By Marjorie Cohn
This article first appeared in Jurist
June 20, 2012
The tragic case of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif hit a dead end when the US
Supreme Court issued an order refusing to hear his case last week.
Latif, a Yemeni man, has been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay since
January 2002, after being detained while traveling to seek medical
treatment.
Latif had suffered serious head injuries as the result of a car
accident in 1994, and the Yemeni government paid for him to receive
treatment in Jordan at that time. But his medical problems persisted,
and in 1999 Yemen’s Ministry of Public Health recommended that Latif
undergo tests, therapy and surgical procedures at his own expense.
Unable to afford it, Latif said he left Yemen in 2001 with the help of
a charitable worker to seek free medical treatment in Pakistan. When
he was picked up in Afghanistan — on his way to Pakistan — and
transferred to US custody in December 2001, Latif had his medical
records with him.
After a kangaroo court proceeding, a Combatant Status Review Tribunal
at Guantanamo declared Latif to be an “enemy combatant.” He was not
allowed to attend the hearing, nor was he permitted to see the
evidence against him. Instead of a lawyer, he was given a “Personal
Representative” — a military officer who did not represent Latif’s
interests.
Four years ago, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s
argument that the detainees at Guantanamo had no right to contest the
legality of their confinement in US courts. In Boumediene v. Bush, the
Court upheld the habeas corpus rights of the detainees, saying they
must be given “a meaningful opportunity” to challenge their detention.
Latif petitioned a federal district court for a writ of habeas corpus.
The Obama administration opposed the petition, relying on information
from an interrogation report. Large sections of the report were
blacked out, so it is difficult to know exactly what the report says.
But we do know that, according to the report, Latif admitted to being
recruited for jihad, receiving weapons training from the Taliban and
serving on the front line with other Taliban troops. Latif said his
interrogators garbled his words so that their summary bears no
relation to what he actually said.
In the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Judge Henry
Kennedy granted Latif’s habeas petition, concluding that it could not
“credit the information [in the Report] because there is serious
question as to whether the [Report] accurately reflects Latif’s words,
the incriminating facts in the [Report] are not corroborated, and
Latif has presented a plausible alternative story to explain his
travel.” It troubled Judge Kennedy that, “[n]o other detainee saw
Latif at a training camp or in battle. No other detainee told
interrogators that he fled from Afghanistan to Pakistan, from Tora
Bora or any other location, with Latif. No other type of evidence
links Latif to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, a guest house, or a training
camp.”
Particularly significant to Judge Kennedy was that the “fundamentals
[of Latif’s story] have remained the same.” More than a dozen
interrogation summaries and statements contained “[Latif’s] adamant
denials of any involvement with al Qaida [sic] or the Taliban; his
serious head injury from a car accident in Yemen; his inability to pay
for the necessary medical treatment; and his expectation and hope that
[the charitable worker] would get him free medical care.”
Judge Kennedy also reasoned that errors in the report support “an
inference that poor translation, sloppy note taking . . . [blacked
out] . . . or some combination of those factors resulted in an
incorrect summary of Latif’s words.” The fact that Latif was found in
possession of his medical papers when seized, according to the judge,
“corroborat[ed]” Latif’s “plausible” story.
The government appealed the district court ruling to the conservative
US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which
reversed the grant of habeas corpus. The appellate court admitted that
the interrogation report was “prepared in stressful and chaotic
conditions, filtered through interpreters, subject to transcription
errors, and heavily redacted [parts blacked out] for national security
purposes.” But for the first time, the DC Circuit held that government
reports must be accorded a “presumption of regularity.” That means
they will be presumed to be true unless the detainee can rebut that
presumption.
Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who wrote the opinion for the two judges in
the majority on the three-judge appellate panel, twisted Boumediene’s
statement that “innovation” could be used in habeas corpus proceedings
into a “presumption of regularity” in government reports. Judge Brown
criticized “Boumediene’s airy suppositions.”
The dissenting appellate judge, David S. Tatel, noted that, in
practice, the presumption of regularity will compel courts to
rubber-stamp government detentions because “it suggest[s] that
whatever the government says must be true.” He concluded that the
report in Latif’s case was inherently unreliable because “it
contain[s] multiple layers of hearsay.” Judge Tatel accused the
majority of denying Latif the “meaningful opportunity” to contest the
lawfulness of his detention that Boumediene guarantees.
When seven detainees whose petitions had been denied by the DC
Circuit, including Latif, took their cases to the Supreme Court, they
hoped the high court would do justice. During the Bush administration,
the Court had struck down illegal and unjust executive policies. These
included the denial of habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees,
the refusal to afford due process to US citizens caught in the “war on
terror” and theholding of military commissions because they violated
the Uniform Code of Military Justice and theGeneva Conventions.
But hope for justice died last week when the Court refused to even
consider the propriety of the appellate court’s denial of habeas
corpus to those seven detainees. Henceforth, detainees who lose in the
DC Circuit cannot expect the Supreme Court to give them relief. Their
last stop will be at one of the most right-wing circuits in the
country, which overturns or delays all release orders by federal
judges if the government objects.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to review the appellate court decisions in
these cases has rendered Boumedienea dead letter. Since 2008,
two-thirds of detainees who have filed habeas corpus petitions have
won at the district court level, yet not one of them has been released
by judicial order. Judge Tatel wrote that “it is hard to see what is
left of the Supreme Court’s command in Boumediene that habeas review
be ‘meaningful.'”
Like many men at Guantanamo, Latif went on a hunger strike to assert
the only power he had in the face of utter hopelessness — the power to
refuse food. He was force-fed for three months, which, he says, “is
like having a dagger shoved down your throat.” As attorney Marc D.
Falkoff writes in his chapter about Latif inThe United States and
Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse, “[t]he United
Nations Commission on Human Rights calls this torture.”
Of the 800 men and boys held at Guantanamo since 2002, 169 remain. Of
those prisoners, 87 have had their release approved by military review
boards established during the Bush administration, and later by the
Guantanamo Review Task Force established by President Obama in 2009.
Yet they continue to languish in the prison camp.
In her opinion, Judge Brown wrote, “Luckily, this is a shrinking
category of cases. The ranks of Guantanamo detainees will not be
replenished.” Indeed, Obama has sent only one new prisoner to
Guantanamo. His strategy is to assassinate “suspected militants” or
people present in “suspicious areas” with drones, obviating the
necessity of incarcerating them and dealing with their detention in
court. As Judge Brown ominously observed, “Boumediene’s logic is
compelling: take no prisoners. Point taken.”