Ten Years of Guantanamo: What Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld Knew

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To mark the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Guantanamo Bay prison to house “war on terror” detainees captured after 9/11, Truthout will republish a handful of exclusive reports by Jason Leopold about the facility.

A version of this report was originally published on Truthout on April 8, 2010.

The Bush administration deceived the American people about the certain danger posed by Guantanamo Bay detainees – the “worst of the worst” as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called them – when many were simply innocent bystanders, according to a former top State Department official.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld knew that many detainees had done nothing wrong but still kept them prisoner for political or PR reasons.

In a nine-page sworn declaration filed with a lawsuit by former Guantanamo detainee Adel Hassan Hamad, Wilkerson said Cheney, in particular, pursued a cynical strategy regarding the detainees in which “the ends justified the means” and assumed that “innocent people languishing in Guantanamo for years was justified by the broader war on terror.”

Wilkerson said he also learned during discussions with Powell that “President Bush was involved in all of the Guantanamo decision making” and that Cheney had mastered the art of manipulating his boss.

“My own view 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,” Wilkerson said. “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.”

Wilkerson said Powell was drawn into the Guantanamo discussions because he was under pressure from foreign governments about their citizens who were believed to have been wrongfully detained.

During one meeting, Wilkerson said he learned that Pierre Prosper, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes and the point person on negotiating transfer of detainees to other countries, “would discuss the difficulty he encountered in dealing with the Department of Defense, and specifically Donald Rumsfeld, who just refused to let detainees go.”

Wilkerson came to conclude that “at least part of the problem was that it was politically impossible to release them [because] if they were released to another country, even an ally such as the United Kingdom, the leadership of the Defense Department would be left without any plausible explanation to the American people, whether the released detainee was subsequently found to be innocent by the receiving country, or whether the detainee was truly a terrorist and, upon release were it to then occur, would return to the war against the US.

“Another concern was that the detention efforts at Guantánamo would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were. Such results were not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DOD.”

Left to Languish

So, Wilkerson said many of the original 742 detainees, who had been shipped to Guantanamo by late August 2002, were left to languish, though it was clear that many of them had been picked up in Afghanistan or another country with little due process and often because their local captors earned a $5,000-per-head bounty.

“The majority of them had never seen a US soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review,” Wilkerson said. “A separate but related problem was that often absolutely no evidence relating to the detainee was turned over, so there was no real method of knowing why the prisoner had been detained in the first place. …

“It was clear to me that, as I learned about how the majority of the Guantánamo prisoners had been detained, the initial group of 742 detainees had not been detained under the processes I was used to as a military officer.

“It was also becoming more and more clear 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. If there were any evidence, the chain protecting it had been completely ignored.”

Wilkerson blamed the “incompetent battlefield vetting” on the insufficient regular US Army troops sent to Afghanistan in the early days of the conflict. The Bush administration had decided to rely on a small number of US Special Operations Forces working with elements of the Afghan Northern Alliance.

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Photo from Walt Jabsco via flickr

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Michael M.

7:08AM PST on Feb 21, 2012

@Mike C.
why for trying to shut Guantanamo down,
or ending the war in Iraq?

send a green star

SeattleAnn S.

1:43PM PST on Jan 21, 2012

What a courageous man of conscience Col. Lawrence Wilkerson is. I hope he has all successes and gains a lot of support for his great cause on the behalf of humanity. Cheney and Rumsfeld are the "worse of the worst" - they have some nerve calling anyone else that.

12:25PM PST on Jan 21, 2012

It was an extremely dark 8 years under the Bush-Cheney dictatorship. The American people were kept in the dark and anyone who opposed the regime was prosecuted, persecuted and/or tortured. It is dubious that they were elected the first time because the voting ballot scandals, and they conveniently oversaw the first US terrorist attack which assisted them in spreading emotions of fear and retaliation enough to ensure another term and take our minds off their policies against the middle and lower class.

KS G.

1:29AM PST on Jan 15, 2012

Thanks for the article.

Eddie O.

4:53PM PST on Jan 14, 2012

Sandi C. -- While it may be very tempting to execute Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, and they certainly deserve it for all the innocent people these three are responsible for killing, crippling, and maiming, putting them in prison for life would be a better punishment for their crimes. That way they would have years to think about all the horrific things they have caused in this beautiful planet of ours.

4:40PM PST on Jan 14, 2012

It's so very sad that Bush and Cheney were so corrupt and inhumane towards other human beings. And it's equally as sad that the Greedy Obstructionists are stopping Obama from closing this hell hole. And, not only the stupid GOP, but also some cowardly Democrats have opposed and prevented Obama from following through with his desire to get rid of GITMO.

Of course, they did this via one of the TWO things the Republicans are good at, promoting fear over and above anything else. That's why we illegally invaded Iraq in the first place, and that's why they "say" they don't want to allow Obama to close Guantanamo.

The other thing the Republicans are good at, of course, is promoting greed and corruption, anywhere and anyhow it can help fill the pockets of their corrupt crony friends!

Robert H.

8:30AM PST on Jan 14, 2012

There is a big difference Mike Obama WANTS to close them but someone is stopping him.

Christina V.

5:50AM PST on Jan 14, 2012

The US is very vocal about "bringing democracy" to "the rest of the world". How about they start at home? When are these people, and those with whom they colluded for political reasons, going to be held accountable for their actions notably their "CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY". The US were the first to scream that the perpetrators of the the horrors of Nazi detention, work, medical "research", camps, rightly accept culpability for failing to observe the Geneva Convention, and yet they seem to believe that those same standards do not apply to them: Why? Not only did the fail, and continue to fail observe the GC, they also lied, bald faced, to perpetrate genocide in Iraque and now Afhanistan.....Iran will be next on the scene. Hundreds of thousand of civilians have been devastated by their actions, as have the military personel they regard as their property to dispose of as they will. All of this in the name of political expediencey, when in actual fact it is about a resources that we do not need and which do us all harm, namely fossil fuels! What a lamentable state!

Mike C.

9:36AM PST on Jan 13, 2012

if you think Bush should go to jail then Obama should be his cell mate

Dr C.

12:50AM PST on Jan 13, 2012

(@Parvez Z.) I agree that the Bush / Cheney crowd really has some things to answer for.

Last I checked , Cheney was still wanted on an international warrant relating to bribery involving pipeline activities and if I recall Halliburton while in Nigeria.

I'd bet he never serves a single day, but I can't find a pigeon to take my bet. :)