George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent

From The Times (UK):

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “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.”

He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.

The Cheneys would maintain, of course, that the people still at Guantanamo are still the "worst of the worst" and it would be impossible to try them or even hold them in the mainland US. But it's not too diffucult to recognize that the Bush/Cheney administration swept people up in great numbers to make it look like there was a great threat, and then held them because they never had any forethought regarding giving them due process.

That would probably be why Liz Cheney yammers on to this day that the foreign or enemy combatants don't have the same Constitutional rights as US citizens. Which may even be, but they do have protections under the Geneva conventions. And even our most dire enemies, such as the Nazis, got military tribunals. So?* as Mr. Cheney might say.

But the point is, we can't establish guilt or innocence without a trial--this isn't Wonderland, where the Red Queen can just cry "Off with their heads" without a trial. It strikes me as inhumane and injust.

*So! Holding innocent people doesn't make us more safe, but it should make everyone in the US just feel a bit less safe because there is a precedent for the government deciding to lock people up and throw away the key. Also, the Iraq war wouldn't have happened but for its being associated with the terrorism of 9/11 and the greater war on terror. So! When do we look at Cheney, who got bids for Halliburton to all kinds of things, including building a new facility at Gitmo-- as being more than unusually self-interested, that being his old company and all?

*shrug*