George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader war on terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times (of London).

Lawrence Wilkerson

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush administration.Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Cheney and Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former vice-president and defense secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them.”General Powell, who left the Bush administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration.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 U.S. 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 Cheney and 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 [Rumsfeld at the Defense Department].”Referring to Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the U.S. 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 Cheney and 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.”He added: “I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell. I learned that it was his view that it was not just Vice-President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making.”Cheney and Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the administration’s plans for war with that country.”He signed the declaration in support of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese man who was held at Guantánamo Bay from March 2003 until December 2007. Hamad claims that he was tortured by U.S. agents while in custody and he filed a damages action against a list of American officials.Defenders of Guantánamo said that detainees began to be released as early as September 2002, nine months after the first prisoners were sent to the jail at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. By the time Bush left office more than 530 detainees had been freed.A spokesman for Bush said of Colonel Wilkerson’s allegations: “We are not going to have any comment on that.” A former associate to Rumsfeld said that Wilkerson’s assertions were completely untrue.There are currently about 180 detainees left in the facility.Meanwhile, a Washington D.C. federal court opinion ordering the  release of Guantánamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Salahi (sometimes spelled Slahi) and providing the reasons for the granting of his habeas corpus petition was made public this week. Federal District Judge James Robertson ruled on March 22 that the U.S. could not continue to detain Salahi, a Mauritanian citizen who has been in U.S. custody since 2001. Judge Robertson’s opinion was released after undergoing a classification review; some portions were withheld as classified.  The American Civil Liberties Union joined attorneys Nancy Hollander and Theresa Duncan of the law firm Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg  Ives & Duncan P.A. and Linda Moreno of Linda Moreno P.A. in challenging Salahi’s detention, arguing that the government had no reliable evidence that he was part of al-Qaeda when he was seized in  2001.  “After subjecting Mr. Salahi to illegal renditions to three countries, brutal physical and psychological torture and almost daily interrogations for most of the nine years he has been in U.S. custody, the government could not even tip the scales ever so slightly to justify Mr. Salahi’s detention,” said Hollander, the lead attorney in the case. “It is well past time for him to go home.””Salahi’s illegal detention for more than eight years without charge or trial embodies the most egregious abuses of Guantánamo,” said Jonathan Hafetz, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “The district court’s decision invalidating that detention  and ordering Salahi’s release is an important step towards restoring the rule of law.”  While at Guantánamo, Salahi was held in total isolation for months, kept in a freezing cold cell, shackled to the floor, deprived of food, made to drink salt water, forced to stand in a room with strobe lights and heavy metal music for hours at a time, threatened with harm to his family, forbidden from praying, beaten and subjected to the “frequent  flyer” program, during which he was awakened every few hours to deprive him of sleep. The government falsely told him that his mother  had been arrested and was being sent to Guantánamo. Salahi’s abuse was confirmed and well documented in a 2009 report by the Senate Armed Services Committee that investigated allegations of detainee abuse at Guantánamo.  Marine Corps Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, a military lawyer originally assigned to prosecute the case against Salahi in the military commissions, determined that Salahi’s self-incriminating statements were so tainted by torture that they couldn’t ethically be used against him. Couch told his supervisors that he was “morally opposed” to Salahi’s treatment and for that reason he refused to participate in the prosecution.  The original habeas challenge to Salahi’s unlawful detention was filed in 2005 in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The  Department of Justice is appealing Judge Robertson’s decision.Combined reports including from The Times.