Afghanistan Taliban Leader Was at Gitmo

Afghanistan Taliban leader was at Gitmo
AP
The Taliban’s new top operations officer in southern Afghanistan had been a prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, the latest example of a freed detainee who took a militant leadership role and a potential complication for the Obama administration’s efforts to close the prison. U.S. authorities handed over the detainee to the Afghan government, which in turn released him, according to Pentagon and CIA officials.
Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, formerly Guantanamo prisoner No. 008, was among 13 Afghan prisoners released to the Afghan government in December 2007. Rasoul is now known as Mullah Abdullah Zakir, a nom de guerre that Pentagon and intelligence officials say is used by a Taliban leader who is in charge of operations against U.S. and Afghan forces in southern Afghanistan.

The officials, who spoke anonymously because they are not authorized to release the information, said Rasoul has joined a growing faction of former Guantanamo prisoners who have rejoined militant groups and taken action against U.S. interests. Pentagon officials have said that as many as 60 former detainees have resurfaced on foreign battlefields.

Pentagon and intelligence officials said Rasoul has emerged as a key militant figure in southern Afghanistan, where violence has been spiking in the last year. Thousands of U.S. troops are preparing to deploy there to fight resurgent Taliban forces.

One intelligence official told the Associated Press that Rasoul’s stated mission is to counter the U.S. troop surge. The revelation underscores the Obama administration’s dilemma in moving to close the detention camp at Guantanamo and figuring out what to do with the nearly 250 prisoners who remain there.

The Pentagon’s preferred option is to hand them over to their home governments for imprisonment. But the Defense Intelligence Agency’s growing list of former prisoners that have rejoined the fight shows that, in some cases, that system does not work.
According to the Pentagon, at least 18 former Guantanamo detainees have “returned to the fight” and 43 others are suspected of resuming terrorist activities. The Pentagon has declined to provide a complete list of the former prisoners they suspect are now on the battlefield.
He told the tribunal that he intended to return to a peaceful life in Afghanistan.

“I want to go back home and join my family and work in my land and help my family,” he said, according to a U.S. military transcript of the hearing.

National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair said Tuesday that at least two Saudi detainees also turned up recently as members of al-Qaida in Yemen after they were released from Guantanamo. The Saudis had been handed over by the U.S. to Saudi Arabia, where they were supposedly rehabilitated as part of a Saudi program to reform extremists.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
OK shoot them on sight and take no prisoners. No quarter give and none returned. Before saying he would close GITMO, Obama had to have had input from our military I would assume anyway. If he did then he snubbed his ugly nose at them when they gave him any of this information that even ONE terrorists was at it again.
It is a slap in the face of all our troops and those that have been injured or killed. Unforgivable! They risk their lives to catch these terrorists.

…..Thank you Richard for sending this to me.