Death of a prisoner of war
LOST in the shuffle of those harrowing images depicting assaults on American embassies in countries in the Middle East and North Africa is a poignant story, set in a now little talked-about and nearly forgotten naval outpost in the tropics, that has passed largely unnoticed by one and all.
Last Saturday, in what has become a globally infamous holding pen, known as Guantanamo Bay, on the southeastern tip of Cuba, a man died. The odds are you’ve never heard of him. He was 36 years old. His name was Adnan Latif and his country of origin was Yemen. He had been held prisoner there since 2002 and, like other prisoners there, he had been subjected during his incarceration to all sorts of lawless abuse by his captors. The day he died, allegedly at his own hands while held in maximum security, he weighed under a hundred pounds and reportedly looked like a “concentration camp survivor.” Latif is the ninth detainee to have died at the detention center, which now holds 167 “suspected terrorists.” Two of the deaths were from “natural causes” and six were “suicides,” allegedly by hanging.
(The reason for the quotation marks here will become apparent momentarily.) The prison camp at one time held as many as 779 detainees, most captured after 9/11. As we learn from the Joint Task Force memos and other documents, exposed by WikiLeaks, hundreds of those were determined to have been innocent. Among them were minors, elderly men, an 89-year-old Afghan villager suffering from dementia, an imam at a mosque in Kandahar province and sundry “suspects” swept up by bounty hunters and overzealous American soldiers.
Yet many of these unfortunate souls continued to be held, long after their innocence was established, because “they were in a position to have special knowledge of the Taleban.” In short, they were held not because they were terrorists but because they presumably could provide information about terrorists. One such case was that of British subject Jamal Al-Harith who was captured as far back as January 2002, ironically while being held in a Taleban prison.
His extended incarceration at Guantanamo was justified on the grounds that he had “useful information of Taleban interrogation techniques.” The torture and humiliation that these folks, innocent and guilty alike, have had to endure has long been starkly and gut-wrenchingly documented.
It was all done under George W. Bush’s watch. And of course it was all un-American. To that extent, we all looked forward to Barack H. Obama, the new idealistic president elected in 2008, to bring back America to its roots as a country of mostly good-hearted people who truly embraced their Jeffersonian principles about decency, honor and compassion. Thus soon after he occupied the White House, President Obama promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” He then issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional (and as it so happened, extra-territorial) prison camp at Guantanamo “shall be closed as soon as possible, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” His promise, four years after it was made, remains unfulfilled. But more serious than his retrenchment on this promise is that his administration not only failed to look into, but appears to be complicit in, a cover-up of the possible homicide of three prisoners at Guantanamo in 2006, whose deaths were officially given as suicide — which brings us to my use of quotation marks earlier.
The three, who had been accused of no crime as Al-Qaeda or Taleban operatives, died violently, suddenly and simultaneously on June 9 that year: Salah Ahmad Al-Salami, 37, from Yemen; Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, 30, from Saudi Arabia; and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, 22, also from Saudi Arabia (imprisoned since his capture at the age of 17). The claim by the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which has primary investigative jurisdiction at Guantanamo, deemed the three deaths suicides. Several investigative journalists, including in particular Scott Horton, who dug deep into the story, begged to differ.
Horton suggested in a lengthy article in Harper’s in 2009 that the prisoners were in fact tortured to death. His article later won the prestigious National Magazine Award. The judges determined that Horton reconstructed “the events of that evening [June 9] in gripping and convincing detail,” leaving readers “with the impression, wholly earned, that the gravest possible miscarriage of justice may have occurred.” Consider this excerpt from his piece about the contradictions in the official report: “According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot high steel mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.” You have to agree with Horton: For us to accept the official explanation of how these men died, that explanation has to meet a certain threshold of credibility. And the NCIS report does not.
What is even more reprehensible than a cover-up is a smear.
Admiral Harris, the chief military commander at the naval base in Guantanamo, launched an attack on the three men who had died on his watch, asserting that “they have no regard for human life, neither ours nor theirs,” a claim reminiscent of that made by Gen. William Westmoreland in 1968 about the Vietnamese people.
All of which brings us back to Adnan Latif who by official account committed suicide last Saturday. A lot of us will look into that, just as we will look into whether President Obama, who has reneged on many of his promises, including the promise to close down Guantanamo, is deserving of our vote come November this year.
