Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Chief of Staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, has charged in a sworn affidavit that top officials of the Bush administration — including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush himself — knowingly left innocent detainees to languish in prison to avoid political fallout. “Their view was that innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader war on terror and the capture of the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks, or other acts of terrorism,” Colonel Wilkerson stated.
Wilkerson, a longtime critic of the Bush detainee process, wrote the affidavit in support of the lawsuit by former Guantanamo detainee Adel Hassan Hamad, who was innocent. The Bush administration repatriated Hamad to Sudan without charges on December 12, 2007 after five years of detention. Wilkerson calls Hamad one of the “victims of incompetent battlefield vetting.”...
