[Peace-discuss] Fw: [laborsmilitantvoice] Ex-Bush admin official: Many at Gitmo are innocent

Fri Mar 20 12:47:53 CDT 2009

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Richard Mellor 
To: laborsmilitantvoice at yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009 10:49 PM
Subject: [laborsmilitantvoice] Ex-Bush admin official: Many at Gitmo are innocent

What a disgusting coward. He lets innocent people languish in jail 
until it's safe he won't lose his job to mention it.

Richard

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Ex-Bush admin official: Many at Gitmo are innocent
By ANDREW O. SELSKY (Associated Press Writer)
>From Associated Press
March 19, 2009 9:47 PM EDT

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 determine "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 ordering Guantanamo closed and reversing other Bush 
administration policies.

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. All rights reserved. This 
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

-- 
"Capitalism teaches the people the moral conceptions of cannibalism 
are the strong devouring the weak; its theory of the world of men and 
women is that of a glorified pig-trough where the biggest swine gets 
the most swill." -James Connolly 1910.

Richard Mellor
AFSCME Local 444 retired
Oakland CA
http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/
http://www.myspace.com/unionguy510
http://www.clnews.org

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