90% of Gitmo Prisoners Innocent: Says Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell

90% of Gitmo prisoners innocent:-Lawrence B. Wilkerson deputy to Colin Powell
by Moin Ansari
March 24, 2009

Lifelong Republican, and chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, stepped forward in ablog post on Tuesday to say not only that there are still innocent people being held at the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, not only that we’ve been holding innocent people there for more than six years, but that the U.S. government has known all along that they pose no risk to national security.

Wilkerson told the Associated Press that he was informed by briefings, and military commanders, that big brass knew those captured had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, or the so-called war on terror, but held them anyway as information-gathering tools for a so-called “mosaic ” of intelligence.

Moreover, Powell’s former chief of staff insists that the process by which these “enemy combatants” were so designated itself was shabby and incompetent, and that those sent to Gitmo weren’t properly “vetted” before they were hauled off to Cuba. Pakistanis, Wilkerson added, often acted as bounty hunters, securing as much as $5,000 a head.

While human rights groups, and others, have speculated for years about the dearth of bona fide terrorists at Gitmo, the information Wilkerson provided this week was classified until now.

The former chief of staff to Colin Powell acknowledges, too, that both Rumsfeld and Cheney knew innocent men were being detained as enemy combatants, without charges, were held indefinitely, and they did nothing about it as “to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership” which only goes to show that while there might be innocent people left at Gitmo, there aren’t many left in our nation’s capital.

According to Wilkerson, fewer than 10% of the 240, or 24 men, who remain at the detention camp, in Cuba, can be considered a security risk, yet a former vice president, Dick Cheney, would aim to convince us that releasing even a single detainee would increase our terror threat. Didn’t the fact that half of the executive branch went missing for eight years following 9/11 pose a terror risk to this republic? We are only starting to learn the kind of mischief Cheney was hiding.

Please read the entire article at:

http://rupeenews.com/2009/03/24/90-of-gitmo-priosners-innocent-lawrence-b-wilkerson-deputy-to-colin-powell/

And read Lawrence Wilkerson's article at:

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/03/some_truths_abo/

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What a novel idea I've come up with!

Has this ever been done before in the United States?

It should be in the Constitution!

This underscores why the GWOT is a joke and why we would be forced to hold the previous administration accountable for creating a Ptomekin terrorist prison to torture Ptomekin terrorists.

people at GITMO suspected of playing a significant role in a terrorist organization: just about everybody else there, we have essentially no real reason to hold. Some of those we're still holding were cleared for release long ago

GITMO results from a number of overlapping political calculations. Post 9/11, the Bushistas decided they had to seem to be doing something, so they reached into places like Afghanistan and Pakistan and quickly swept up a large number of people, some on the basis of denunciations by unfriendly neighbors, some from the battlefield, some for paid bounties, and so on. Some of these people quickly went to GITMO; some were held in other places; some were badly mistreated for a while (whether guilty or innocent). The Bushistas knew rather soon that not everyone in custody was relevant, and during the whole GITMO era, prisoners slowly trickled out, while the Bushistas covered their butts and the releases by shrieking again and again that GITMO held "the worst of the worst" -- even as they slowly released prisoners, the Bushistas attempted to put GITMO critics on the defensive by claiming (without a shred of evidence! according to Seton Hall studies) that released prisoners were "returning to terrorism." This had the effect of limiting US criticism of GITMO, while decreasing willingness here and abroad to take released prisoners as free civilians. Unfortunately, at this point, many of those remaining (innocent or guilty) may not be in good psychological shape, and the problem of prosecuting the guilty is complicated by the history of abusive treatment

So the current situation is that the political climate in the US isn't favorable for release of innocent GITMO detainees here, much of the rest of the world doesn't think the detainees are their problem, and repatriating some detainees to their original countries may not be defensible either -- since some of these people are not in political favor with authorities at home, even if not demonstrably guilty of crimes against us or anyone else

These machiavellian swine planned Gitmo as a charade. They wanted to scare the sheople into thinking the world was so dangerous that the "bad guys" had to be rounded up and kept in dog cages. So the torture itself was part of the charade. Gaining information or complete innocence had nothing to do with it. What would you expect from people who could carry out 9/11 against their own population?

:sarcasm: