President Barack Obama:

George W.Bush,Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror,according to a new document obtained by The Times.The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson,a top aide to Colin Powell,the former Republican Secretary of State,in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantanamo detainee.It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.Colonel Wilkerson,who was General Powells chief of staff when he ran the State Department,was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld.He 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.General Powell,who left the Bush Administration in 2005,angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN,is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkersons declaration

Colonel Wilkerson,a long-time critic of the Bush Administrations approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq,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,.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 Guantanamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists,so be it.