Dead Gitmo detainee had lost bid for release

MIAMI - The detainee found dead in a maximum-security cell at Guantanamo was a Yemeni captive with a history of suicide attempts who at one time had won a federal judge's release order, only to see his case overturned on appeal and rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The detention center on Tuesday identified the dead captive as Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, in his 30s, held since January 2002 as prisoner No. 156.

Latif was found unconscious in his cell Saturday afternoon, the military said. Guards and military medical staff could not revive him. He was the ninth detainee to die in the 11 years of the detention center.

The military had withheld Latif's identity while the Naval Criminal Intelligence Service began an investigation and the Obama administration notified members of Congress and Latif's family of the death.

He was not one of Guantanamo's best-known captives, and had never been charged with a war crime.

Latif frequently was confined to the detention center's mental-health ward, attorney David Remes reported, starting in 2010; he repeatedly tried to kill or harm himself by swallowing shards of metal and trying to eat glass and other foreign objects. He would smear excrement on himself and throw blood at his lawyer.

In July 2010, Latif won his habeas corpus petition in U.S. District Court in Washington.

He had been captured near the Afghan-Pakistan border in late 2001, amid waves of men believed to be foreign fighters who were scooped up by Pakistani security services and handed over to U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

He had consistently argued that as a youth in Yemen he had suffered a head injury in a car accident and left his impoverished homeland in search of Muslim charitable medical treatment.

U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy ruled for Latif's release "forthwith" on July 21, 2010, in a 32-page order that ruled that the government had failed to show by a preponderance of evidence that the Yemeni man was part of al-Qaeda or an associated force at the time of his capture.

"This is a mentally disturbed man who has said from the beginning that he went to Afghanistan seeking medical care because he was too poor to pay for it," Remes said at the time. "Finally a court has recognized that he's been telling the truth, and ordered his release."

The Justice Department, however, appealed the judge's release order and won a 2-1 reversal from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that set aside Kennedy's ruling. The appeals court said Kennedy did not give enough weight to government intelligence reports that Latif probably was seeking military training in an al-Qaeda camp.

In June, the Supreme Court chose not to hear the case.

Latif's 2008 Defense Department risk assessment recommended he be transferred from Guantanamo as "a medium risk" who "may pose a threat to the U.S. its interests and its allies." It said he had often violated the rules and overall "had been noncompliant and hostile to the guard force."

At the time of his death, a Guantanamo spokesman said, Latif had been in single-cell confinement at the maximum-security Camp 5 prison building with his privileges reduced for hurling a container of his bodily fluids at a guard.