Ex-Guantanamo prisoner detained in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — It was 2 a.m. when a rocket launcher sent a grenade slamming into the front gate of Hafizullah Shahbaz Khiel’s walled compound. Screeching children and women ran into a small underground room. American and Afghan soldiers shouted: “Get over here, get over here. On the floor, heads down.”

Hafizullah, a former Guantanamo prisoner, knew not to resist. And so, his family says, he was wrongly taken into custody by the United States — for the second time.

Hafizullah’s story shows just how difficult it is for the U.S. to determine who is guilty and who is not in Afghanistan, where corruption rules and grudges are held for years, if not decades. It is a conundrum that the U.S. faces as it prepares to close Guantanamo and empty it of the 245 prisoners still there.

The first time Hafizullah was seized, in 2002, he spent five years at Guantanamo. In legal documents, the U.S. cites a source saying he helped al-Qaida and planned to kill a government official. But Hafizullah says he was turned in by a corrupt police chief as revenge, and the Afghan government cleared him of all charges in December 2007.

Less than a year later, in September, the U.S. raided his home. This time he was accused of treating sick Taliban as a pharmacist. Afghan officials have signed documents attesting to his innocence, but he is still in custody at Bagram Air Base, along with about 600 other prisoners.

Some Afghans claim the U.S. is far too quick to arrest people without understanding the complexities of the culture.

“We are fed up,” says Ishaq Gailani, a member of President Hamid Karzai’s government. “Bagram is full of these people who are wrongly accused. They arrest everyone — a 15-year-old boy and a 61-year-old man. They arrest them because they run away from their helicopters. ... I would run away too if I saw them. They don’t know who is the terrorist and who is not.”

The Associated Press has pieced together Hafizullah’s story from legal documents and interviews with a former governor of Paktia province, family members, neighbors, a former mujahedeen leader and former cell mates at Guantanamo.

Hafizullah was a village elder and a father of seven, from a family that goes back to generals and brigadiers in the army of Afghanistan’s King Amanullah Khan at the turn of the 20th century.

In 1998 he languished in a Taliban jail for several months, beaten and accused of opposing the Taliban. Fearful of the religious militia, he relocated his pharmacy to his home. People in his rural district of Zormat called him doctor and came to him for treatment.

In the heady days that followed the Taliban’s collapse in December 2001, Hafizullah was appointed a sub-governor. He was named to a provincewide shura, or council, designed to unite government supporters and neutralize the Taliban and hostile warlords.

“I know Hafizullah very well. I appointed him to the shura,” says Raz Mohammed Dilili, governor of eastern Paktia province at the time. “He was respected by the people of his district of Zormat.”

The U.S. military in Afghanistan refused to comment on either the first or the second detention.

“It has been a giant failure of intelligence. Most of the people the U.S. had were turned in for bounties and personal grudges,” said Tina Foster, a U.S. lawyer representing several detainees both at Guantanamo and at Bagram.