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The Badger Herald

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The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

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Obama, Romney avoid subject of Guantanamo

This weekend, one of the youngest detainees and the only Western prisoner left at Guantanamo Bay was released to Canada. Omar Khadr, who was just 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan, grew up incarcerated in the United States prison facility off the coast of Cuba. He was subjected to countless interrogations and torture sessions.

Repatriated to his home country, Khadr will now continue his sentence in Canadian prison – where he should have been brought after his arrest in the first place. His lawyers have said he is in a state of disbelief, which is not surprising. It is the only reasonable reaction one could have after a decade in the black hole that is Guantanamo.

During the post-9/11 Wild West days in Pakistan and Afghanistan, dozens of arrests were made as a result of hefty bounties for al-Qaida operatives – any Arab man in the region could be painted as a mujahideen in training. The Bush administration was eager to apprehend and inflict revenge upon any and all potential “terrorists,” so these men were relocated to an island prison thousands of miles away from their homes with no judicial system in place to establish their innocence.

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One such man was Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, who moved to Pakistan from his home country of Yemen for cheaper health care after a nasty car accident. Rounded up by bounty hunters, he spent close to a decade in Guantanamo until he died in his cell. He was approved for release by the Department of Defense in 2004 and again in 2007 because of the lack of evidence in his case, but because of Yemen’s lack of political stability, he was kept incarcerated in Guantanamo in an indefinite state of limbo.
The cause of his death is unknown, but Latif’s lawyers claim he suffered severe torture sessions and was frequently subjected to extreme physical abuse and degradation. He joined his fellow prisoners in a hunger strike and was force-fed liquid food through his nose twice a day for years. In 2009, Latif attempted suicide by slitting his wrists.

Al-Jazeera reports in a letter to his lawyers in 2010, Latif said, “I am happy to express from this darkness and draw a true picture of the condition in which I exist. I am moving towards a dark cave and a dark life in the shadow of a dark prison. This is a prison that does not know humanity and does not know anything except the language of power, oppression and humiliation for whoever enters it. It does not differentiate between a criminal and the innocent.”

In 2008, supporters of President Barack Obama were promised an end to the facility. The president’s inter-agency Guantanamo Bay Task Force was created to handle the transition away from the shadowy, guilty-until-proven-innocent philosophy of international criminal justice so beloved to former President George W. Bush.

But instead of bringing an end to deplorable tactics of interrogation, the Obama administration has made legal efforts to keep the facility open. The U.S. Court of Appeals backtracked on meaningful judicial oversight – which is necessary to insure no torture techniques are used – effectively bringing back the lack of transparency characteristic of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in the Bush days.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is a supporter of this oppressive torture facility. According to Fox News, in 2007 he stated, “I don’t want them on our soil. I want them in Guantanamo, where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil. … My view is we ought to double Guantanamo.”

But Romney hasn’t had to state his opinions on the subject during his presidential campaign because the debate has been completely swept under the rug. His lack of belief in basic human rights isn’t brought forward in smear campaigns because the American public essentially does not care. Romney and Obama both plan to use Guantanamo as the depository for any and all suspected “terrorists,” regardless of the legal grounds for their incarceration. 

And so, after another detainee has quietly passed away in the hell that is indefinite incarceration at the hands of the U.S. government, both presidential candidates are happy to walk away from the subject of Guantanamo. What’s worse is that the American people are too.

Meher Ahmad ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in international studies and Middle Eastern studies.

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