The retired Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson has called out the Bush administration, alleging that the “vast majority” of the 774 prisoners who have passed through the Guantanamo Bay detention facility since 2002 are innocent, according to an investigation by Truthout.
Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell during George W. Bush’s first term in office, offered the first known account by a U.S. military official that acknowledged human rights abuses at Guantanamo.
The Guantanamo Bay prison was advertised by the Bush administration as a necessary facility for housing “the worst of the worst” terrorists who committed or planned to commit crimes killing civilians, including inside the United States.
During a radio interview in June 2005, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld characterized the detainees at Guantanamo, “all of whom were captured on a battlefield,” as “terrorists, trainers, bomb-makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama Bin Laden’s] bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers [and] probably the 20th … 9/11 hijacker.”
Wilkerson issued a sworn statement obtained by Truthout in their investigation, which stated that Rumsfeld, former Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush knew that the Guantanamo detention facility housed people who were innocent, with no known connections to terrorism.
“By late August 2002, I found that of the initial 742 detainees that had arrived at Guantánamo, the majority of them had never seen a U.S. soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review,” Wilkerson’s declaration says.
“Secretary Powell was also trying to bring pressure to bear regarding a number of specific detentions because children as young as 12 and 13 and elderly as old as 92 or 93 had been shipped to Guantánamo. By that time, I also understood that the deliberate choice to send detainees to Guantánamo was an attempt to place them outside the jurisdiction of the US legal system.”
The majority of the 774 men who have been held at Guantanamo since 2002 have not been charged with crimes, nor have they been tried for any alleged crimes stemming from terrorism.
Mohammed Sadiq was 89 years old when he was detained by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002. Suffering from acute dementia, depression and prostate cancer, Sadiq was later released after interrogators found that he was “not affiliated with al-Qaida, not a Taliban leader” and possessed “no further intelligence value to the United States.” He was repatriated to Afghanistan after spending four additional months behind bars.
Shaker Aamer has spent 11 years in Guantanamo without charge or trial. He remains at Gitmo despite being cleared for release to the U.K. in 2007. Aamer was initially detained in Afghanistan where he was thought to be supporting the Taliban’s fight against U.S. troops. The 47-year-old has not been formally charged or tried.
Friends and supporters of Aamer say he moved to Afghanistan in June 2001 to work for a Muslim charity building schools for Afghan orphans. Aamer is a citizen of the U.K. and remains the only Briton held at Guantanamo.
These cases and others correspond with Wilkerson’s assessment 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.”
Despite ongoing accusations of torture and mistreatment, Guantanamo remains open. President Obama promised to close the facility during his election campaign in 2007, signing an executive order in 2009 mandating the prison be closed.
Currently nearly half of the 166 remaining Guantanamo detainees are now on a hunger strike, with 17 being force fed to avoid starvation and death. A U.S. military spokesman announced that in the past few days, 25 detainees have joined the protest, increasing the total number abstaining from food to 77.
“They say they want their freedom, or they’ll try trying to get it,” Al Jazeera’s Rosiland Jordan said, reporting from Washington.