Military Identifies Guantanamo Hunger Striker Who Died

By Charlie Savage, The New York Times

12 September 12

he detainee who died on Saturday at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was a Yemeni man who had been ordered freed in 2010 by a Federal District Court judge but remained in captivity after the ruling was overturned by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last year.

The military on Tuesday publicly identified the detainee, whose death was announced a day earlier, as Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif. He was captured at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in December 2001 and was among the first detainees taken to the prison when the Bush administration opened it in January 2002.

Mr. Latif was found unresponsive in his cell and could not be revived, the military has said. An autopsy was performed, but the Naval Criminal Investigative Service has not yet made public its findings about how he died. The United States Southern Command, which oversees Guantánamo, is also conducting an investigation into the death.

"Autopsy results and cause of death determinations take time, and therefore are not available for release," the military said in a statement. "Following the autopsy, a Muslim military chaplain, the Joint Task Force Guantánamo cultural adviser and Islamic volunteers from the staff were on hand to ensure the appropriate handling of the body."

Mr. Latif was a former hunger striker who was in the "disciplinary" lockup for throwing bodily fluids on guards. He also had a history of depression and erratic behavior, including an episode in 2009 in which he threw his blood onto his volunteer lawyer, David Remes.

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Remes described Mr. Latif as a "talented poet and deeply devout" man who was "mentally fragile and was at times sedated, placed on suicide watch and sent to the prison's psychological ward." Mr. Remes said he last saw his client in May and had been planning to visit him again next week.

"Every hope held out to him was dashed," Mr. Remes said. "He felt that his spirit was dying, that he couldn't continue to bear his conditions."

There was no dispute that Mr. Latif traveled from Yemen to Pakistan in August 2001 and later made his way to Afghanistan before trying to flee once the war began.

He claimed that he was sent to the region by a humanitarian aid worker to seek charitable medical treatment for problems stemming from a head injury he had suffered in a car accident in 1994. The military instead maintained that he had been recruited by a Qaeda figure to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance.

Still, the military did not see him as a particular threat. His classified assessment file, made public by WikiLeaks, showed that the military had recommended that he be released in December 2006 and again in January 2008. A detainee task force under President Obama also approved him for transfer, Mr. Remes said. But both the Bush and the Obama administrations were reluctant to repatriate detainees to Yemen because of poor security conditions, so he remained locked up.

The central piece of evidence against Mr. Latif was an intelligence report prepared shortly after his capture that said he had incriminated himself. In his habeas corpus lawsuit, the question was whether to credit that report as sufficient evidence to justify keeping him locked up indefinitely.

In 2010, Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. of Federal District Court in Washington wrote that the report was unreliable and granted his habeas corpus petition. While many details in his ruling were redacted, Judge Kennedy cited flaws with the report, noted that no other detainees said they had seen Mr. Latif at a safe house or training camp linked to Al Qaeda, and said Mr. Latif had presented a "plausible alternative story" for what he was doing in the region.

But last year, a divided three-judge panel for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated that ruling. Citing inconsistencies in Mr. Latif's account, the two judges in the majority, Janice Rogers Brown and Karen LeCraft Henderson, also said the report was entitled to "a presumption of regularity."

The ruling drew a sharp dissent from the third judge on the panel, David Tatel, who also focused on the flaws of the report. He faulted his colleagues for giving nearly conclusive weight to a sketchy report "produced in the fog of war," saying their standard effectively required judges to accept as true virtually whatever the government claims, severely undermining a 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting the detainees habeas corpus rights.

In June, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in Mr. Latif's case without comment. Judges Kennedy and Tatel were both appointed by President Bill Clinton. Judge Henderson was appointed by President George Bush, and Judge Brown by President George W. Bush.

Mr. Latif was the ninth detainee known to have died at Guantánamo. Some prisoners apparently committed suicide, while others apparently died of natural causes. Mr. Latif's death lowered the inmate population to 167.