Bush Regime Knew Most Guantanamo Prisoners were innocent

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This means prisoners were tortured for their propaganda value, not for military intelligence.

"Could anything make what happened at Guantanamo any worse? How about if the President, the Vice President, and the Defence Secretary weren't simply incompetent or misled, but knew all along that most of their prisoners were innocent? (via DU):

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.

* Alien Abductee's diary :: ::
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Powell is apparently backing the statement as well.

Wilkerson says that Cheney and Rumsfeld knew that most of the original 742 detainees had nothing to do with terrorism but that it was just "politically impossible to release them" and because "the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were," and that would have been detrimental to the Administration and to the leadership of the DOD (Rumsfeld).

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".

President Bush was directly involved with the decision making about who was to be held at Guantanamo, along with Cheney and Rumsfeld. They believed most of the detainees were innocent, but felt that if some actual terrorists were mixed in with them, that made it all worthwhile.

Wilkerson signed the new statement in support of a Sudanese man, Adel Hassan Hamad, who was held at Guantanamo between March 2003 and December 2007 and filed suit yesterday for damages he says he sustained as a result of his false imprisonment and torture.

So these were the "worst of the worst." I wonder if Bush ever felt the slightest twinge of guilt each time he called them that while knowing he was entombing innocent people for year after year, robbing them of their lives and their sanity.

It looks like even if powerful people want to look forward instead of backward, the past will just keep on making itself heard no matter what."