During all the years that Bush and his cronies authorized and oversaw acts of torture, they carefully nurtured and perpetuated one conceit: that most, if not all, those detained were dirty, guilty scum who deserved their fate. Now-- after all that we've learned about the soulless and corrupt Bush/Cheney years-- it shouldn't be a shock to find out that many of those detained and tortured were actually innocent.
According to new admissions by a former Bush administration official, many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants. "There are still innocent people there," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."
Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a "mosaic" of intelligence.
"It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance," Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather "sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified."
How much moral indignation can we tolerate before action is taken to get a full accounting of the crimes that took place and demand that those responsible are taken to task?
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