It looks to me Obama was just looking for an excuse to get rid of five terrorist at Gitmo that he didn’t want to deal with. The “exchange” was just a pretext to do what he already wanted to do.
I was thinking that Obama was trying to appease thw close Gitmo crowd. He has been unable to close Gitmo, so he will just trade out all the inmates- in affect closing Gitmo.
More likely he had been holding out on Taliban demands for the release of the 5 terrorists. Needing to deflect from the VA scandal he decided to make the trade. Same goes with the convenient coincidence of the parents being in DC. “Old Shoe” is lucky they needed him alive to make this show happen. My guess is that “for his privacy” we won’t be hearing from him for a while.