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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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March 19th,
2009 - Ex-Bush Admin Official: Many at Gitmo Are Innocent |
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Ex-Bush Admin Official: Many
at Gitmo Are Innocent By Andrew O. Selsky Associated Press March 19, 2009 San Juan, Puerto Rico - Many
detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces
unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush
administration official said Thursday. "There are still innocent people
there," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to
then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. "Some
have been there six or seven years." Wilkerson, who first made
the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from
briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon
realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them
in hopes they could provide information for a "mosaic" of
intelligence. "It did not matter if a
detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was
captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of
importance," Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence analysts
hoped to gather "sufficient information about a village, a region, or a
group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their
plots could be identified." Wilkerson, a retired Army
colonel, said vetting on the battlefield during the early stages of U.S.
military operations in Afghanistan was incompetent with no meaningful attempt
to discriminate "who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and
interrogation." Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a
Pentagon spokesman, declined to comment on Wilkerson's specific allegations
but noted that the military has consistently said that dealing with foreign
fighters from a wide variety of countries in a wartime setting was a complex
process. The military has insisted that those held at Guantanamo were enemy
combatants and posed a threat to the United States. In his posting for The
Washington Note blog, Wilkerson wrote that "U.S. leadership became aware
of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that
many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little
intelligence value, and should be immediately released." Former Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney fought efforts to address the
situation, Wilkerson said, because "to have admitted this reality would
have been a black mark on their leadership." Wilkerson told the AP in a
telephone interview that many detainees "clearly had no connection to
al-Qaida and the Taliban and were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Pakistanis turned many over for $5,000 a head." Some 800 men have been held
at Guantanamo since the prison opened in January 2002, and 240 remain.
Wilkerson said two dozen are terrorists, including confessed Sept. 11 plotter
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was transferred to Guantanamo from CIA custody in
September 2006. "We need to put those
people in a high-security prison like the one in Colorado, forget them and
throw away the key," Wilkerson said. "We can't try them because we
tortured them and didn't keep an evidence trail." But the rest of the
detainees need to be released, he said. Wilkerson, who flew combat
missions as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and left the government in January
2005, said he did not speak out while in government because some of the
information was classified. He said he feels compelled to do so now because
Cheney has claimed in recent press interviews that President Barack Obama is
making the U.S. less safe by reversing Bush administration policies toward
terror suspects, including ordering Guantanamo closed. The administration is now
evaluating what to do with the prisoners who remain at the U.S. military base
in Cuba. "I'm very concerned
about the kinds of things Cheney is saying to make it seem Obama is a danger
to this republic," Wilkerson said. "To have a former vice president
fearmongering like this is really, really dangerous." Copyright © 2009 The
Associated Press. External link: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ie2Gewi7L3__bSzBds095stmE88QD971APO00 |