In the last decade, the United States has increasingly become a symbol of hypocrisy as a nation that has violated many international principles that it helped create after 9-11. That record was reinforced this week after the Afghan government (not exactly the paragon of civil liberties) refused to adopt indefinite detention rules pushed by the Obama Administration. Of course, President Obama has continued the indefinite detention of the Bush Administration and the operation of the Guantanamo Bay facility over the objections of civil libertarians. We recently saw the death of a detainee who was found years ago not to be a national security risk and never proven to be guilty of a single crime. Yet, in its effort to create a “new Democracy” in the Afghanistan, the Obama Administration was insisting that it replicate our own indefinite detention rules. In the meantime, a federal court has stayed a prior court order that enjoined the provision on indefinite detention under the Obama Administration’s 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.
A judicial panel ruled that administrative detention runs counter to the country’s laws. Yet the Obama Administration said that unless the country adopted this authoritarian measure, it may not turn over prisoners to Afghan officials. We are still holding more than 600 Afghans.
The death of Adnan Latif, a Yemeni, has become the latest symbol of our abusive policy of detention. As early as 2004, the military determined that he should be released but never told his lawyers until years later. In 2010 a federal court ordered his release. He would never live to see freedom.
Source: Guardian
mespo,
“Yes somebody did actually say that and yes they were wrong. It’s just that in Latif’s decision the error was corrected within a year. ”
What year are you talking about?
Swarthmore mom,
Adnan Latif Dead: Guantanamo Prisoner Who Died Reportedly Battled Confinement
By BEN FOX 09/11/12
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/11/adnan-latif-dead-guantanamo_n_1874333.html
Excerpt:
Latif was found unconscious in his cell inside the maximum security section of Guantanamo known as Camp 5 on Saturday and pronounced dead a short time later, according to a statement from the U.S. military’s Miami-based Southern Command. It said the cause of death remains under investigation. He was the ninth prisoner to die at Guantanamo.
*****
I don’t know if the investigation of his death has been concluded.
malisha:
You forgeot one:
4. We expected Latif to act as a civilized adult and not take up arms against us or our allies based on some religious delusion or hyped up notion of jihad. He didn’t so he suffered his detainment. Caveat terroristis.
Elaine M:
“Is it a fact that the DOD, a government task force, and a U.S. District Court Judge determined that Latif should have been released? Or is that just misinformation that I got from “biased” sources?”
********************
Not misinformation just premature erroneous information with the qualifier I expressed above. It’s like saying that slaves are still property because Dredd Scott was decided that way in 1857. Yes somebody did actually say that and yes they were wrong. It’s just that in Latif’s decision the error was corrected within a year. Things change and decisions get modified by higher and more enlightened authorities all the time. That happenstance doesn’t vindicate the earlier decision; it refutes it.
Swarthmore mom,
I know that many believe he committed suicide–but I had read somewhere last night that it hadn’t been confirmed. I can’t recall where I read it though.
Malisha:
Well we have a Congressional declared state of hostilities and a UN resolution authorizing our actions in Afghanistan that no other nation has challenged. We are still engaged there but our role is coming to an end at a definite time. The Afghans still fight on of course. This answer from the left that the war on terror is indefinite is true of course; it’s just not the right question being asked. As O’Connor said in Hamdi, there is nothing to this proposition of endless warfare while we are engaged in an active theater of war from which the combatant was detained. Once hostilities end in that theater we can repatriate the detainees. BTW there “entire” international community has made no such pronouncement as the one you mentioned.
“During the decade plus that Latif spent in US custody there were ongoing concerns about his mental and physical health and, according to his lawyer, he spent most of the time in solitary confinement.
He had previously made a number of suicide attempts, and including by slitting one of his wrists during a meeting with a lawyer in 2009.
He had told lawyers that his circumstances “made death more desirable than living”, and complained of chronic back pain, and other ailments – the US military never complied with his request for a hearing aid to help with deafness in his left ear following a 1994 car accident.” Amnesty International
I don’t think suicide is properly defined as “a coward’s way out.” I think, in fact, that that notion, while common, is a cop-out. Let’s see what courage we (the non-coward we, of course) should have expected of Latif, since we (the righteous we, of course) presumably stand in judgment of his action.
1. We expected Latif to have the courage to accept the punishment of Guantanamo.
2. We expected Latif to have the courage to repeatedly be told that he would be released, and then repeatedly see that hope dashed for no reason comprehensible to him.
3. We expected Latif to have the courage to accept a lifestyle that he was never trained to adjust to, and to accept the idea that, for instance, if he thought he was a woman who had wrongfully been born a man, he would NOT be allowed to get surgery (as would American prisoners actually convicted of crimes).
Etc.
Well Hell, I guess he didn’t come up to standard. So forget HIM! 😡
Elaine, The attorneys for the Guantanamo prisoners seem to think it was a suicide. He had made other attempts and had written a suicide letter previously.
mespo,
From another one of my biased sources:
REPORT ON GUANTANAMO DETAINEES
A Profile of 517 Detainees through Analysis of Department of Defense Data
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/230/guantanamo-report.pdf
Excerpt:
III. THE GOVERNMENT’S EVIDENCE THAT THE DETAINEES ARE ENEMY
COMBATANTS
The data permit at least some answers to two questions: How was the evidence of their enemy combatant status obtained? What evidence does the Government have as to the detainees commission of 3(b) violations?
A. Sources of Detainees and Reliability of the Information about Them
Figure 12 explains who captured the detainees. Pakistan was the source of at least 36% of all detainees, and the Afghanistan Northern Alliance was the source of at least 11% more. The pervasiveness of Pakistani involvement is made clear in Figure 13 which shows that of the 56%
whose captor is identified, 66% of those detainees were captured by Pakistani Authorities or in Pakistan. Thus, if 66% of the unknown 44% were derived from Pakistan, the total captured in Pakistan or by Pakistani Authorities is fully 66%.
Since the Government presumably knows which detainees were captured by United States forces, it is safe to assume that those whose providence is not known were captured by some third party. The conclusion to be drawn from the Government’s evidence is that 93% of the detainees were not apprehended by the United States.15 (See Fig. 12) Hopefully, in assessing the enemy combatant status of such detainees, the Government appropriately addressed the reliability of information provided by those turning over detainees although the data provides no assurances that
any proper safeguards against mistaken identification existed or were followed.
The United States promised (and apparently paid) large sums of money for the capture of persons identified as enemy combatants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One representative flyer, distributed in Afghanistan, states:
Get wealth and power beyond your dreams….You can receive millions of
dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaida and Taliban murders.
This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for
the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and
housing for all your people.16
Bounty hunters or reward-seekers handed people over to American or Northern Alliance soldiers in the field, often soon after disappearing;17 as a result, there was little opportunity on the field to verify the story of an individual who presented the detainee in response to the bounty award.
Where that story constitutes the sole basis for an individual’s detention in Guantanamo, there would be little ability either for the Government to corroborate or a detainee to refute such an allegation.
As shall be seen in consideration of the Uighers, the Government has found detainees to be enemy combatants based upon the information provided by the bounty hunters. As to the Uighers, at least, there is no doubt that bounties were paid for the capture and detainment of individuals who were not enemy combatants.18 The Uigher have yet to be released.
The evidence satisfactory to the Government for some of the detainees is formidable. For this group, the Government’s evidence portrays a detainee as a powerful, dangerous and knowledgeable man who enjoyed positions of considerable power within the prohibited organizations. The evidence against them is concrete and plausible. The evidence provided for most of the detainees, however, is far less impressive.
mespo,
“I appreciate the generalized articles from biased sources but I am more interested in why you so readily accept that this man was railroaded despite his able legal counsel and the myriad levels of judicial and administrative review that he was accorded before he took the coward’s way out.”
*****
I wonder what state of mind and health you’d be in after spending more than a decade incarcerated at Guantanamo. Has it been confirmed that Latif committed suicide?
Is it a fact that the DOD, a government task force, and a U.S. District Court Judge determined that Latif should have been released? Or is that just misinformation that I got from “biased” sources?
Mespo, we crossed each other in the mail. You said:
“And pray tell, Malisha, what were all those German and Japanese prisoners of war “guilty” of justifying their confinement at the hands of the American people in the ’40s? Simply finding one conflicted federal prosecutor does not justify throwing open the prison gates and ushering our enemies right back to their spider holes on the battlefield to lay in wait with their AK-47s or IEDs for some baby-faced American to come along and stumble into his ambush in furtherance of his cause of religious intoleration.
“That may not offend the tough hide of your conscience, but it certainly does mine and also seemingly those officials who are charged with the solemn duty of protecting our troops in harm’s way to the best of their abilities.”
===============
OK, I will pray tell.
When you take a prisoner of war, you realize that you have taken a prisoner of war and you follow the procedures involved. There is, then, a prisoner exchange at the end of said war. You don’t say you have someone because they’re guilty of anything; they were captured in a war. They go back home at the end of the war just as your folks come back to YOU and for the same reason: no individual reason and no individual crime. They were there.
If you say, at the end of the war, “We won’t let them go because you might make war again and they might fight again,” there’s going to be a problem, right?
In fact we DO have to “throw[] open the prison gates” at Guantanamo for several reasons:
(1) This is not a case of a declared war upon a known enemy in which there can be truce, settlement and prisoner exchange; this is an amorphous and never-ending mess and we have no real evidence that any of the folks we have in Guantanamo WERE soldiers of the actual enemy, whether they are suspected of having emerged from spider-holes or not;
and
(2) The entire international community now recognizes, as should WE, that we need to relinquish our unlawful hold on these people because they do not fit into the category of “prisoners of war” by international standards AND we have no evidence they have committed punishable crimes by OUR standards.
WE have painted ourselves into the corner we are in.
If I were grabbed up in my country for some or no reason, sold to someone for $5,000 or maybe “given” to someone for some other “reason,” brought to a foreign place, held indefinitely, tortured, isolated, and debased, I might feel very seriously inimical towards those who had done that to me, all inclusive. That hostility I might feel should not THEN be a reason for holding me further, should it?
Yes, my conscience is injured by the Guantanamo situation. Yes.
Elaine M:
I appreciate the generalized articles from biased sources but I am more interested in why you so readily accept that this man was railroaded despite his able legal counsel and the myriad levels of judicial and administrative review that he was accorded before he took the coward’s way out.
malisha:
You are missing the essential point that this man is not a citizen combatant as was Hamdi. He is an alien combatant. He is entitled to nothing more constitutionally that a status hearing, a lawyer to represent him, and a right to habeas relief if a status hearing is not granted or its findings aren’t complied with. That’s it and the SCOTUS has said so.
Your sentiments about the rights of citizens criminally accused or aliens within our borders charged with crimes is admirable but inapposite. Latif is incarcerated precisely and solely to prevent him from returning to the battlefield not for punishment. The judgment of the Administration on that topic is certainly relevant since we know little if any of the unfiltered facts, the ramblings of the ACLU and his attorney notwithstanding. When they were disclosed in the DC Circuit Court’s opinion we saw quite a different picture.
Ten Years of Guantanamo: What Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld Knew
08 January 2012
By Jason Leopold, Truthout
http://truth-out.org/news/item/5979:ten-years-of-guantanamo-what-bush-cheney-and-rumsfeld-knew
Excerpt:
The Bush administration deceived the American people about the certain danger posed by Guantanamo Bay detainees – the “worst of the worst” as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called them – when many were simply innocent bystanders, according to a former top State Department official.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld knew that many detainees had done nothing wrong but still kept them prisoner for political or PR reasons.
In a nine-page sworn declaration filed with a lawsuit by former Guantanamo detainee Adel Hassan Hamad, Wilkerson said Cheney, in particular, pursued a cynical strategy regarding the detainees in which “the ends justified the means” and assumed that “innocent people languishing in Guantanamo for years was justified by the broader war on terror.”
Wilkerson said he also learned during discussions with Powell that “President Bush was involved in all of the Guantanamo decision making” and that Cheney had mastered the art of manipulating his boss.
“My own view is that it was easy for Vice President Cheney to run circles around President Bush bureaucratically because Cheney had the network within the government to do so,” Wilkerson said. “Moreover, by exploiting what Secretary Powell called the President’s ‘cowboy instincts,’ Vice President Cheney could more often than not gain the President’s acquiescence.”
Wilkerson said Powell was drawn into the Guantanamo discussions because he was under pressure from foreign governments about their citizens who were believed to have been wrongfully detained.
During one meeting, Wilkerson said he learned that Pierre Prosper, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes and the point person on negotiating transfer of detainees to other countries, “would discuss the difficulty he encountered in dealing with the Department of Defense, and specifically Donald Rumsfeld, who just refused to let detainees go.”
Wilkerson came to conclude that “at least part of the problem was that it was politically impossible to release them [because] if they were released to another country, even an ally such as the United Kingdom, the leadership of the Defense Department would be left without any plausible explanation to the American people, whether the released detainee was subsequently found to be innocent by the receiving country, or whether the detainee was truly a terrorist and, upon release were it to then occur, would return to the war against the US.
“Another concern was that the detention efforts at Guantánamo would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were. Such results were not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DOD.”
Left to Languish
So, Wilkerson said many of the original 742 detainees, who had been shipped to Guantanamo by late August 2002, were left to languish, though it was clear that many of them had been picked up in Afghanistan or another country with little due process and often because their local captors earned a $5,000-per-head bounty.
“The majority of them had never seen a US soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review,” Wilkerson said. “A separate but related problem was that often absolutely no evidence relating to the detainee was turned over, so there was no real method of knowing why the prisoner had been detained in the first place. …
“It was clear to me that, as I learned about how the majority of the Guantánamo prisoners had been detained, the initial group of 742 detainees had not been detained under the processes I was used to as a military officer.
“It was also becoming more and more clear that many of the men were innocent, or at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in any court of law, civilian or military. If there were any evidence, the chain protecting it had been completely ignored.”
Wilkerson blamed the “incompetent battlefield vetting” on the insufficient regular US Army troops sent to Afghanistan in the early days of the conflict. The Bush administration had decided to rely on a small number of US Special Operations Forces working with elements of the Afghan Northern Alliance.
The Special Forces didn’t have the manpower, the training nor the inclination to deal with the problem of assessing whether captives were enemy combatants or simply unlucky civilians who fell into the hands of local US allies, Wilkerson said, noting:
“We relied upon Afghans, such as General [Abdul Rashid] Dostum’s forces, and upon Pakistanis, to hand over prisoners whom they had apprehended, or who had been turned over to them for bounties, sometimes as much as $5,000 per head.
“Such practices meant that the likelihood was high that some of the Guantánamo detainees had been turned in to US forces in order to settle local scores, for tribal reasons, or just as a method of making money. I recall conversations with serving military officers at the time, who told me that many detainees were turned over for the wrong reasons, particularly for bounties and other incentives.”
Mespo, I know you addressed Elaine and not me, but I want to respond to something you said, namely, “the Administration declined that recommendation based largely on its collective judgment that he would show up again on some battlefield.”
Where in our system of laws is a person who has not been convicted of a felony held because someone in the Executive Branch of Government has a “collective judgment” that the person “would” at some point in the future do something — in another country — that “would” be bad?
I know the words sound like they have meaning, but really, to me they do NOT. I know that if a guy has been convicted of selling drugs, and he applies for parole, and the “collective judgment” of the Parole Board is that he “would” at some point in the future reoffend, he should continue to be held until the completion of his sentence, but that is not analogous.
Holding Latif because he “would show up again on some battlefield” is not, in my opinion, a meaningful OR a constututional OR a justifiable reason for holding him. Of course, as with most really important principles, it is now moot.
Malisha:
“I don’t care if he “confessed” to Congress itself in the middle of a filibuster. If he didn’t get convicted of a major crime (defined in a criminal code to which he was subject, of course) with due process I do not consider him guilty of anything. ”
*****************
And pray tell, Malisha, what were all those German and Japanese prisoners of war “guilty” of justifying their confinement at the hands of the American people in the ’40s? Simply finding one conflicted federal prosecutor does not justify throwing open the prison gates and ushering our enemies right back to their spider holes on the battlefield to lay in wait with their AK-47s or IEDs for some baby-faced American to come along and stumble into his ambush in furtherance of his cause of religious intoleration.
That may not offend the tough hide of your conscience, but it certainly does mine and also seemingly those officials who are charged with the solemn duty of protecting our troops in harm’s way to the best of their abilities.
Dog, “George Zimmerman shot a guy who was beating George’s head onto concrete while astride him. Dead choir boy has a chorus of family and geek fat lawyer guy who paint a nice picture of him. A judge should dismiss this case based on his motion. Mommy, daddy and fat whining lawyer can whine forever. Free George!”
(1) Lawyers are allowed to be fat. If you don’t like it, at least stop whining about it.
(2) If somebody were to shoot you, I would hope your family would be good enough to assemble a chorus to paint a nice picture of you. After all I’m sure some people already believe you’re up to no good, and I’ve heard a few cats call you “real suspicious.”
(3) Onliest thing to worry about, Dog, is that maybe that judge (who is also fat and therefore you may be oppositional/defiant towards her as well) will not believe fat whining (“I was calling out for help but nobody helped me!”) George and therefore will not dismiss the case. Hmmmm…
(4) Although my guess is that you’re trying to enter the “cute puppy” contests with these very contrived and irrelevant posts, it really is not about the comparative body mass measurements of the various attorneys involved OR about the comparative personality assessments of the deceased and his confessed killer; it really is about the law (reasonable by your pseudocanine standards or not) that says you receive punishment from the society if you kill somebody after demonstrating malice and without legally justifiable cause. That is, even if George had killed a fat whiner who had really bad stinky unrespectable parents and a long record of snot-nosed misbehavior that any dog would abhor, under the circumstances prevailing on the night of 2/26/2012 in Florida, he would have to face the music now.
But on another matter, it really is objectionable to try to piss on the dead. Leave that to non-mammals; you should have evolved more by this time.
Elaine:
“It appears the DOD, a government task force, and a U.S. District Court Judge determined that Latif should have been released. Were they all wrong in drawing their conclusions about Latif after reviewing all the evidence they had in his case?”
***********************
The DOD “recommended” his release and the Administration declined that recommendation based largely on its collective judgment that he would show up again on some battlefield. Two appellate level judges disagreed with one district court judge. Seven Supreme Court justices denied cert effectively agreeing with the two DC Circuit Court judges. Even in a numbers game Latif loses.
Those you cited are wrong precisely because their superiors at the highest levels of our judiciary and executive departments say they are wrong. That’s the system. it beats the one Latif is advocating by miles.
For the life of me, I have no idea why anyone cares about this admitted alien enemy combatant who received his full measure of due process (up to and including the SCOTUS) and who likely died by his own hand. If people don’t like the reasoning of the DC Circuit Court’s opinion they should just say so, but making this jihadist out as some martyr to the cause of freedom cheapens freedom and speaks volumes about the asserter.
Sic sempre terroristis.
Igottasay, I just took a quick gander around the web because when I wrote the phrase (above) that I had only a peripheral knowledge of the Guantanamo thing, I felt a bit…negligent…and —
Igottasay, in the last 12, 13 minutes I have found out enough to depress a normal, rational person forever. Search terms Sean Baker, Blackwater, Guantanamo, Scahill, torture, a little this, a little that, I’m looking at this and suddenly I find myself arguing with my damned Superego:
===============
YOU KNEW ALL THIS WHEN YOU WERE 21 YEARS OLD, B*TCH.
No I didn’t, not really, most of it hadn’t even HAPPENED when I was young.
YOU KNEW YOU KNEW. REMEMBER WHEN YOU WERE IN THE LADIES ROOM AT THE LAW FIRM WHERE YOU WORKED AND THAT OTHER SECRETARY CAME IN AND TALKED ABOUT HER KIDS AND YOU THOUGHT, AND YOU F*CKING SUBVOCALIZED, “I BETTER NEVER HAVE KIDS BECAUSE IT’S NOT SAFE AND IT’S NOT FAIR” — REMEMBER, REMEMBER?
Uh…what was that secretary’s name?
YOUR HONOR INSTRUCT THE WITNESS TO ANSWER THE QUESTION!
Uh…yeah, maybe, a stray thought — I was drying my hands —
YOU KNEW YOU KNEW YOU KNEW.
==============
Of course I did. Details? No. I still avoid hearing or reading the news, for this very reason. Too much confirmation. Of course I did.
==============
YOU KNEW THAT SINCE THERE HAD ALREADY BEEN SLAVERY, GENOCIDE, TORTURE, THERE COULD BE MORE, RIGHT?
To me, what is the death of Adnan Latif, of Martin Grossman, of Margaret Park, of Trayvon Martin?
It is the verdict: that I KNEW.