Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, murdered by the US military

Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, murdered by the US military

Another individual, Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni citizen, died in the notorious Guantanamo concentration camp on Saturday.  Abdul was 25  when he was detained by Pakistani security forces in 2001and handed over to the US military for a $5000 bounty.  The US offered money to all sorts of crooks, thugs, warlords and desperate people to go find terrorists and in this poverty stricken region, torn by war, they went and found them. (See also, The Road to Guantanamo).

Latif spent the first three years at the Guantánamo detention center in total isolation.  He was subjected to physical and mental torture---he was held without a charge or hearing before a judge. He traveled to Afghanistan to seek seek medical help but was accused by the US military of attending terrorist training camps. He was deemed unimportant enough to be ordered freed in 2010 by a federal court only to have this overturned. 

Latif's pro-bono attorney wrote in his journal after meeting Latif, "when I first saw the [United States] accusations, I thought they looked serious.  But that when I looked at the government’s evidence, I was amazed.  There was nothing there.”

The New York Times notes today, "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" 

“Every hope held out to him was dashed,” his present lawyer said,  “He felt that his spirit was dying, that he couldn’t continue to bear his conditions.”

 Latif referred to himself as a "caged bird".Many of the detainees at Guantanamo have written poetry, most of it the US military will not allow to be published.  Latif wrote poetry.  These poems are "Written under duress and published with great difficulty in 2007 by The University of Iowa Press,  Poems from Guantánamo is a collection of 22 poems from seventeen of the detainees." (Witness Against Torture).

Here is one of Latif's poems:

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 existence of this concentration camp in occupied Cuba is a mark of shame on US society.  We do not know who is there.  We do not know what they are there for. They have no rights afforded human beings simply because the likes of Dick Cheney, George Bush and the thugs at the Pentagon have decided to call them, "enemy combatants". It's existence, like US foreign policy, is the best recruitment tool for al Qaeda and breeds hatred and animosity towards all Americans.

Human beings have been driven mad in Guantanamo, many of them, like Latif, found peace only through self inflicted death.

Guantanamo brings shame and disgrace on the American people.