The Times informa que George W. Bush, Dick Cheney y Donald Rumsfeld sabían que había cientos de inocentes en Guantánamo pero decidieron no liberarlos inmediatamente por el daño que ello podía causar a la imagen de la campaña anti-terrorista. La fuente es una declaración firmada de Lawrence Wilkerson, uno de los principales asesores de Colin Powell.
Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, (...) claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence 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”.
[Wilkerson] claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US 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 Mr Cheney and Mr 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 [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.
El portavoz de Bush ha dicho "sin comentarios" y un antiguo asociado de Rumsfeld ha negado que las acusaciones sean ciertas. La oficina de Cheney no ha respondido.
Ignoro la credibilidad de Wilkerson, pero Bush, Cheney y Rumsfeld no me merecen ninguna, así que no pondría la mano en el fuego por ellos.
Leed también esta noticia en The Times: Prisoner demands compensation for Guantánamo nightmare.
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