Colonel
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin
Powell, provided shocking new testimony from inside the Bush
Administration that hundreds of the men jailed at Guantanamo were
innocent, the top people in the Bush Administration knew full well they
were innocent, and that information was kept from the public.
Wilkerson
said President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld “indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons” and
many in the administration knew it. The wrongfully held prisoners were
not released because of political maneuverings aimed in part to cover
up the mistakes of the administration.
Colonel
Wilkerson, who served in the U.S. Army for over thirty years, signed a
sworn declaration for an Oregon federal court case stating that he
found out in August 2002 that the US knew that many of the prisoners at
Guantanamo were not enemy combatants. Wilkerson also discussed this in
a revealing and critical article on Guantanamo for the Washington Note.
How
did Colonel Wilkerson first learn about the innocents in Guantanamo?
In August 2002, Wilkerson, who had been working closely with Colin
Powell for years, was appointed Chief of Staff to the Secretary of
State. In that position, Wilkerson started attending daily classified
briefings involving 50 or more senior State Department officials where
Guantanamo was often discussed.
It
soon became clear to him and other State Department personnel “that
many of the prisoners detained at Guantanamo had been taken into
custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or
in fact whether many of them were enemies at all.”
How
was it possible that hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners were innocent?
Wilkerson said it all started at the beginning, mostly because U.S.
forces did not capture most of the people who were sent to Guantanamo.
The people who ended up in Guantanamo, said Wilkerson, were mostly
turned over to the US by Afghan warlords and others who received
bounties of up to $5000 per head for each person they turned in. The
majority of the 742 detainees “had never seen a U.S. soldier in the
process of their initial detention.”
Military
officers told Wilkerson that “many detainees were turned over for the
wrong reasons, particularly for bounties and other incentives.” The
U.S. knew “that the likelihood was high that some of the Guantanamo
detainees had been turned in to U.S. forces in order to settle local
scores, for tribal reasons, or just as a method of making money.”
As a consequence, said Wilkerson “there was no real method of knowing why the prisoner had been detained in the first place.”
Wilkerson
wrote that the American people have no idea of the “utter incompetence
of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the initial
stages…Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made
in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we
were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.”
Why
was there utter incompetence in the battlefield vetting? “This was a
factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, the troops and
civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in
such vetting, and the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to ‘just get the bastards to the
interrogators.’”
As
a result, Wilkerson’s statement continues, “there was no meaningful way
to determine whether they were terrorists, Taliban, or simply innocent
civilians picked up on a very confused battlefield or in the territory
of another state such as Pakistan.”
In
addition, the statement points out “a separate but related problem was
that often absolutely no evidence relating to the detainee was turned
over, so there was no real method of knowing why the prisoner had been
detained in the first place.”
“The
initial group of 742 detainees had not been detained under the
processes I was used to as a military officer,” Wilkerson said. “It
was becoming more and more clear that many of the men were innocent, or
at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in
any court of law, civilian or military. If there was any evidence, the
chain of protecting it had been completely ignored.”
Several
in the U.S. leadership became aware of this early on and knew “of the
reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial
wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately
released,” wrote Wilkerson.
So
why did the Bush Administration not release the men from prison once it
was discovered that they were not guilty? Why continue to keep
innocent men in prison?
“To
have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their
leadership from virtually day one of the so-called War on Terror and
these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in
Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the
World Trade Towers,” wrote Wilkerson.
“They
were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay.
Better to claim everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of
enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released,”
according to Wilkerson. “I am very sorry to say that I believe there
were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at
the highest levels of our armed forces.”
The
refusal to let the detainees go, even those who were likely innocent,
was based on several political factors. If the US released them to
another country and that country found them innocent, it would make the
US look bad, said Wilkerson. “Another concern was that the detention
efforts at Guantanamo would be revealed as the incredibly confused
operation that they were. Such results were not acceptable to the
Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the
leadership at the Department of Defense.”
At the Department of Defense, Secretary Rumsfeld, “just refused to let detainees go” said Wilkerson.
“Another
part of the political dilemma originated in the Office of Vice
President Richard B. Cheney,” according to Wilkerson, “whose position
could be summed up as ‘the end justifies the means’, and who had
absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees
were innocent, or that there was a lack of useable evidence for the
great majority of them. If hundreds of innocent individuals had to
suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”
President
Bush was involved in all of the decisions about the men in Guantanamo
according to reports from Secretary Powell to Wilkerson. “My own
view,” said Wilkerson “is that it was easy for Vice President Cheney to
run circles around President Bush bureaucratically because Cheney had
the network within the government to do so. Moreover, by exploiting
what Secretary Powell called the President’s ‘cowboy instincts,’ Vice
President Cheney could more often than not gain the President’s
acquiescence.”
Despite
the widespread knowledge inside the Bush administration that the US
continued to indefinitely detain the innocent at Guantanamo, for years
the US government continued to publicly say the opposite – that people
at Guantanamo were terrorists.
After
these disclosures from deep within the Bush Administration, the newest
issue now before the people of the U.S. is not just whether the Bush
Administration was wrong about Guantanamo but whether it was also
consistently deceitful in holding hundreds of innocent men in prison to
cover up their own mistakes.
Why
is Colonel Wilkerson disclosing this now? He provided a sworn
statement to assist the International Human Rights Clinic at Willamette
University College of Law in Oregon and the Federal Public Defender who
are suing US officials for the wrongful detention and torture of Adel
Hassan Hamad. Hamad was a humanitarian aid worker from Sudan working
in Pakistan when he was kidnapped from his apartment, tortured and
shipped to Guantanamo where he was held for five years before being
released.
At
the end of his nine page sworn statement, Wilkerson explains his
personal reasons for disclosing this damning information. “I have made
a personal choice to come forward and discuss the abuses that occurred
because knowledge that I served an Administration that tortured and
abused those it detained at the facilities at Guantanamo Bay and
elsewhere and indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons
has marked a low point in my professional career and I wish to make the
record clear on what occurred. I am also extremely concerned that the
Armed Forces of the United States, where I spent 31 years of my
professional life, were deeply involved in these tragic mistakes.”
Wilkerson
concluded his article on Guantanamo by issuing a challenge. “When –
and if – the truths about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay will be
revealed in the way they should be, or Congress will step up and
shoulder some of the blame, or the new Obama administration will have
the courage to follow through substantially on its campaign promises
with respect to GITMO, torture and the like, remains indeed to be seen.”
The U.S. rightly criticizes Iran and China for wrongfully imprisoning people. So what are we as a nation going to do now that an insider from the Bush Administration has courageously revealed the truth and the cover up about U.S. politicians wrongfully imprisoning hundreds and not releasing them even when they knew they were innocent? Our response will tell much about our national commitment to justice for all.