hiredgun

I'm trying very hard to imagine what kind of coded message could emerge from a place like Guantanamo. Secret information about what the inside of a prison cell looks like? As prisoners who themselves have no access to information, I don't understand exactly what we have to fear from their contact with the outside world. A coded signal that intitiates an attack? That could have been triggered merely by the prisoner's incarceration or failure to make contact for the last several years.

I'm not terribly surprised that we are for the moment incapable of speedy translation and screening of the work. I happen to be a (non-native) Arabic speaker myself, and while the statistics would have you think that American universities are churning us out like rabbits over the past five years, the truth is that the field is flooded with unbearably mediocre Arabic students, 90% of whom would be completely unable to approach something like a poem, much less screen it for encoded messages.

With our threat perception as skewed as it is, the obvious answer is simply to clamp down on all communications, since we can't seem to decide which might be dangerous. I think it's kind of unconscionable.