Book: White House ignored CIA on detainees' innocence

A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were "enemy combatants" subject to indefinite incarceration, according to a new book critical of the administration's terrorism policies. The CIA assessment directly challenged the administration's claim that the detainees were all hardened terrorists -- the "worst of the worst," as then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at the time. But a top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees' cases, author Jane Mayer writes in "The Dark Side." "There will be no review," the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. "The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it." The classified CIA report described by Mayer was prepared in the summer of 2002 by a senior CIA analyst who was invited to the prison camp in Cuba to help Defense Department officials grapple with a major problem: They were gleaning very little useful information from the roughly 600 detainees in custody at the time. After a study involving dozens of detainees, the analyst came up with an answer: A large fraction of them "had no connection with terrorism whatsoever," Mayer writes, citing officials familiar with the report. Many were essentially bystanders who had been swept up in dragnets or turned over to the US military by bounty hunters. According to Mayer, the analyst estimated that a full third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions -- up to half -- were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaida. The CIA findings prompted a vigorous debate with the administration and prompted calls for a review of detainee cases. But "Addington's response was adamant and imperious. 'We are not second-guessing the president's decision. These are enemy combatants,'–Mayer wrote.