As reported by the UK Times Online Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff has confirmed that most of the men imprisoned at Guantánamo were innocent, and that the Bush Administration knew this.  Most of them were taken into custody without ever having had their cases reviewed by a member of the U.S. military, and most of them were turned over to the U.S. by others in return for reward money ranging from $3,000 to $25,000:

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent … If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.” He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.

Though many of the prisoners were immediately known to be innocent, the Bush Administration kept them imprisoned so as not to hurt its image as being tough on the “War on Terror.”   The innocence of almost all of these prisoners compounds the evidence that many of them were tortured and at least several of them were murdered while in U.S. custody.  759 men were imprisoned at Guantanamo.   Only about 35 of them will be prosecuted in federal or military courts.  Fifty others will be  “held indefinitely without trial under the laws of war.”