Former State Department Official Says United States Knew Many Gitmo Prisoners were Innocent

[sabra]

Source: washington independent

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, writes in The Washington Note about “the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan” during the early days of U.S. operations there. “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.”

Having too few adequately trained troops and civilians, combined with pressure from then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to “just get the bastards to the interrogators” meant lots of hasty abductions of the wrong people, many of whom were sent to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

Moreover, Wilkerson writes, “several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.”

Read more: http://washingtonindependent.com/34614/former-state-department-official-says-united-states-knew-many-gitmo-prisoners-were-innocent

[The Stranger]

1. "Someone must have traduced Joseph K. . . .

. . . for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning."

[QUALAR]

2. ACCOUNTABILITY

There are a lot of judges who have compromised the Constitution and the basic rights of individuals, both foreign and domestic. Mukasey is among those who have rendered such decisions. Bush tainted the Department of Justice and has done irreparable harm to judiciary. The only recourse is impeachment or retirement for these federal judges. Bush has left a malignancy not a legacy.

[Ian David]

3. And NOW he tells us? n/t

[EFerrari]

4. I don't trust Wilkerson. His boss helped lead us to war AND

to develop the torture policy.

[aldo]

5. Gitmo has always been primarily a charade

to convince the grass-eaters (the American voters) that the world was so dangerous that the villians had to be rounded up & locked up like mad dogs. The fact that they were torturing people that they knew were innocent of any wrongdoing shows the depth of their cynical evil and Repus depravity.

[sattahipdeep]

6. Torture it makes justice impossible.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Mark Danner, did President Bush lie?


MARK DANNER: Yes. Yeah, he did.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/18/mark_danner_bush_lied_about_torture

And the writers of the report say, with no equivocation, that the activities that they described “constitute torture”—that’s a quote, “constitute torture”—and also constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. There’s no equivocation. There’s no “it’s in the eye of the beholder.” There’s no “it depends on the definition.” None of that. They simply say it bluntly. And the people saying it are the people who are the legally constituted guardians, in effect, of the Geneva Conventions, which forbid torture of prisoners and forbid cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as does, I should say, the Convention Against Torture of 1984, which the United States—to which the United States is a signatory, as does the War Crimes Act of 1996. All of these things make that activity illegal.

So, I think anyone who looks at the report or reads the extracts in the New York Review of Books article can have no doubt, first of all, that the United States tortured prisoners and, secondly, that this activity was illegal and constituted a breach of international and domestic law.