On September 10 of this year, Yemeni national Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif died in his prison cell at Guantanamo Bay. Latif was never charged with a crime and was never given a trial.
Latif was taken into custody by Pakistani police near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan in late 2001, and was handed over to US forces, who placed him in Guantanamo by January of 2002. The United States government claimed he was recruited by al-Qaeda to train for terrorist operations, but Latif maintained that he was traveling to Pakistan to seek medical attention for injuries sustained in a car accident in 1994.
District Court Judge Henry Kennedy said in 2004 that Latif “is not known to have participated in combatant/terrorist training.” He recommended in 2004, and then again in 2007, to have him transferred out of Guantanamo. In July of 2010, he ruled that the government lacked sufficient evidence and that his detention was unlawful, ordering that he be released.
But the Obama administration appealed, claiming that Judge Kennedy was completely wrong and misguided. The Court of Appeals in 2011 ruled in favor of the government, and Judge Kennedy’s order was overturned.
Latif suffered from chronic back pain, deafness, headaches, heartburn, and a sore throat. He never received proper medical treatment or any assisting devices for his deafness. He was regularly mistreated by the Guantanamo Immediate Response Force, who entered his cell, threw him on the ground, dragged him, strangled him, and knocked him unconscious.
He cut his wrists in front of his lawyers in 2009, and often expressed a desire to die because “death [is] more desirable than living.” He tried to commit suicide multiple times.
The official cause of his death has not yet been released.
This is the ninth known death at Guantanamo Bay. Six of the previous eight deaths were by suicide, with the others being reportedly due to natural causes.
Part of Obama’s platform when he ran for president in 2008 was to close Guantanamo Bay. He presented it as an overreach by the Bush administration that was blatantly in opposition to human rights. In 2009, right after he was sworn in, Obama signed an order that suspended proceedings at Guantanamo and ordered its closing within a year. Congress and the military both opposed this measure and have since blocked any efforts to close the prison.
It would be great if we could blame Obama’s broken promise on Congress, but we can’t, because in 2011 Obama signed the Defense Authorization Bill, placing restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo Bay prisoners to mainland prisons, further delaying its closure.
The United Nations called for the closure of Guantanamo. Other developed nations view the proceedings there as incredibly inhumane and unconscionable. But it seems that Obama has since changed his mind or his priorities away from human rights.
It is completely clear that the use of this detention facility is reprehensible. It is a disgusting overreach of American power abroad, and an arrogant, paranoid product of deep-seated racism. In a 2004 report, the New York Times said that of almost 600 detainees, a maximum of 24 of them had any meaningful connection at all to al-Qaeda and that very limited information could be gathered from detention and questioning. Are we really so arrogant that we believe this murky concept of “homeland security” is worth the detention, torture, humiliation, and abuse of hundreds of innocent people? People with lives and families? Even after all these years since 9/11? Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif is just another example of the extent to which we are pushing our fellow human beings. We should be ashamed.
— Lindsay Lee is a junior in mathematics. She can be reached in [email protected].
