George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times. 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.
Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken. He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.
Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent … If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.” He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.
He added: “I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell. I learnt that it was his view that it was not just Vice-President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making.” 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”…
What this story brings to mind is the Mantra of the Bush Administration, "Fight Bullshit with Bullshit!" Saddam Hussein was the biggest bullshitter ever. He refused to let anyone know the truth, that he had nothing – no nukes, no anthrax, ne nerve gas to speak of. His so called "elite republican guards" lasted only days in both the First Gulf War and the recent invasion. He had nothing, but he refuse to let anyone know. What he said in captivity was that he was afraid the Iranians would over-run his country if the truth were known.
So President Bush and Vice President Cheney believed his bullshit in spite of the fact that our intelligence said he had nothing. Never ones to be out blustered, out sword rattled, out bullshitted, they matched him lie for lie. They filled up the high security prison in Guantanamo Bay with people that the Pakistanis sold them – hardly any of which were ever even combatants. I guess it looks good if you have a high security prison to have it full of people. Then they actually got some real prisoners and tried to torture them into fingering Hussein as an al Qaeda ally. They hyped a bogus Uranium story to accuse him of having nukes. And they sort of made up the rest based on the reports of a guy they never actually met [Curveball]. Like I said, "Fight Bullshit with Bullshit!"
Then, when it turned out that their detainees weren’t the real McCoy, imagine how embarrassed they might have felt if it had come to light. So they decided to keep them out of our courts by trying them with Military Tribunals. But apparently that too might have been embarrassing, so the just never got around to having any trials at all. So the detainees just hung out at GITMO for years with no trials of any kind.
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