Bush Insider Reveals Guantanamo Deception:

Hundreds of Innocents Jailed

By Bill Quigley

April 20, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, provided shocking new testimony from inside the Bush Administration that hundreds of the men jailed at Guantanamo were innocent, the top people in the Bush Administration knew full well they were innocent, and that information was kept from the public.

Wilkerson said President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld “indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons” and many in the administration knew it. The wrongfully held prisoners were not released because of political maneuverings aimed in part to cover up the mistakes of the administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who served in the U.S. Army for over thirty years, signed a sworn declaration for an Oregon federal court case stating that he found out in August 2002 that the US knew that many of the prisoners at Guantanamo were not enemy combatants. Wilkerson also discussed this in a revealing and critical article on Guantanamo for the Washington Note.

How did Colonel Wilkerson first learn about the innocents in Guantanamo? In August 2002, Wilkerson, who had been working closely with Colin Powell for years, was appointed Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State. In that position, Wilkerson started attending daily classified briefings involving 50 or more senior State Department officials where Guantanamo was often discussed.

It soon became clear to him and other State Department personnel “that many of the prisoners detained at Guantanamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all.”

How was it possible that hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners were innocent? Wilkerson said it all started at the beginning, mostly because U.S. forces did not capture most of the people who were sent to Guantanamo. The people who ended up in Guantanamo, said Wilkerson, were mostly turned over to the US by Afghan warlords and others who received bounties of up to $5000 per head for each person they turned in. The majority of the 742 detainees “had never seen a U.S. soldier in the process of their initial detention.”

Military officers told Wilkerson that “many detainees were turned over for the wrong reasons, particularly for bounties and other incentives.” The U.S. knew “that the likelihood was high that some of the Guantanamo detainees had been turned in to U.S. forces in order to settle local scores, for tribal reasons, or just as a method of making money.”

As a consequence, said Wilkerson “there was no real method of knowing why the prisoner had been detained in the first place.”

Wilkerson wrote that the American people have no idea of the “utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the initial stages…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.”

Why was there utter incompetence in the battlefield vetting? “This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to ‘just get the bastards to the interrogators.’” As a result, Wilkerson’s statement continues, “there was no meaningful way to determine whether they were terrorists, Taliban, or simply innocent civilians picked up on a very confused battlefield or in the territory of another state such as Pakistan.”

In addition, the statement points out “a separate but related problem was that often absolutely no evidence relating to the detainee was turned over, so there was no real method of knowing why the prisoner had been detained in the first place.”

“The initial group of 742 detainees had not been detained under the processes I was used to as a military officer,” Wilkerson said. “It was becoming more and more clear that many of the men were innocent, or at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in any court of law, civilian or military. If there was any evidence, the chain of protecting it had been completely ignored.”

Several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this early on and knew “of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released,” wrote Wilkerson.

So why did the Bush Administration not release the men from prison once it was discovered that they were not guilty? Why continue to keep innocent men in prison?

“To have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers,” wrote Wilkerson.

“They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released,” according to Wilkerson. “I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.”

The refusal to let the detainees go, even those who were likely innocent, was based on several political factors. If the US released them to another country and that country found them innocent, it would make the US look bad, said Wilkerson. “Another concern was that the detention efforts at Guantanamo would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were. Such results were not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at the Department of Defense.”

At the Department of Defense, Secretary Rumsfeld, “just refused to let detainees go” said Wilkerson.

“Another part of the political dilemma originated in the Office of Vice President Richard B. Cheney,” according to Wilkerson, “whose position could be summed up as ‘the end justifies the means’, and who had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees were innocent, or that there was a lack of useable evidence for the great majority of them. If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”

President Bush was involved in all of the decisions about the men in Guantanamo according to reports from Secretary Powell to Wilkerson. “My own view,” said Wilkerson “is that it was easy for Vice President Cheney to run circles around President Bush bureaucratically because Cheney had the network within the government to do so. Moreover, by exploiting what Secretary Powell called the President’s ‘cowboy instincts,’ Vice President Cheney could more often than not gain the President’s acquiescence.”

Despite the widespread knowledge inside the Bush administration that the US continued to indefinitely detain the innocent at Guantanamo, for years the US government continued to publicly say the opposite – that people at Guantanamo were terrorists.

After these disclosures from deep within the Bush Administration, the newest issue now before the people of the U.S. is not just whether the Bush Administration was wrong about Guantanamo but whether it was also consistently deceitful in holding hundreds of innocent men in prison to cover up their own mistakes.

Why is Colonel Wilkerson disclosing this now? He provided a sworn statement to assist the International Human Rights Clinic at Willamette University College of Law in Oregon and the Federal Public Defender who are suing US officials for the wrongful detention and torture of Adel Hassan Hamad. Hamad was a humanitarian aid worker from Sudan working in Pakistan when he was kidnapped from his apartment, tortured and shipped to Guantanamo where he was held for five years before being released.

At the end of his nine page sworn statement, Wilkerson explains his personal reasons for disclosing this damning information. “I have made a personal choice to come forward and discuss the abuses that occurred because knowledge that I served an Administration that tortured and abused those it detained at the facilities at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere and indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons has marked a low point in my professional career and I wish to make the record clear on what occurred. I am also extremely concerned that the Armed Forces of the United States, where I spent 31 years of my professional life, were deeply involved in these tragic mistakes.”

Wilkerson concluded his article on Guantanamo by issuing a challenge. “When – and if – the truths about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay will be revealed in the way they should be, or Congress will step up and shoulder some of the blame, or the new Obama administration will have the courage to follow through substantially on its campaign promises with respect to GITMO, torture and the like, remains indeed to be seen.”

The U.S. rightly criticizes Iran and China for wrongfully imprisoning people. So what are we as a nation going to do now that an insider from the Bush Administration has courageously revealed the truth and the cover up about U.S. politicians wrongfully imprisoning hundreds and not releasing them even when they knew they were innocent? Our response will tell much about our national commitment to justice for all.

Bill is Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans. Bill can be contacted at quigley77@gmail.com
 

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

The Surveillance Regime

Editorial - The Nation

April 09, 2010 "The Nation" -- The recent California federal district court ruling that the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping violated a 1978 surveillance law was the first significant judicial rebuke to post-9/11 government eavesdropping. For that reason alone, Judge Vaughn Walker's damages award to the Muslim charity Al-Haramain and its attorneys, targets of unlawful spying in 2004, is worthy of celebration. But the ruling won't change our current deeply troubling surveillance regime. In that sense, it is a timely reminder of unfinished business.

Ever since Barack Obama took office, accountability for rights violations during the "war on terror" has been thin. Victims of wrongful overseas detention, surveillance and torture have received no apology and no reparations. Despite an early commitment to close Guantánamo, 183 prisoners remain there. Indeed, Obama has released fewer detainees than Bush did during his last year in office. And despite an early promise to protect the First Amendment rights of Muslim charities, Obama has done nothing to change the onerous application of terrorism financing laws. Walker's decision is only the second to have ruled against the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program. All other challenges--including one against the odious 2008 FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which The Nation has joined as a plaintiff--ultimately got booted at the courthouse door.

Even if Walker's opinion survives possible appeal, it will have no effect on the broad surveillance powers unleashed by the FAA, which passed with then-Senator Obama's support. Under that law, the government can dispense with individualized warrants, the cornerstone of Fourth Amendment privacy protections. Absent meaningful judicial review, we simply can't know how much surveillance the government is carrying out.

Continuity, not change, has characterized the conduct of Eric Holder's Justice Department. Walker documents, in his opinion, the government's persistent "refusal to cooperate with the court's orders," its improper use of procedural delays and even point-blank refusals to produce information. Yes, this was business as usual during the Bush era. But Walker was talking about events on Obama's watch.

Nor is Walker's experience unusual. In lawsuits by survivors of the CIA's "black sites" and Guantánamo's interrogation rooms, the government either keeps insisting that "state secrets" require outright dismissal or has stuck to the canard that noncitizens forcibly brought into US custody overseas lack all constitutional rights. In Guantánamo litigation, habeas lawyers complain about obfuscation, secrecy and delay not dissimilar from what they faced in the Bush era.

Blaming the lawyers is easy. But it is the otherwise near-absolute absence of accountability that makes Walker's opinion such a lonely beacon. This absence is, in large part, a result of the Obama administration's failure to explain to the American people that the surveillance program violated the Constitution, and that unlawful and futile torture was rife in Guantánamo and the black sites.

It is not too late to win the political, or the moral, battle. It is not too late to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to explain that reckless and illegal incursions into privacy rights are no road to security. It is only by taking on that battle that the Obama administration, and not just a handful of voices on the federal bench, can produce the real change its lawyers have been fighting.

Copyright © 2009 The Nation

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Joseph Goebbels, the leading propagandist of the Third Reich, believed in the power of the lie; the greater the lie, the greater the power.  Goebbels would have loved Karl Rove’s “Courage and Consequences: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight,” a pastiche of lies, fabrications, and distortions designed to rehabilitate the record of the Bush-Cheney years.  There are too many lies to treat in this one column, but his greatest lie is that the Bush administration would not have invaded Iraq if it had known there were no weapons of mass destruction there. Its corolla ry is that the administration did not lie about the presence of such weapons in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. 
   
In fact, the Bush administration mounted an intense six-month campaign to make sure that the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency produced “evidence” of WMD, and then made sure that such players as national security adviser Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell parroted the administration’s big lie to the American public and to the international community.  President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and their acolytes Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Karl Rove, desperately wanted to go to war against Iraq for reasons that have never been explained.  As a result, they created and employed a strategic disinformation campaign to convince Congress and the American people of the need for war.  Goebbels would have beamed.

This is not the first time the United States has manipulated intelligence to make a case for war.  It happened prior to the Mexican-American war to support the policies of President James Polk; the Spanish-American war to support the policies of President William McKinley; and the Vietnamese war to support President Lyndon Johnson.  But the Iraq War marked the first time that the White House mounted a full-court press with such zeal to take the nation to a war that was unneeded, illegal, and immoral.

Rove and Libby were key operatives in a programmatic “marketing plan” to justify the war, which included the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose husband had dared to challenge the case for war; the phony intelligence documents produced by the CIA and DIA; and the public commentary linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and Iraq to al Qaeda.  Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, has already admitted to the marketing plan, which was introduced in September 2002, because “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”In the summer of 2002, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was formed to convince public opinion at home and abroad of the need for war against Iraq.  The group met regularly in the White House situation room and the regular attendants included Rove, Libby, Condi Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley.   

At the same time, Cheney and Libby began meeting directly with analysts at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, an unprecedented procedure.  The purpose of these meetings was to garner the intelligence justification for a preemptive war to remove Saddam Hussein in order to make a case to the Congress, the American public, and the international community.  In July 2002, the chief of the British MI6 intelligence service, Sir Richard Dearlove, after several meetings with CIA director George Tenet, warned Prime Minister Tony Blair about the American misuse of intelligence and the public relations campaign to justify war.  Dearlove concluded that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” and that “military action was now seen as inevitable.”

A major aspect of Rove’s “marketing plan” was to leak unsubstantiated and flawed intelligence (supplied by Iraqi defector Ahmad Chalabi and his minions) to the press and then offer authoritative White House confirmation of the leaked information.  The White House selected Judith Miller of the New York Times as the key recipient of these leaks.  Miller had a front-page story in the Times on September 8, 2002 citing administration officials as claiming that Saddam had acquired aluminum tubes “specifically designed” to enrich uranium.  

On the same day, Cheney told “Meet the Press” that “we know with absolute certainty” that Saddam was “using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.”  Four days later, President Bush took the aluminum tubes claim to the UN General Assembly.  The issue was central to Secretary of State Powell’s UN speech in February 2003.

Rove and Libby were also central to the outing of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative whose husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, refuted Cheney’s charge that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Niger.  The outing of Plame was designed to embarrass the ambassador and to keep other officials from testifying against the White House’s case for war, which required a nuclear dimension.  Rove was not indicted for lying about the outing of Plame, although Libby’s lawyer, Theodore Wells, argued that Libby was a scapegoat to protect Rove.  Cheney charged that the White House was failing to “protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy this Pres asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.” Cheney ultimately scratched out “this Pres” and substituted “that was.”

Rove, of course, was not alone in these efforts.  He had help from CIA director Tenet and deputy director John McLaughlin, who lied to Secretary of State Powell about the sources for the secretary’s speech to the UN Security Council.  He benefitted from CIA senior analysts such as Robert Walpole and Paul Pillar, who helped to craft specious documents such as a National Intelligence Estimate and a White Paper that were used to influence the congressional vote on the use of force authorization in October 2002. 

As the chief of the CIA’s largest analytic office, Alan Foley, told his senior managers, “if the president decides to go to war, it’s our job to supply the intelligence to allow him to do so.” Foley’s comments took place only several days after Tenet assured President Bush that gathering intelligence support for a public case to go to war would be a “slam dunk.”At the Pentagon, Douglas Feith and Abram Shulsky created the Office of Special Plans (OSP) to circulate intelligence that even the CIA did not believe was credible.   

According to the Pentagon’s Inspector General, OSP’s major mission was to provide the White House with so-called intelligence to make the case for war.  Feith regularly briefed the White House on this disinformation in August and September 2002, and then passed the “classified” findings to Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard.  The OSP had close links with the Defense Policy Board, whose members—particularly Richard Perle, former CIA director Jim Woolsey, and former Republican speaker of the House Newt Gingrich—peddled the OSP’s disinformation to high-level opinion makers at home and abroad.

There were many CIA and Defense Department puppets in this effort but two major Geppetos in the White House: one named Libby and one named Rove.  Perhaps that is why the Rove memoir is titled “Courage and Consequence” and not “Truth and Consequence.”

   

Melvin A. Goodman is national security and intelligence columnist for Truthout.  He is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  His 42-year government career includes service with the CIA, the State Department, the Defense Department, and the US Army.  His most recent book is “Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.”

There is nothing civil about civil wars!