A Salute to America's Last Eisenhower Republican

(except for the Eisenhower family members)

From his perch at William & Mary College, former Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson,the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, almost always pounces into full view whenever the Cheney monster appears to roar. Col. Wilkerson in a signed declaration to a lawsuit filed by a former Guatanamo detainee accused President George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney of covering up the fact that hundreds of innocent men were sent to Gitmo and were not released because the administration feared the harm it would do to the push for the Iraq war and to the Long War on terror.

Col. Wilkerson's declaration is in support of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese man who was held at Gitmo from March 2003 until December 2007. Mr. Hamad is claiming his was tortured and has filed for damages against a list of American officials.

Wilkerson claims that Cheney and Rumsfeld knew that the majority of the 742 detainees sent to Gitmo from Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan were innocent but believed that it was "politically impossible to release them". He claims that the majority of detainees--children as young as 12 and a man as old as 93--were turned over by Aghanis and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. There was little or no evidence as to why they had been taken. Previous accounts claim that clans would sell rivals to the Americans.

Wilkerson says that one of the reasons 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" and this "was not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD."

Referring to Mr. Cheney, whom he has despises, he asserted, "He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Gutanamo detainees were innocent...If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it."

When Col. Wilkerson raised this issue with Secretary of State Powell, he learned from Powell that the President himself was involved in all of the Guantanamo decision-making.

I have written several posts in the past about revelations from Col. Wilkerson. on everything from torture and the drive to waterboard Khalid Sheik Mohammed for the simple purpose of getting him to confess to a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein to the manufacturing of evidence for Colin Powell's UN speech. In another world, the problems of the innocent at Gitmo could have been humanely resolved without alot of fanfare but keeping innocent people jailed for years at a time is reprehensible.

Today theer are about 180 detainees left in Gitmo, about 50 are actually considered terrorists.