Powell aide says Bush knew Gitmo prisoners innocent

When you have had over 100,000 troops running amok abroad killing civilians almost daily, it’s hard to go back in time and give much thought to little things like holding innocent people in prison indefinitely without charging them with anything. But just for the hell of it, we would like to pass along some revelations from Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was a senior aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. He has stated that the Bush administration knew that most of the 742 people who were originally sent to Guantanamo in 2002 were innocent, but that they felt that is was “politically impossible to release them.”

Wilkerson made these statements in connection with a lawsuit that has been filed by a Gitmo detainee. Powell apparently supports Wilkerson’s decision to come forward with the truth concerning these illegal detainments. There were children as young as twelve-years-old among them, and a man as old as 93.

Concerning Vice-President Dick Cheney, Wilkerson offered: “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.”

But the buck didn’t stop there.

“I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell. I learned 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,” asserted Wilkerson.

You read this and you have to wonder how we somehow have the moral authority to decide who lives and who dies in the Middle East, and there is little doubt that the people who live in Iraq and Afghanistan have been asking themselves the same questio