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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Website is scotthorton.org.
All the interview archives are there.
We're live on the radio from noon to 2 Eastern time, Monday through Friday, less Thursday, at noagendastream.com.
And our next guest on the show is the great Jason Leopold from truthout.org and from publicrecord.org.
And this piece is called Sold into a Piece of Hell, A Death of Innocence at Gitmo.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Jason?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks so much for having me back on.
This is a great piece of work.
You really pissed me off with this thing here, but it's not your fault.
It's just the truth that you're reporting on to people.
Yeah.
It was a difficult one to write.
It's basically the story about the life and death of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, the last Guantanamo prisoner who died.
He died September 8th.
This is a man who never should have been in Guantanamo, who should have been released during the Bush administration when they recommended he be transferred back to Yemen.
And the Obama administration actually recommended the same thing.
You know, when Obama was sworn into office, he set up a task force to take a look at all of the cases at Guantanamo.
And the task force made a recommendation a year later that these are the prisoners who should be released, these are the prisoners who should stay, and these are the ones who should go before military commissions.
This particular prisoner, Adnan Latif, the Obama administration recommended he be repatriated.
And the task force recommended that.
And it's unclear why the Obama administration fought it, fought their own task force, because when Adnan Latif's attorney went to court to challenge his detention, basically seeking habeas corpus petition, the Obama administration fought it.
Was it not just the no Yemenis ever get out again because we're too afraid that they'll participate in a plot and make Obama look bad kind of thing?
Well, that was a little early.
That didn't happen yet.
Because that was a reaction to the 2009 Christmas attack, the attempted attack.
Right, right.
But his recommendation, well, yes, that's actually true.
So that could have been a part of it.
But the fact is that they actually went to court to fight his release.
Anyway, aside from that, this is just an incredibly tragic story about a young man who never should have been in Guantanamo, who leaves behind a 14-year-old son.
His son was three years old when he was picked up and sold to U.S. forces for a $5,000 bounty.
He was suffering.
He had mental health conditions he was suffering from.
But the U.S. continued to maintain that he was fighting with the Taliban, fighting against the U.S., even though the evidence was very thin.
So this was a real difficult story to write because what I wanted to do was humanize this person, not just say he's the dead Guantanamo prisoner, but actually humanize him.
It was a person before he was that, right?
Right, yeah.
You know what, I almost interrupted you in your very first sentence when you said his name to remark on the fact that, you know what, his name is not an English name.
And it's just a shame, right, that if only, even if his middle name had been David or something, maybe, you know, like we could have had some kind of connection between people in North America and this poor bastard.
But instead he's named a name that no one we know is named, and so screw him.
That's basically what it comes down to, I think.
You're right.
That is what it comes down to.
And here is the part that, you know, it becomes ever so tragic when we find out that he died at Guantanamo September 8th.
We still don't know what the cause and manner of death was, and his body is now being held in a secure, undisclosed location, which I have learned is Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
And so even in death he's in indefinite detention.
He faces this sort of indefinite detention his family can't mourn.
And so, you know, the reason I mentioned that the cause and manner of death is unknown, I think it's very important, because unlike the nine previous deaths at Guantanamo, every time that, you know, we've heard from Joint Task Force Guantanamo that a prisoner has died, they've actually released a, you know, what they believe was a cause and manner of death, even though it may have been questionable, whether it was suicide, you know, cardiac arrest.
In this case, with Abdel Latif, they haven't.
And his death is looking more and more suspicious.
Well, of course, all the initial reports were, oh, yeah, you know, we knew that this guy was going to commit suicide eventually.
Well, you know, and it's understandable that people would sort of jump to that conclusion because he did have previous suicide attempts.
But his body was found.
There was no sign of self-harm on his body.
He was being held in a block at Camp 5, which is a punishment block at Guantanamo, that is monitored every three minutes.
So, literally, guards are walking by every three minutes, and in certain cases, if you're what they refer to as a detainee of interest, every 60 seconds to check on the prisoners.
And they have to see, the guards have to see skin.
So that's the way it was described to me.
So, you know, he, sometime in the afternoon, he became unresponsive and unconscious.
And, you know, some of the experts I spoke with said that usually in...
Did I lose you?
Check, check.
Nope, we lost him.
Well, that's a hell of a thing, ain't it?
All right, y'all, welcome back.
Apparently, Corporal Jerkface over at the National Security Agency felt like interrupting our conversation with the great Jason Leopold, but that's all right, we got him back on the line.
Truthout.org and pubrecord.org for the public record, the piece is sold into a piece of hell, a death of innocence at Guantanamo.
And we're talking about Adnan Latif Yemeni, who is one of the very first detained at Guantanamo, who recently died there.
And we sort of already are skipping ahead to the end, but that's okay.
We're talking right now about reasons to suspect that maybe there's something not quite right with this man's death, even though all the initial news reports said that he had committed suicide.
There's reason to believe that maybe they're not, or at least it's a fact that they don't want to come clean with the record as quickly as they usually do anyway.
That's what you were saying before the phone interrupted us, correct, Jason?
Yes, yes, and apologies for that.
Yeah, sorry to skip to the end, but it's...
Yeah, no, no, of course, that's the important news here.
That's why people ought to be interested.
This guy just died.
Otherwise we'd be talking about any one guy at Guantanamo and they wouldn't care.
Exactly, and the fact is that he's no longer in the news.
He's no longer an individual who is generating headlines.
The fact is that his family, who they haven't seen him in more than 10 years, they're unable to mourn his death.
The Yemeni government will not accept his body until the U.S. provides them with a cause and matter of death.
They want to also know what the investigations turn up.
And if you recall, there was a previous or a death about a year and a half ago of another Yemeni prisoner.
In this particular case, the government said that he committed suicide, strangled himself with the elastic on his underwear, which sounded very suspicious.
So in terms of Abdel Latif, I think that perhaps the Yemeni government is not willing to immediately accept his remains until they understand what happened.
So at this point, as of yesterday, the Joint Task Force Guantanamo still will not release a cause and matter of death.
The autopsy was already done.
Now it's been more than six weeks.
The forensic pathologist that I've spoken with said that, look, when it gets past six weeks, usually what they're trying to do is figure out what to say publicly.
And his feeling also, as I indicated before we got cut off, was that drugs are usually the cause of death in cases like this, particularly benzodiazepines, any sort of antidepressants, any drugs that cause brain depression, pressure on the brain.
And of course, again, I want to make clear that he doesn't have any, I don't have any documents or any medical records.
But what we do know is that Abdel Latif had been routinely drugged because he refused to be compliant over the years.
Yeah, well, he might.
I really like the way you wrote this story, too, because not that this would ever happen, but very well could be the TV movie of the week or whatever.
Do they still have those?
Where, hey, it's the story of this one guy who otherwise you might not take notice of him.
But out of the crowd, let's just follow this one guy on his path and whatever happened to him.
And it's basically this guy who once got in a car wreck and then, like, too bad he's not Hindu and has another chance to be reincarnated and start over because his life basically just went to hell from there on, ending up with being, in effect, killed by Obama or Obama's men, whether literally or not.
Yes, yes.
I mean, it certainly left me speechless.
When I started looking into this story, I mean, we saw the headlines.
We knew that a Guantanamo prisoner died, but really getting deep into it, it left me speechless.
I mean, I did speak with his family, and that's what really threw me off.
I'm not even sure if that's the right way to describe it.
His father, I mean, I had an interpreter on the other end of the phone, and I was speaking to Adnan's father, and you can hear the emotion in this man's voice, even though I couldn't understand.
The interpreter hadn't yet translated what he was saying.
But this was a man who was just so sad by the death of his son.
And, again, we picked up people back after 9-11 simply by the brand of capsule watch they wore, and we kept them locked up in Guantanamo, some who perhaps may still be there.
And here's the story of this man who suffered a debilitating head injury when he was in his teens, Adnan Lateef, and he simply was traveling in search of medical care.
Yemen is a poor country.
He was unable to obtain affordable medical care that would allow him to make a full recovery.
The government of Yemen even declared him a disabled person and had urged citizens to help him obtain medical care.
So he was obsessively searching for that.
He meets someone who tells him about this Islamic charity in Pakistan, and so he sets off and goes to Pakistan and tries to search for this person who has this Islamic charity that would help him, and that leads him to Afghanistan.
And by the time he got there, just a couple of months later, we invaded.
And he just was unable to escape.
So if you can hear what I'm saying, it's like, well, what was he doing in Afghanistan?
Well, Afghanistan's a huge country.
That's the reaction that I get from people that I've seen, that anyone who's in Afghanistan after the U.S. invaded, Scott, must have been fighting with the Taliban.
You know, there's no reason for you to be there.
Yeah, well, and if they were an Arab, they were al-Qaeda.
Exactly.
So it's so bizarre, but that is exactly what the...
You're telling me this guy had a headache.
He got in a car wreck, and he had a headache, and he'd been traveling around trying to find a doctor who could figure out how to help him out.
That's basically what it came down to.
Yes, yes.
And then he was sold to Donald Rumsfeld.
Right, for five grand.
And, like I said, he was one of the first prisoners at Guantanamo, and at least three times during the Bush administration they recommended his release.
The only evidence they had against him was this intelligence report prepared by the CIA, but it was so standard.
It allegedly said that he implicated himself after he was interviewed.
I should note that when he, during his combatant status review tribunal, when he was supposed to answer the charges against him, they even had his name wrong.
This poor guy, for ten years literally, was just fighting, saying, You've got the wrong guy.
I'm not who you say I am.
I've got a son at home.
I've got a wife.
Please let me go.
And refused.
This kid is 14 years old now, and wow, that's what he grew up with, knowing that the United States...
And you talked to the boy, too, right?
Yes.
Through a translator.
Yes, yes.
And it was very sad.
Difficult to describe.
It was much easier to write it than to discuss it, because this is truly a tragic story.
And that's not over, because we still don't know how he died.
It's important for me to note that there was no sign of suicide, and the conversations that have taken place between the U.S. government, State Department, and Yemen have already said that it wasn't a suicide.
So how did he die?
That's an important question.
His lawyer says it's not as important as knowing that it was Guantanamo that killed him.
Yeah, that's what I was saying about Obama murdered him.
In effect, Obama and his men, one way or the other, they're responsible for this.
And anybody tuning in late or whatever, you kind of missed it.
It's not just that, hey, it turns out that this poor guy didn't really do it.
It's that the Bush administration and the Obama administration and the military and everybody agreed.
The CIA, you say, had one report that was thin as could be.
And then after the Bomettine decision when the Supreme Court said, hey, everybody gets at least one shot in front of a federal judge under the writ of habeas corpus, that federal judge said, yeah, set him free.
And everyone agreed, set him free.
And everyone agreed there was no case against him.
And everybody agreed that his case that, no, really, he was just a guy with a splitting headache from this car wreck he got into one time, and he just wants to go home, is legit.
And they all believe it, and there's no reason to disbelieve it.
And then they still held him in prison for years and years after that.
The reason it's so objectionable to me is not just what a horrible crime it is against this man, but it's also because, you know, this is like freedom of religion or something.
We're getting down to the very last few things that Americans are still good on, right?
Like, you give a man a fair trial, right?
Like, that's one thing where, you know, unlike the Russians, where sometimes you don't even know what the charge is, like in that terrible book, where the guy doesn't even know what the charge is, which is like a, you know what I mean?
This is a reality that someone else in the old world has to suffer, unfortunately, for them, but not us, not here in America.
We don't do things that way.
And, yeah, we do.
Yeah, we do.
And we have been doing it for quite some time.
So it's not new.
It's just now it's out in the open.
Now we know about it.
You know, when he brought his case to, you know, before a federal judge who granted his, you know, habeas corpus petition, that's when the Obama administration appealed it.
And they appealed it to the D.C.
Circuit, and their ruling out of the D.C.
Circuit was basically, you know, essentially gutting habeas corpus, because they said that the government's evidence, no matter how thin, is entitled to a presumption of regularity.
Right, and you know what, I talked with Marjorie Cohen about that.
She's the professor at, I forget now, Thomas Jefferson School of Law or something, but she was the head of the Center for Constitutional Rights at the time, I think.
Anyway, and she knows, and she said that that was a brand new invented phrase, like illegal enemy combatant, that they had just made up that whole brand new thing in the law, presumption of regularity, meaning presumption that whatever the intelligence agencies say on the piece of paper must be true.
Right, and the burden would fall upon Adnan Latif to, you know, to prove that it's not true.
And so this went all the way up to the Supreme Court.
And in June, you know, as you mentioned, you know, the Supreme Court issued that landmark decision saying, you know, that detainees have the right to, you know, challenge their detention.
So in June, the Supreme Court decided, nope, they're not going to take it up.
And, you know, at that time, Adnan Latif had been, you know, on a hunger strike.
He just ended his hunger strike.
He regained about 95% of his body weight.
He seemed to be in good spirits, at least that's the way his lawyer described him.
And then on September 8th, you know, the afternoon, he was found dead in his cell.
Again, you're supposed to walk that block every three minutes.
So it's unclear, you know, how that could happen, because what we say, you know, what Joint Task Force Guantanamo says is that, you know, things like this are never supposed to happen at Guantanamo because the Guard Force is supposed to catch it.
You know, in his cell, he has a video camera affixed to the ceiling.
You know, it's wired for sound as well.
So they're constantly monitored.
And, you know, at this point, I'm still trying to figure out exactly, you know, what the cause and manner of death is.
But in addition to that, I'm trying to access his medical record, which, you know, perhaps would give a little bit of an insight as to, you know, what he had been given in terms of medication.
Yeah, well, I sure hope you stay on the story.
I know you will and find out just what happened there.
Yeah, it's a story that I think that will be, unfortunately, scoffing many more types of stories like this.
You know, there's no plan to let any of those prisoners out.
And they're getting older and weaker.
And they're eventually, you know, will die there.
Well, we've got appearances to keep, so, you know.
Yes.
All right.
Well, we'll come up with a good cover story, I'm sure.
Or not.
Whichever.
Yeah.
Okay.
Thank you very much for your time, as always.
Especially, I kept you over time here a little bit.
I appreciate it, Scott.
It's great talking to you.
Great journalism, as always, Jason.
Thank you.
Take care.
Everybody, that's great.
Jason Leopold from truthout.org.
This one is at pubrecord.org.
The public record.
Sold into a piece of hell.
A death of innocence at Gitmo.
Hey, read this thing.
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