Colin Powell's former chief of Staff at the State Department, Lawrence Wilkerson wrote a column in The Washington Note where he responded to Dick Cheney's blast at Barack Obama's policy to close Guantanamo. The post entitled "Some Truths About Guantanamo Bay" reveals a host of problems that plagued the facility since its foundation. In the end, Wilkerson claims that only about two dozen of the detainees held there were ever terrorists.

Some of Wilkerson's assertions have found print before in various books since 9/11 but his former position gives him weight as an insider confirming what is becoming obvious to the outside world all the time.

First, there was an utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of operations there so that there was no meaningful discrimination made by competent officials as to who the United States were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation or why. The U.S. policies such as bounty-hunting, a weak understanding of cultural tendencies and rivalries as well as an utter disregard for the fundamentals of jurisprudence compounded problems.

A second aspect of the issue should bother most of us. Several in the U.S. political leadership became aware early on that the reality was that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value and should have been immeditely released. To have admitted this would have put a black mark on the political leadership who already had allowed 9/11 to happen. Instead, it was decided it was better to claim everyone was a hardcore terrorist "the worse of the worst" and had enduring intelligence value than to have them released.

The third aspect of the issue was, according to Wilkerson, that Ambassador Pierre Prosper, the U.S. envoy for war crimes issues, was being bombarded by questions and directions from Colin Powell to repatriate every detainee who could be repatriated. However, this was blocked by Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who would have none of this. Wilkerson reports that both men knew that among the detainees were a 13 year-old boy and a man over 90.

The fourth aspect Wilkerson covers is an adhoc theory of intelligence called the mosaic philosophy, which held that it didn't matter if a detainee was innocent because since he lived in Afghanistan he might know something of importance. This philosophy required a large number of people detained for as long as possible for this theory to work.

Another aspect of Gitmo ,which has been revealed in the last few months, is the sheer incompetence involved in cataloguing and maintaining the pertinent factors surrounding the detainees that might be relevant in any eventual legal proceedings, whether in an established court system or even in a kangaroo court setting. There was no chain of custody, no disciplined handling of the evidence and no attention to the details that a legal process would demand.

Wilkerson is devastating when he writes," it has never come to my attention in any persuasive way--from classified information or otherwise--that any intelligence of significance was gained from any of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay other than from the handful of undisputed ring leaders and their companions, clearly no more than a dozen or two of the detainees, and even their alleged contribution of hard, actionable intelligence is intensely disputed in the relevant communities such as intelligence and law enforcement."

Wilkerson was driven to write his piece not only because of Cheney's re-emergence to advocate torture and maintaining Gitmo, something the Bush Administration had planned to close as early as 2004 and 2005, but also the stoking of what he sees are the half-baked nuts which formed the base of the McCain-Palin run in 2008. He also writes that Gordon England, Deputy Secretary of Defense, had proposed closing Gitmo and that given his competence surely had a plan in 2005. Whether it was passed on remains to be seen.