Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (Ret.), former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, recently took to the Web to speak his mind about Guantanamo and the war on terror. In eye-opening remarks posted on Washington Note, Wilkerson excoriatied "the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there… no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made… as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation."
The rush to "get the bastards to the interrogators" (that's Wilkerson's summing up of Pentagon policy) was, Wilkerson said, a response to pressure from ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Adding to the muddle, he wrote, were "poor U.S. policies such as bounty-hunting, a weak understanding of cultural tendencies, and an utter disregard for the fundamentals of jurisprudence…"
Only a very few of those sent to Guantanamo had useful intelligence to give, Wilkerson said, and "&even for those two dozen or so of the detainees who might well be hardcore terrorists, there was virtually no chain of custody, no disciplined handling of evidence, and no attention to the details that almost any court system would demand."
The Bush administration knew all this but hushed it up to cover its own mistakes, insisted Wilkerson, who was infuriated by ex-Vice President Richard Cheney's recent defense of the Bush-era management of the war on terror.
"Al-Qa'ida has been hurt, badly, largely by our military actions in Afghanistan and our careful and devastating moves to stymie its financial support networks," Wilkerson concluded. "But al-Qa'ida will be back. Iraq, GITMO, Abu Ghraib, heavily-biased U.S. support for Israel, and a host of other strategic errors have insured al-Qa'ida's resilience, staying power and motivation. How we deal with the future attacks of this organization and its cohorts could well seal our fate, for good or bad. Osama bin Laden and his brain trust… are counting on us to produce the bad. With people such as Cheney assisting them, they are far more likely to succeed."
