[The press have published a couple of stories about former Guantanamo prisoners fighting western armies after release from the G torture camp. We’re supposed to learn - presumably - that these people shouldn’t have been freed, that we should have killed them, that military courts are soft on crime, that anticipating offences is ample justification to keep someone in jail for life, and/or that American prisons are schools for crime. The tabloids are everywhere.] 

 

The Taleban commander responsible for increasingly sophisticated explosives attacks on British soldiers in Afghanistan is a former detainee from Guantanamo Bay, British officials and Taleban sources have told The Times.

Abdul Ghulam Rasoul was held in Guantanamo for six years before his release, in December 2007, by the unanimous decision of a review board that determined he was no longer a threat.

 

British officials told The Times that Rasoul is the man that has since resurfaced as Mullah Abdullah Zakir, the Taleban’s new operations chief in southern Afghanistan and the architect of a new offensive against British and American troops.

 

The revelation of Rasoul’s return to the battlefield underscores the challenges faced by the Obama administration in carrying out its vow to close Guantanamo, and raises fresh questions about the quality of American intelligence used there. Pentagon records of Rasoul’s time in Guantanamo show he told investigators he had never been a commander in the Taleban, one of the factors that recommended him for release.

 

But Taleban sources in Afghanistan told The Times that before his capture, Rasoul had been a high-ranking military commander close to the Taleban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar. "In the time of the Taleban government he was the commander of Taleban forces in Takhar province,” a Taleban official said. “He was one of Mullah Omar’s deputies.”

Prior to September 11, 2001, Takhar was the frontline between the forces of the Taleban and the Northern Alliance, the most important front for the hardline religious movement.

The claim chimes with the place of his capture, in Kunduz, where Taleban forces retreated and regrouped as Northern Alliance commanders advanced with the aid of American aerial bombing.

 

Rasoul was captured from a car that he claimed to be driving for another Taleban leader, Mohammed, and insisted that the Kalashnikov he was carrying had been forced on him by the Taleban.

 

A major piece of evidence against him was that he was captured with two Casio watches similar to those used in al-Qaeda bombings. He claimed to be holding the watches for a Taleban member who lacked pockets.

 

But he admitted to having joined the Taleban twice in the course of seven years – once in 1995 and later in 1997 to get proper medical treatment for injuries sustained in a bombing.

 

Rasoul was one of 13 Afghan detainees released by a review board in December 2007 and transferred to Pul-e-Charki prison in Kabul before being released by authorities there. It is unclear whether the US authorities had asked the Afghan authorities to continue to detain him after he was transferred.

 

The full text of the decision to release him has not been declassified but documents show it was unanimous. Factors favouring his release included his professed ignorance of Osama bin Laden, his assertion that he had been conscripted into the Taleban and had never been to a training camp and his promise 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 military transcript of the hearing.

 

British officials said Rasoul is believed to be based in Quetta, Pakistan, from where many top tier Taleban run their operations. They say he is an explosives expert, which would explain the watches he was caught with in Kunduz.

 

Since his return to the battlefield in spring, the level of sophistication of the devices deployed against British troops has risen so dramatically that even the most heavily armoured vehicles sent out to provide greater protection for the troops have proved vulnerable.

 

The quantity and quality of explosives used in roadside bombings have increased sufficiently to destroy at least three of the new Jackal armoured vehicles designed to be mine-resistant.

 

A Taleban official said Rasoul travels back and forth from Pakistan to coordinate attacks on British troops there, as well as American, Canadian and Dutch troops in Kandahar. “He is back in Helmand since his release,” the official said. “He is in the border area now, sometimes in Pakistan and sometimes in Afghanistan."

 

According to the Pentagon, at least 18 former Guantanamo detainees have “returned to the fight,” and 43 others are suspected of committing new terror activities.

 

Dennis Blair, the National Intelligence Director, said on Tuesday that at least two Saudi detainees also turned up recently as members of al-Qaida in Yemen, after they were released from Guantanamo.

 

Blair questioned the Bush administration’s decision to transfer militants to Saudi Arabia for rehabilitation, saying the outcome “doesn’t inspire confidence.”

 

Afghanistan has no formal rehabilitation programme but detainees deemed to remain a risk continue to be held at Guantanamo as the Obama administration labours over how to close it.

 

Blair has said there is no choice but to close the prison because of the damage it has done to America’s reputation.