Khairullah Khairkhwa

Khairullah Said Wali Khairkhwa ( ; born 1967) is a member of the militant Taliban organization currently in control of Afghanistan, who has previously been called one of the "moderate" Taliban. He has previously served as Taliban Minister of Information and Culture and Minister of the Interior. After the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, he was held at the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camp in Cuba for 12 years. He was released in late May 2014 in a prisoner exchange that involved Bowe Bergdahl and the Taliban five. Press reports have referred to him as "Mullah" and "Maulavi", two different honorifics for referring to senior Muslim clerics.

Claims from analysts at Guantanamo that Khairkhwa was directly associated with Osama bin Laden and Taliban Supreme Commander Mullah Muhammad Omar have been widely repeated. Kate Clark has criticized her fellow journalists for uncritically repeating U.S. claims that were largely based on unsubstantiated rumor and innuendo, or on confessions and denunciations coerced through torture and other extreme interrogation techniques.

Khairullah was one of the original members of the Taliban in 1994 and was a spokesman for them from 1994 to 1996. He was the Minister of the Interior under Taliban rule in 1997 and 1998, with Abdul Samad Khaksar, also called Mohammad Khaksar, as deputy minister.

Some reports have said he had been the Taliban's deputy minister of the interior, interim minister of the interior, the minister of the interior, and the Minister of Information.

Guantanamo Bay internment

Khirullah Khairkhwa arrived at the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camp in Cuba on May 1, 2002.

Official status reviews Originally, the Bush Presidency asserted that captives apprehended in the "war on terror" were not covered by the Geneva Conventions and could be held indefinitely without charge and without an open and transparent review of the justifications for their detention. In 2004, the United States Supreme Court ruled, in Rasul v. Bush, that Guantanamo captives were entitled to being informed of the allegations justifying their detention and were entitled to try to refute them. Following the ruling, the Department of Defense set up the Office for the Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants (OARDEC) in 2004.

Combatant Status Review Tribunals were held in a 3x5 meter trailer where the captive sat with his hands and feet shackled to a bolt in the floor.

Scholars at the Brookings Institution, led by Benjamin Wittes, listed the captives still held in Guantanamo in December 2008, according to whether their detention was justified by certain common allegations. Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa was listed as one of the captives who:

the military alleges were members of either al Qaeda or the Taliban and associated with the other group. He put in place a new review system composed of officials from six departments, where the OARDEC reviews were conducted entirely by the Department of Defense. When it reported back a year later, the Joint Review Task Force classified some individuals as too dangerous to be transferred from Guantanamo. On April 9, 2013, that document was made public after a Freedom of Information Act request. Khairullah Khairkhwa was one of the 71 individuals deemed too innocent to charge but too dangerous to release. Obama said those in that category would start to receive reviews from a Periodic Review Board. The first review was not convened until November 20, 2013.

Throughout the fall of 2011 and the winter of 2012, the United States conducted peace negotiations with the Taliban and widely leaked that a key sticking point was the ongoing detention of Khairkhwa and four other senior Taliban, Norullah Noori, Mohammed Fazl, Abdul Haq Wasiq – the Taliban Five. Negotiations hinged on a proposal to send the five men directly to Doha, Qatar, where they would be allowed to set up an official office for the Taliban.

In March 2012, it was reported that Ibrahim Spinzada, described as "Karzai's top aide", had spoken with the five men in Guantanamo earlier that month and had secured their agreement to be transferred to Qatar. They are the only "forever prisoners" to be released without being cleared by a review