A Yemeni detainee who was found dead last year at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, committed suicide by taking an overdose of psychiatric medication, according to a military report made public on Friday.
The 79-page report found that the detainee, Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, had hoarded medication prescribed for mental illness and died after ingesting two dozen capsules of a drug known as Invega, confirming a New York Times report in November, two months after his death.
The report noted that a guard had recorded a day earlier that Mr. Latif had insisted on mailing a letter to his lawyer and had made the remark “to die is better than to live.” His behavior was described as being increasingly unruly in the weeks leading up to his death, including throwing rocks at guards in one incident and splashing them with urine and feces in another.
Mr. Latif, who sustained a traumatic brain injury in his youth and had acute pneumonia at the time of his death, had a series of cognitive and psychiatric problems, including bipolar disorder and “borderline personality disorder with antisocial traits.” Medical staff members had prescribed a long list of medications, trace amounts of which were in his system.
David Remes, a lawyer for Mr. Latif, said he could not talk about the letter his client had sent him — which investigators did not read because of attorney-client privilege — because the military has deemed it to be classified. But he denounced Mr. Latif’s continued incarceration, noting that an Obama task force in early 2010 had recommended that he be released to a place where he could receive “necessary mental health treatment.”
The report does not reach a definitive conclusion about several murky aspects of the episode, like how Mr. Latif managed to hoard dosages of the drug over several weeks.
Mr. Remes, who complained that the investigators apparently did not interview detainee witnesses, has suggested that a guard may have slipped him the drugs to assist in his suicide.
The report, however, concluded that Mr. Latif hoarded the medication on his own and cited a series of oversights and lapses in procedures.
Col. Greg Julian, a spokesman for the United States Southern Command, which oversees Guantánamo, said steps had been taken the address the concerns. “There are comprehensive programs in place now that ensure everyone receives the appropriate training, and reviews and follows” the standard operating procedures, he said.
Among the lapses identified in the report were around staffing. Guards would take turns watching Mr. Latif because he would engage in “indecent behavior,” often leaving gaps of several seconds each time guards traded places.
In addition, it says, corpsmen had grown lax about following procedures that required watching a detainee swallow medicine and were depositing dosages in trays at cell doors.
Mr. Latif was transferred to another cell the day before he died, raising questions about how he could have moved contraband medication. The report says guards did not search his Koran or take another step that was redacted; an official familiar with the report said the censored sentence referred to not searching private areas on detainees’ bodies.
The military released the report in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Jason Leopold, who has written for Truth-out.org and Al Jazeera.
Mr. Latif traveled from Yemen to Pakistan in August 2001, and later made his way into Afghanistan, where he was captured trying to flee after the war began. He insisted that he was not a jihadist and that he had been seeking medical treatment from a charity for lingering problems related to a brain injury he had sustained in a car accident.
But the military said he had confessed under interrogation early in his capture to having gone to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance. Still, executive branch panels under both the Bush and Obama administrations recommended repatriating him, and in 2010, a federal judge ordered his release. But by then, President Obama had imposed a ban on any transfers to Yemen, which he lifted only last month.
The Justice Department appealed the decision, and in 2011 an appeals court ruled that the administration could lawfully keep imprisoning him. The report says that Mr. Latif’s final “downward spiral of behavior” began in June 2012, when he learned in a phone call from Mr. Remes that the Supreme Court had declined to hear his appeal.
Source: NYTimes
