the Haqqani Taliban network. Mr Rutherford, too, is a Canadian.

“I exhausted all efforts and resources available to return them but I failed,” Mr Amerine said in his prepared testimony.

Published in Dawn June 12th, 2015

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