The Obama administration has said since Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was released by the Taliban on Saturday that his deteriorating health drove the decision to exchange quickly the five high-level Taliban detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for Bergdahl. But in a closed-door briefing to senators this week, Obama administration officials also said they were concerned that the Taliban might kill him if word of the negotiations leaked.

Here are some of the administration’s comments:

—En route to Afghanistan on June 1, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said: “We believed that the information we had, the intelligence we had, was such that Sgt. Bergdahl’s safety and health were both in jeopardy, and in particular his health deteriorating. It was our judgment that if we could find an opening and move very quickly with that opening, that we needed to get him out of there, essentially to save his life.”

—At a news conference in Brussels on Thursday, President Barack Obama said: “We do not leave anybody wearing the American uniform behind. We had a prisoner of war whose health had deteriorated and we were deeply concerned about. And we saw an opportunity and we seized it. And I make no apologies for that. We had discussed with Congress the possibility that something like this might occur. But because of the nature of the folks that we were dealing with and the fragile nature of these negotiations, we felt it was important to go ahead and do what we did. And we’re now explaining to Congress the details of how we moved forward.”

—In Washington, deputy State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said Thursday: “There were real concerns that if this were made public first, his physical security could be in danger. We needed to move quickly, all of these factors played into that.”

(AP)