New document by Bush-staffer claims Bush knew Guantanamo prisoners were innocent

[karmakramer]

New document by Bush-staffer claims Bush knew Guantanamo prisoners were innocent, but hid the fact to hide that "the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were".

 

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

 

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

 

General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration

 

Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7092435.ece

[Guest Wall Bird]

Disgusting. As usual. I don't even know where to start this time.

[jules]

they should put that whole administration in guantanamo bay

[Guest ezkerraldean]

i think they had some thingy on TV in Blighty vaguely recently where a former guard worker met an innocent former prisoner face-to-face, and admitted to slamming doors on elderly inmate's heads and shit. guantanamo's fucked up. the war on terror is generally a massive turd, let's have the cold war back.