Ex-Bush Administration Member Claims Many at Gitmo Innocent

Lawrense B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, has recently claimed that many of the detainees who were imprisoned at Guantanamo were innocents who got erroneously locked up because U.S. forces were not able to distinguish noncombatants from U.S. enemies. Wilkerson also claimed that "There are still innocent people there." He went on to say that many U.S. military commanders realized the mistake early on, but kept the innocent men captive in the hopes of gaining relevant information.

"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 noted. He went on to say that the U.S. military hoped to gain "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."

Further condemning the Gitmo prison facility, and the general handling of prisoners brought there, Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said "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." Wilkerson claims that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney did not address the situation because "to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership."