Bush administration locked up innocents and knew it.

[FluffyMcDeath]

Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, provided shocking new testimony from inside the Bush Administration that hundreds of the men jailed at Guantanamo were innocent, the top people in the Bush Administration knew full well they were innocent, and that information was kept from the public.

Military officers told Wilkerson that “many detainees were turned over for the wrong reasons, particularly for bounties and other incentives.” The U.S. knew “that the likelihood was high that some of the Guantanamo detainees had been turned in to U.S. forces in order to settle local scores, for tribal reasons, or just as a method of making money.”

Several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this early on and knew “of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released,” wrote Wilkerson.

Letting the innocents go would have made the administration look bad and shown the operation to have been a confused mess. Keeping them in and inflating the threat and talking about all the hardened dangerous men housed at Gitmo a) covered up the problem b) helped keep the American people afraid of "terrorists" and maintained the Administration's power.


And, yes, Cheney ran the government.

President Bush was involved in all of the decisions about the men in Guantanamo according to reports from Secretary Powell to Wilkerson. “My own view,” said Wilkerson “is that it was easy for Vice President Cheney to run circles around President Bush bureaucratically because Cheney had the network within the government to do so. Moreover, by exploiting what Secretary Powell called the President’s ‘cowboy instincts,’ Vice President Cheney could more often than not gain the President’s acquiescence.”

No surprises in there for anyone who has been paying attention (i.e. not gullibly swallowing all the specially selected "News" on TV but trolling the back pages and last column inch where the real news is kept).

 

[cecilia]

cheney really knows how to make friends all over the planet

 

[Robert]

Only confirms what everyone already knew.

And yes, that includes those who think 'Gitmo' is a 'good thing'. They know too but they either don't care or think it's 'a price worth paying.'