How can I safetly remove the contents of the hidden volumes folder?

Question

I have 149GB of backedup data eating up my laptop's hard drive space (300GB). I want that space BACK! But I'm afraid that I'll jack up my system even worse if I go in there and start deleting files.
Here's the my story...
I tried many times (unsuccessfully) to get Time Machine to work with my external WD Mybook Mirror Edition Hard Drive. It was work initially but then fail to backup and it wouldn't even really give me a reason it would just say that it was unable to back up to the drive. So I gave up, turned time machine off and tried to drag what files had been backed-up by Time Machine from my external drive to the trash. That's where my problems multiplied.
As you may know Time Machine puts some niffy locks on the files. Even holding down the option key while dragging the files didn't seem to fix things. So after doing some poking around I found this thread on the internet which showed me how to remove the ACL associated with the backup files so that they could be removed.
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?t=80598
I preformed the following command line on my drive:
sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/<yourVolume> -d
Then I dragged the backup files to the trash (using the option key) and eventually the files were deleted. At least they weren't showing up on my external drive anymore.
I thought that I was in the clear, but then yesterday I got this stupid your scratch disk is full warning while trying to use Photoshop. SO I took a peak at my local disk and discovered that I only had 45MB left on a 300GB drive. I quickly went through all of my folders in the finder looking at how much disk space they were taking up. It didn't add up. There had to be some files that the finder wasn't showing me. So did some more research online and came across this little gem:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html#Anchor-Manually-49575
And so I executed this command to manually perform Mac's maintenance scripts:
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
This took a while but had no effect. A few hours later, I came across this utility on the internet:
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/
According to OmniDiskSweeper I have 149GB of files in a hidden "Volumes" folder. After looking at the files, it's pretty clear to me that I'm looking at the backups from either Carbon Copy Clone, or Time Machine (Guessing the Later). I have CCC setup to backup to the same external drive mentioned earlier, but I stopped this process when I realized that I had more files on my local drive than I should have.
*So back to my original question. How do I nuke these freaking files without breaking anything. Thanks.*

Answer 1

Niel,
Thank you for the response. I did as you suggested, and it worked. I had a few hiccups along the way:
1. Option + Dragging the files to the trash didn't work alone. I had to unlock the files:
$ chflags -R nouchg /myfiles
2. My external drive was mounted with a number after it. So I tried to eject it and it gave me some crap about it being in use (Even after I quit everything). So I shut my machine down, Disconnected the USB cable, Restarted and then reconnected the external drive. It now shows under volumes without the number after it.
Thank you for the help.
Message was edited by: strayhand