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A sensible move on the part of the Bush administration, for both of the reasons you have cited above. I find the administration's argument that poems are formatted in a way that makes concealment of hidden messages easier to be relatively pursuasive. After all, poetry is well-known for conveying multiple meanings within the same piece of text.
As for the dehumanizing aspect, I fear you are also correct. The administration has done a very effective job of making people forget about Gitmo's existence and a collection of poetry like this one would signficantly impair this effort. It is a sad state of affairs that the administration believes its terror prisoner facilities can continue to be operated only if the public does not think enough about them to create a disturbance.
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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