Hassan filed suit against the government and several individuals in federal district court in Seattle in April, 2010.[9] His case was bolstered by an affidavit from Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a former aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who stated that top U.S. officials, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, had known that the majority of the detainees initially sent to Guantánamo were innocent, but that the detainees had been kept there for reasons of political expedience.[10][11]