tagged w/ Timesonline
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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.
Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.
General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration.
Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.
He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.
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”.
He added: “I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell. I learnt that it was his view that it was not just Vice-President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making.”
Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.
- Times Online Link,..continued
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7092435.eceGeorge W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent... more
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The largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found has been unearthed on farmland in Staffordshire by a metal detector enthusiast, archaeologists revealed today.
Terry Herbert, 55, from Burntwood, came across the huge treasure estimated to be worth more than £1 million as he searched a field near his home. The exact location of the discovery has not been disclosed but it is understood to be near the Lichfield border in South Staffordshire, in what was once the independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia.
Experts said that the collection of more than 1,500 military artefacts, including helmet, sword pommel and sword hilt ornaments possibly looted on the field of battle 1,400 years by a victorious warlord, may have belonged to Saxon royalty.
The hoard contains around 5kg of gold and 2.5kg of silver, far bigger than previous finds such as the Snettisham hoards. Some of it was lying in the open on top of the ploughed field.The largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found has been unearthed on farmland in... more
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