A former Bush administrator reminds us that there are innocent men at GITMO.
In all the screaming of congress of, "no terrorists in my state!" we seem to have forgotten...there is NO PROOF that any detainee is actually guilty of terrorism.
I started this diary as private musings of the fact that no proof of any kind has been submitted, no trials have proven these men guilty. Yet all the speeches refer to them as "terrorists" as if by fact that they were at GITMO at all is proof positive that they belonged there.
Former Bush administrator Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to State Colin Powell, states: "There are still innocent people there....Some have been there six or seven years."
"It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance," Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather "sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified."
Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said vetting on the battlefield during the early stages of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan was incompetent with no meaningful attempt to discriminate "who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation."
It's also important to realize that some of them were teenagers when placed at GITMO.
When this issues arises, correct those who assert that we can't let the terrorists free here the US. They are "suspected" of being terrorists, and honestly some aren't even suspected anymore, we just have no place to send them.