Dead Gitmo Detainee Was Cleared for Release in 2009

[Hissyspit]

Source: NBC News San Diego

Dead Gitmo detainee was cleared for release in 2009
By Michael Isikoff, NBC News

The Guantanamo detainee found dead in his prison cell last weekend had been cleared for release three years ago by an Obama administration task force that concluded that his detention was no longer necessary, NBC News has learned.

The disclosure that the detainee, Adnan Farham Abdul Latif, a 32-year-old Yemeni citizen, had been approved for repatriation could raise new questions about the handling of his case and those of scores of others held in Gitmo who also have been cleared for release. Instead, the detainees remain stuck in legal limbo in the U.S. prison for suspected terrorists with no prospect for getting out any time soon.

- snip -

That finding was buttressed a year later when U.S. Judge Henry Kennedy ruled that the U.S. government's initial evidence that Latif had links to al-Qaida and the Taliban was "unconvincing." Despite both findings, the Obama administration appealed the ruling -- because it did not want to return him to Yemen, a country it viewed as too unstable.
That stance provoked criticism from human rights groups. At the time of Latif's death, Amnesty International was about to launch an international campaign calling for his freedom, according to David Remes, who headed a legal team that represented Latif.

"Adnan spent more than ten years in Guantanamo-- nearly a third of his life -- but like most Guantanamo detainees, he was never charged with a crime or accused of violating any law," Remes said in a statement released Tuesday. He "endured great suffering at Guantanamo -- physical and spiritual -- and lived in constant torment" but "could see no end to his confinement," it said. "However he died, Adman's death is a reminder of the injustice of Guantanamo and the urgency of closing the prison."

Read more: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/11/13808173-dead-gitmo-detainee-was-cleared-for-release-in-2009

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This is a disgusting continuation of the nightmare that was the Bush administration.

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[idwiyo]

2. K&R ... n/t

[OnyxCollie]

10. The Republicans are blocking them.

It's a conspiracy, I tell you.

[secondwind]

4. how very sad...K&R

[yardwork]

5. I think that this is a national disgrace. We should all be ashamed.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

6. Justice delayed is justi...

-"he's dead Jim"

[StrictlyRockers]

8. +1

n/t

[rhett o rick]

7. I am surprised you havent been attacked by the Neighborhood Watch for

helping the Republicans win.

Thanks for the post.

[Mnemosyne]

9. What a horrific nightmare. And they wonder why there are those that hate the US. K&R nt

[Vanje]

11. Horrid

horrid , horrid

[Hissyspit]

12. Poem written by Latif:

http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/projects/the-guantanamo-testimonials-project/testimonies/prisoner-testimonies/poems-from-guantanamo

Poems from Guantanamo

Amnesty International Magazine
Fall 2007
by Marc Falcoff

I first met Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif soon after I filed a habeas corpus petition on his behalf in late 2004. We were sitting in an interview cell really a retrofitted storage container at Camp Echo in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Across the table, Latif sat with his arms crossed and his head down. The guards had removed his handcuffs, but when he shifted his weight his leg irons clanged and echoed in the bare room. The irons were chained to an eyebolt on the floor. Guards were stationed outside the door, and a video camera was visible in the corner.

Latif, a small, thin Yemeni man with a scraggly beard, had been in the prison for nearly three years. Upon his arrival in Cuba, he said, he was chained hand and foot while still in the blackout goggles and ear muffs he had been forced to wear for the flight. Soldiers kicked him, hit him, and dislocated his shoulder. Early on, interrogators questioned him with a gun to his head. Latif spent his first weeks at Camp X-Ray in an open-air cage, exposed to the tropical sun, without shade or shelter from the wind that buffeted him with sand and pebbles. His only amenities were a bucket for water and another for urine and feces.

"This is an island of hell," he told me. Punishment for minor infractions of rules, such as squirreling away lunch food, included solitary confinement. No comfort items. No mattress. No pants.
"They take away your pants and leave you wearing only shorts. This is to prevent the brothers from praying. It would be immodest to pray uncovered. They do it to humiliate us," said Latif. Dressed in a pullover shirt and cotton pants dyed iconic Gitmo orange, he looked pale, weak and much older than his 28 years. He had been seeking medical treatment in Pakistan for a 1994 head injury when

Pakistani forces detained him and turned him over to the United States for a $5,000 bounty. His health was deteriorating at Guantánamo.

Despairing of ever being released, Latif had sent a number of poems in his letters to me and other lawyers representing Guantanamo detainees. The Pentagon refuses to allow most of them to be made public, but it did clear "Hunger Strike Poem," which contains the lines:

They are artists of torture,
They are artists of pain and fatigue,
They are artists of insults
and humiliation.
Where is the world to save us
from torture?
Where is the world to save us
from the fire and sadness?
Where is the world to save
the hunger strikers?

The military won't let you read the rest of Latif's poetry.

[Solly Mack]

13. I remember that.

[Kablooie]

14. It just makes me sick that America can destroy people's lives like this.

The fact that our government invented loopholes just so they could get around our own constitution is horrifying.
The foundation of the USA is deteriorating underneath us and no one seems to be able to do anything about it.

[Nihil]

15. Kick to remind people who have forgotten ...

> Cleared for release in 2009

> Never charge with a crime or accused of violating any law.

> a 32-year-old Yemeni citizen

> spent more than ten years in Guantanamo-- nearly a third of his life


"Why do they hate us?"

I wonder.

[Hissyspit]

16. Thanks. nt