Bush trio 'knew innocence of many Gitmo inmates'

In order to justify the US-led War on Terror, the Bush administration deliberately kept hundreds of 'innocent' terror suspects in the notorious Guantanamo prison camp.

According to new documents recently obtained by the Times, former US president George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld refused to free scores of innocent Guantanamo inmates for fear that their release would harm the US-led campaign for war in Iraq and the broader 'War on Terror.'

Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, made the revelations in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantanamo detainee Adel Hassan Hamad.

Hamad, a Sudanese man who was held at Guantanamo Bay from March 2003 until December 2007, claims that he was tortured by US agents while in custody and yesterday filed a damage action against a list of American officials.

According to Wilkerson, both Cheney and Rumsfeld knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantanamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible” to let them walk free.

Wilkerson, who served as Powell's chief of staff before he left the Bush administration in 2005, claimed that most of detainees, which were comprised of children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, never saw a US soldier until they were arrested.

Many of them, Wilkerson claimed, were turned over with little or no evidence by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000.

He went on to say that Rumsfeld and Cheney in particular, had no pity for the “innocent people languishing in Guantanamo for years” as their sufferings were all justified by “the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.

“[Cheney] had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it,” said Wilkerson.

This is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Source: PressTV.
Link: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=122848§ionid=3510203.