The Mosaic Philosophy at Gitmo by Scott Horton

[Jefferson23]

April 28, 2011

On March 17, 2009, Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as Colin Powell’s right-hand at the State Department, penned a short piece for the Washington Note. “There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware,” Wilkerson wrote. He noted that prisoners had been seized and shuffled quickly off to Guantánamo without the process of vetting and review that had characterized earlier military operations, adding:

Several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.

Wilkerson’s accusations have now been validated by the batch of classified U.S. government documents released this past Sunday by WikiLeaks. The documents show that government analysts fully acknowledged that 150 of the 779 prisoners at Guantanamo were civilians uninvolved in any hostile activities who were picked up by mistake, but who wound up being held for years for vague or improper reasons. Among the revelations:

remainder in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/04/hbc-90008078