How This Old Brit Sees It ...

Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a "mosaic" of intelligence.

"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."

In his posting for The Washington Note blog, Wilkerson wrote that "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."

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney fought efforts to address the situation, Wilkerson said, because "to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership."

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."

Wilkerson told the AP in a telephone interview that many detainees "clearly had no connection to al-Qaida and the Taliban and were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pakistanis turned many over for $5,000 a head."

Some 800 men have been held at Guantanamo since the prison opened in January 2002, and 240 remain. Wilkerson said two dozen are terrorists, including confessed Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was transferred to Guantanamo from CIA custody in September 2006.

Labels: Afghanistan, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Guantanamo, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, terrorism, terrorists, torture

Judge orders Chinese Muslims freed from Gitmo

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A federal judge has ordered the immediate release into the United States of 17 Chinese Muslims who have been held for several years in the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina on Tuesday ordered the 17 detainees to appear in his Washington courtroom at 10 a.m. Friday and said he would hold a hearing next week to determine under what conditions they will be settled in the United States.

The government late Tuesday afternoon announced it would file papers shortly with an appeals court seeking an emergency stay to stop the judge's order in its tracks.

The detainees are ethnic Uighurs, from a mostly Muslim autonomous region in western China.

They have been in government custody for seven years and have been cleared for release for the past four years to any country willing to take them. No countries have volunteered.

The judge, visibly impatient, told government lawyers he wants no delays.

"There is a pressing need for them to be released," Urbina declared.

"I have issued an order. I do not want these people interfered with in any way," the judge said.

Labels: America, China, civil liberties, freedom, Guantanamo, Ricardo Urbina, Uighurs, United States

Take all the time you need to try to figure it out for yourself if you can't comprehend all that quickly. Since from here on in, we're staying schtum on said subject. After all, who ever said we were here to educate enemies? Especially, enemies within.

(Sarcastic British black humour ends.)



Unfortunately, much as we'd cherish the chance to show certain special things, we can't.

But we can show you - and speak shout out about - what follows below, since it's now in the public domain.

CIA destroyed interrogation tapes

The CIA destroyed the tapes when being scrutinised over secret prisons The CIA has confirmed that it destroyed at least two video tapes showing the interrogation of terror suspects.

According to the intelligence agency, the tapes were destroyed to protect the identity of CIA agents and because they no longer had intelligence value.

But civil liberties lawyers have refused to accept this, saying the CIA previously denied such tapes existed.

They say the move appears to be an attempt to destroy evidence that could have brought CIA agents to account.

The New York Times, which broke the story, quotes current and former government officials as saying the CIA destroyed the tapes in 2005 as it faced Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program.

Officials feared the tapes could have raised doubts about the legality of the CIA's techniques, the newspaper says.

They can recognise a vehicle registration plate from satellites circling in space. They can examine at will every single one of everyone's emails with ease. They can continually listen in to (and tape), all of our telephone talks.

Yet they can't (like even the most unsophisticated civilian TV techies do daily), simply blank or fuzz out faces?

Yeah, sure. And the band played 'Believe me if you like'.

Call this continual load of lying crap what you want to - coincidence, conspiracy, careless - or perhaps to put it more politely, a clear cut (and dried) case of economy of truth.

Whatever you care to call it, remember the famous literary line, "A Rose by any other name" ?

There are also questions over whether CIA agents withheld information from the courts and a presidential commission.

The CIA's failure to make the tapes available to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the 9/11 Commission could amount to obstruction of justice, according to the New York Times.

Well, we say the CIA are shower of shitty serial liars. What's more, we challenge absolutely anyone to prove us wrong.



Read the rest of this report.

*(Cross posted at Appletree)

Labels: ACLU, America, American fascism, CIA, Freedom of Information Act, Guantanamo, lies, torture, United States, US intelligence

Never let it be said we don't give it to you straight - regardless of repercussions - we tell it how it is.

A never-before-seen military manual detailing the day-to-day operations of the U.S. military's Guantánamo Bay detention facility has been leaked to the web, affording a rare inside glimpse into the institution where the United States has imprisoned hundreds of suspected terrorists since 2002.

The 238-page document, "Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures," is dated March 28, 2003. It is unclassified, but designated "For Official Use Only." It hit the web last Wednesday on Wikileaks.org.

The disclosure highlights the internet's usefulness to whistle-blowers in anonymously propagating documents the government and others would rather conceal. The Pentagon has been resisting -- since October 2003 -- a Freedom of Information Act request from the American Civil Liberties Union seeking the very same document.

Labels: American Civil Liberties Union, Camp Delta, Freedom of Information Act, Geneva Convention, Guantanamo, War Crimes, Wikileaks

Claims of secret CIA jail for terror suspects on British island to be investigated

· Legal charity urges action on Diego Garcia claims

· Prisoners may have been held in ships off coast

Go to the 'The Guardian' to read the (revolting), rest of this report -- and go there right now.

Labels: Diego Garcia, Guantanamo, terrorism, terrorists, torture