Originally posted by jd140
President Obama, in a CBS News interview for "60 Minutes," fired back at Dick Cheney over the former vice president's claim that plans to close Guantanamo will make America less safe.

"How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney?" Obama said in the interview, according to experts released Saturday. "It hasn't made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment."

Obama said the U.S. hasn't done a good job sorting out who should be released from the Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba because some freed detainees have rejoined terrorist groups.

www.foxnews.com...

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."
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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 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."
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Wilkerson, who flew combat missions as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and left the government in January 2005, said he did not speak out while in government because some of the information was classified.

Obama said in the interview, according to experts released Saturday. "It hasn't made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment."