Empire of fools

From Ex-Bush admin official: Many at Gitmo are innocent

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday. "There are still innocent people there," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."

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."

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."

Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to comment on Wilkerson's specific allegations but noted that the military has consistently said that dealing with foreign fighters from a wide variety of countries in a wartime setting was a complex process. The military has insisted that those held at Guantanamo were enemy combatants and posed a threat to the United States.

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."


From One Million And Counting by Ernest Stewart

"The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center acknowledged this week that there are more than 1 million names on its official terrorist watch list, a number that suggests the vast scale of the police-state measures undertaken by the US government on the pretext of waging a 'war on terror.'" ~~~ Patrick Martin

"Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us."
~~~ Seymour Hersh ~ about the J.S.O.C. ~~~

Eat The Rich
There's only one thing that they are good for
Eat The Rich
Take one bite now - come back for more
Eat The Rich
I gotta get this off my chest
Eat The Rich
Take one bite now - spit out the rest
Eat The Rich ~~~ Aerosmith

Here's something that we told you about last summer and the FBI is finally admitting. According to their "Terrorist Screening Center" they've acknowledged that there are more than 1 million names on the official terrorist watch list.

This is a list that has very little to do with actual terrorists but is all about Americans as well as foreigners who are considered an enemies of the state for political reasons. Actual terrorist are not on the terrorist list as the government doesn't want to tip its hand about whom they are actively pursuing! Now isn't that special?

Some famous folks who've made the list include politicians such as Senator Edward Kennedy and members of the House of Representatives, John Lewis, Loretta Sanchez and Don Young. Or any journalist who has spoken out about the last two Juntas such as James Moore, author of a critical biography of Karl Rove, entitled Bush's Brain, and CNN reporter Drew Griffin who found himself on the list in May 2008, shortly after he did a series of reports critical of the Transportation Security Administration. A couple of other well known folks on the list are Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, and Evo Morales, currently president of Bolivia. I'm sure there are more but we're not allowed to see this secret list and only find out when someone is harassed because of it. Even though I made Nixon's enemies list I'm apparently not on this one yet as I got my passport last year which surprised me to no end!

There is no legal restriction on who can be placed on the watch list nor is there presently any legal right to have your name removed from the list once it appears. You may recall that children have been stopped from boarding planes, in one case, an eight-year-old boy was deemed a terrorist because of the list, so you can see how well it works!

According to a 2007 report by the Government Accountability Office, "an individual may be nominated to the list if they are subject to an ongoing counterterrorism investigation, or if the individual is the subject of a preliminary investigation to determine if they have links to terrorism." The second category potentially includes the entire population of world as after all we're apparently just six degrees of separation apart! Of the million plus currently on the list at least one hundred thousand are Americans, many because they've spoken out against Bush, Israel, the wars or because someone on the nominating committee doesn't like them! This means the other nine hundred thousand or so must belong to Al Qaeda which gives them more troops than the US Army. Strange to say the least, as the last count I had there were about five hundred members in Al Qaeda.

The FBI has stated that they removed thirty three thousand last year but since they're adding several hundred thousand a year it may take decades to get your name off the list once it gets put on! While there currently aren't one hundred thousand American terrorists (my guess would be less than fifty), if this kind of big brother sh*t keeps up there soon will be one hundred thousand American terrorists or more as one man's terrorist is another man's patriot!

In Other News

Are you hip to the "Joint Special Operations Command?" If not, let me hip you!

They say they're, "...a joint headquarters designed to study special operations requirements and techniques; ensure interoperability and equipment standardization; plan and conduct joint special operations exercises and training; and develop joint special operations tactics." Joint Special Operations Command was established on December 15, 1980, in the aftermath of the failure of "Operation Eagle Claw," the unsuccessful attempt to rescue the 53 hostages from the American embassy in Tehran, Iran. The Joint Special Operations Command is located at the Pope Air Force Base, Fort Bragg complex outside of Fayetteville, North Carolina.

They're really combat teams of professional killers like the Green Berets or the Navy Seals but their targets aren't military but political!