Ex-Bush Admin Official: Many Gitmo prisoners are innocent

[TWiley]

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."

Full Story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090319/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_guantanamo_wrongly_held

[Solly Mack]

1. I just finished watching "Taxi to the Dark Side" again

And it makes clear that the overwhelming majority of those detained are guilty of nothing more than existing.

They were kidnapped and turned over for the bounty. Marks. They were in the vicinity. They existed - they were there...nothing more. Just handy targets...easily captured, easily detained. Filling some quota...some sick numbers game - so the executive and others in DC could claim America was safe...that the job was being done.