Mark Levin spoke last night of former detainee ISN # 008 Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, who is now “in charge of operations against U.S. and Afghan forces in southern Afghanistan.”

The Times (UK) has confirmed the AP’s story and provided additional details. The Times reported that Rasoul is “responsible for increasingly sophisticated explosives attacks on British soldiers in Afghanistan” and is currently operating out of the Taliban stronghold in Quetta, Pakistan. Prior to his detention at Guantánamo, he was a “high-ranking military commander close to the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar.”

“In the time of the Taliban government he was the commander of Taliban forces in Takhar province,” a Taliban official told The Times. “He was one of Mullah Omar’s deputies.”

Rasoul is but one of many former Guantanamo terrorists back in the business of killing both Americans and Muslims:

Me: I recently debated an intelligent but ignorant researcher for a progressive think-tank (she is working on her law degree after graduating a couple of years ago from one of the top colleges in the nation). She spewed all the lib talking-points propaganda about Abu Ghraib, “torture,” “rule of law,” America’s image in the world, and how closing Gitmo and providing full due process to the enemy was “consistent with our core values.” Yet she knew almost nothing about the current conditions at Guantanamo or about the fights in Afghanistan or Pakistan. At one point, I literally stunned her into silence by informing her that more than 100,000 Taliban are now under arms in the frontier and federally administered tribal areas of northwest Pakistan and a ‘Shadow Army‘ of an additional 8 to 14 thousand al Qaeda-led terrorists are conducting cross-border operations into Afghanistan from there. Shocking numbers, are they not?

For the record, I fully supported (and still do) the invasion of Iraq. Unlike many, I vividly recall that 16 of the 23 “where as” provisions of Congress’ authorization to use force there were about Saddam’s support for terrorism and do not buy the argument that President Bush took his eye off Afghanistan. That said, the deteriorating situation in Pakistan threatens our main coalition supply lines, Russia’s interference with a key supporting airbase and the alternate supply routes from the north, and growing insurgency inside Afghanistan ought to concern every American. Most troubling to me is President Barack Obama’s failure to provide this year the full 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan (he is sending 17,000) despite campaign promises to do so and after consistently calling it the “right war.”

While we need to see the mission in Iraq through, no matter how long it takes, we also cannot return al Qaeda its sanctuary in Afghanistan by ceding that ground back to the Taliban. And we need to stop adding to our troubles by releasing more committed jihadists from Gitmo as many just go back to their murderous ways.