the bush administration's fear of poetry - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 02-26-2007, 07:07 PM

somewhere in all this there must there must lie an explanation for why jewel is the best-selling poet in america. i just know it.
here, let's look, shall we?

Quote:

'Inside the wire'

The pressures of confinement in Guantánamo Bay have led many in the controversial detention camp to turn to poetry. But, as Richard Lea learns, the American authorities are very reluctant to let the world see them
Monday February 26, 2007

Guardian Unlimited
Poetry's capacity to rattle governments is not, it appears, confined to totalitarian regimes. A collection of poems by detainees at the US military base in Guantánamo Bay is to be published later this year, but only in the face of strong opposition by suspicious American censors.

Twenty-one poems written "inside the wire" in Arabic, Pashto and English have been gathered together despite formidable obstacles by Marc Falkoff, a law professor at Northern Illinois University who represents 17 of the detainees at the camp. The collection, entitled Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, will be published in August by the University of Iowa Press with an afterword written by Ariel Dorfman.

It all began when he turned up at the secure facility in Washington DC where all communications from detainees are sent, and found a poem waiting for him.

"The first poem I saw was sent to me by Abdulsalam al Hela," he says. "It's a moving cry about the injustice of arbitrary detention and at the same time a hymn to the comforts of religious faith."

"It was interesting to me because I did a PhD in literature, but I didn't think too much about it."

A second poem from another client followed soon after, and Falkoff began to wonder if other lawyers also had clients who were sending poetry. It turned out that Guantánamo Bay is "filled with itinerant poets".

Many of the poems deal with the pain and humiliation inflicted on the detainees by the US military. Others express disbelief and a sense of betrayal that Americans - described in one poem as "protectors of peace" - could deny detainees any kind of justice. Some engage with wider themes of nostalgia, hope and faith in God.

But most of the poems, including the lament by Al Hela which first sparked Falkoff's interest, are unlikely to ever see the light of day. Not content with imprisoning the authors, the Pentagon has refused to declassify many of their words, arguing that poetry "presents a special risk" to national security because of its "content and format". In a memo sent on September 18 2006, the team assigned to deal with communications between lawyers and their clients explains that they do not "maintain the requisite subject matter expertise" and says that poems "should continue to be considered presumptively classified".

The defence department spokesman Jeffrey Gordon is unsurprised that access to detainees poetry is tightly controlled. "It depends on what's being written," he says. "There's a whole range of things that are inappropriate." Of course poetry that deals with subjects such as guard routines, interrogation techniques or terrorist operations could pose a security threat, but Gordon is unable to explain why Al Hela's poem is still classified, saying "I haven't read any of these [poems]".

As with prisoners within the American justice system, he argues, there are constraints on their first amendment rights. "I don't think these guys are writing poetry like Morrissey," he continues.

"The fear appears to be that detainees will try to smuggle coded messages out of the camp," explains Falkoff, a fear that has often allowed clearance for English translations only - Arabic or Pashto originals being judged to represent an "enhanced security risk". In many cases even Falkoff has only seen the translations prepared for the volunteer lawyers by the few translators with the requisite security clearance.

Because of security restrictions, Falkoff cannot give any further details about Al Hela's poem, or about other poems sent to him by his clients that have not been cleared for publication by the department of defence. He is not allowed to see about 20 poems sent to other lawyers that have not been cleared for publication.

Many poems have also been lost, confiscated or destroyed. Falkoff is unable to even offer an estimate of how many poems have been written in the camp.

"To start with," he says, "there are probably 200 detainees who either don't have lawyers or have not been allowed to communicate with their lawyers. Even for those clients who have lawyers, I really don't know how many poems they've written or whether they've been confiscated. Communicating back and forth with our clients is a very, very difficult process."

Only one of the authors in the forthcoming collection wrote poetry before his incarceration. The religious scholar Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost wrote 25,000 lines of poetry during his time in the camp, only a handful of which have been returned to him. A poem he wrote on a Styrofoam cup and reconstructed from memory after his release appears in Poems from Guantánamo. The other detainees were not poets before their incarceration, but have turned to poetry under the particular pressures of their situation.

Moazzam Begg, who spent three years in Guantánamo Bay before being released without charge in January 2005, began writing poetry as a way of explaining what he was going through. He knew that everything he wrote would be censored, so used poetry to try to describe his situation to his family.

"The idea was to say it without saying it," he says, "and to explain to my interrogators that it was a farce."

The formal constraints of poetry gives the writer control over their material, he says, "the ability to say the words without going into a rant".

Poetry was also a way of engaging with the system.

"I knew that everything I wrote would be censored," he continues, "and that the person censoring it would have to read the poem." By writing in English, a language rarely used by detainees in the camp, he was able to communicate directly with guards, and perhaps those higher up in the US military.

It was also a way of "showing anger" and "channelling frustration".

According to Falkoff, detainees are writing poetry because "they're trying to keep hold of their sanity and humanity".

"They have really, really nothing to do there," he says. "They get, now, an hour of exercise every other day or so. They don't have access to books, apart from a Qu'ran - which they get whether they want it or not - and a little book cart with some Agatha Christie novels and some Harry Potter. They're not allowed to interact with the other prisoners. There are no communal areas. The recreation area is like a chimney with 30ft high walls."

"They're writing poetry because they need some kind of mental stimulation, some way of expressing their feelings, some outlet for their creativity."

According to the poet Jack Mapanje, who was imprisoned in Malawi because of his writing and now teaches a course on the poetry of incarceration at Newcastle University, prisoners often turn to writing poetry as a way of "defending themselves".

"People are writing as a search for the dignity that has been taken away from them," he says. "It's the only way they can attempt to restore it, but nobody is listening to them." He was imprisoned himself with many people who were illiterate, he says, but many of them were writing poetry, or singing songs about their captivity - "it's the same impulse that drives people to prayer."

"Poetry talks to the heart," he continues, "there is something immediately passionate about it." For Mapanje, poetry is a more "natural" means of expression than prose, a means of communication that "anybody who hasn't got any craft will come to".

The poet Tim Liardet, whose Forward prize-shortlisted collection Blood Choir deals with the time he spent teaching poetry at a young offenders' prison, agrees there's an "instinctual" urge to reach for poetry in extreme circumstances.

"They're feeling things they've never felt before, or never with so much intensity," he says. "They've never had to try to match such an intense experience with language before."

Many of the offenders he worked with resisted his efforts to get them to write poetry, he continues, but "the ones who ended up writing it were the ones who found it themselves. They weren't following an example from me."

Falkoff is hoping the collection of poems from Guantánamo Bay will put a human face on people branded by the former American defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth".

The quality of the poems in the collection is "variable", says Falkoff, but "there's some really good stuff there". He stresses that because of security restrictions he has often been unable to see anything more than translations prepared without "poetry in mind". Nevertheless some of the poems transcend their extraordinary circumstances, he says, and "just knock me over".

With the courts moving slowly towards fair and open hearings, he continues, "the detainees' own words may become part of the dialogue. Perhaps their poems will prick the conscience of a nation."

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo...021901,00.html

ok so the really mind-boggling part of this is simple: the existence of this legal black hole, the existence of this facility in guantanomo---the fact that it still exists---the fact that it is still functioning----the fact that it ever functioned---and that it has been, and continues to be tolerated---by all of us.

nonetheless, every so often the bush squad manages to put into motion something that reveals much more than it conceals--the making over into a fortress of independence hall is a good example because it functioned as a 3-d demonstration of "freedom" bush style more effectively than anything that could be said as a criticism of the regime or the "freedom" for which it stands. so here:

Quote:

Not content with imprisoning the authors, the Pentagon has refused to declassify many of their words, arguing that poetry "presents a special risk" to national security because of its "content and format". In a memo sent on September 18 2006, the team assigned to deal with communications between lawyers and their clients explains that they do not "maintain the requisite subject matter expertise" and says that poems "should continue to be considered presumptively classified".

so "poetry presents a special security risk" because of its "content and format."---so american freedoms are threatened by line breaks? by allusion? by innovative layout? by precision in the use of language? are they worried about roaming gangs of poets terrorizing the countryside, speaking elliptically and conning right-thinking, simple americans out of stuff? what is going on here?

then you get the memo from 9/06:
the bush squad has classified this poetry because they do not understand it.
they have few operatives who speak arabic of pashto, so poetry in either language constitues an additional security risk.
it could, you see, contain secret messages.
and what is worse, it is poetry, which we have already seen is scary scary bad.

my suspicion is that the official rationales are simply bullshit and that the real danger of this material--no matter the quality of the texts themselves---is that it could---as the article says---make the people who have been rotting in guantanomo with no access to any legal recourse seem more like human beings.
and that the bush squad will not and cannot tolerate.

what do you think of this?
and remember to lock up tight tonight: you never know where scary bad poets are lurking.

politicophile · 02-26-2007, 07:21 PM

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.

hiredgun · 02-27-2007, 03:54 PM

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.

host · 02-27-2007, 10:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile

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.

I am sorry, politicophile....I can't let your statements and the beliefs that they infer (to me....anyway...) that you harbor, about who the detainees at Guantanamo are, and why they are there....go unchallenged.

Here are quotes from Bush and Cheney...they aren't "filtered" by the "liberal" media, they are from the white house website:

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0060906-3.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
September 6, 2006

President Discusses Creation of Military Commissions to Try Suspected Terrorists
The East Room

THE PRESIDENT:......Most of the enemy combatants we capture are held in Afghanistan or in Iraq, where they're questioned by our military personnel. Many are released after questioning, or turned over to local authorities -- if we determine that they do not pose a continuing threat and no longer have significant intelligence value. Others remain in American custody near the battlefield, to ensure that they don't return to the fight.

In some cases, we determine that individuals we have captured pose a significant threat, or may have intelligence that we and our allies need to have to prevent new attacks. Many are al Qaeda operatives or Taliban fighters trying to conceal their identities, and they withhold information that could save American lives. In these cases, it has been necessary to move these individuals to an environment where they can be held secretly [sic], questioned by experts, and -- when appropriate -- prosecuted for terrorist acts.

President George W. Bush addresses invited guests, members of the media and White House staff Wednesday. Sept. 6, 2006 in the East Room of the White House, as he discusses the administration's draft legislation to create a strong and effective military commission to try suspected terrorists. The bill being sent to Congress said President Bush, "reflects the reality that we are a nation at war, and that it is essential for us to use all reliable evidence to bring these people to justice." White House photo by Kimberlee Hewitt Some of these individuals are taken to the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It's important for Americans and others across the world to understand the kind of people held at Guantanamo. These aren't common criminals, or bystanders accidentally swept up on the battlefield -- we have in place a rigorous process to ensure those held at Guantanamo Bay belong at Guantanamo. Those held at Guantanamo include suspected bomb makers, terrorist trainers, recruiters and facilitators, and potential suicide bombers. They are in our custody so they cannot murder our people. One detainee held at Guantanamo told a questioner questioning him -- he said this: "I'll never forget your face. I will kill you, your brothers, your mother, and sisters."

In addition to the terrorists held at Guantanamo, a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.....

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0060629-3.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
June 29, 2006

President Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Participate in a Joint Press Availability

.....Q Thank you, Mr. President. You've said that you wanted to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, but you were waiting for the Supreme Court decision that came out today. Do you intend now to close the Guantanamo Bay quickly? And how do you deal with the suspects that you've said were too dangerous to be released or sent home?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Thank you for the question on a court ruling that literally came out in the midst of my meeting with the Prime Minister -- and so I haven't had a chance to fully review the findings of the Supreme Court. I, one, assure you that we take them very seriously. Two, that to the extent that there is latitude to work with the Congress to determine whether or not the military tribunals will be an avenue in which to give people their day in court, we will do so.

The American people need to know that this ruling, as I understand it, won't cause killers to be put out on the street. In other words, there's not a -- it was a drive-by briefing on the way here, I was told that this was not going to be the case. At any rate, we will seriously look at the findings, obviously. And one thing I'm not going to do, though, is I'm not going to jeopardize the safety of the American people. People have got to understand that. I understand we're in a war on terror; that these people were picked up off of a battlefield; and I will protect the people and, at the same time, conform with the findings of the Supreme Court. .....

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0050623-8.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
June 23, 2005

Interview of the Vice President by Wolf Blitzer, CNN

.....Q A few other quick questions before we end this interview. Should Gitmo -- Guantanamo Bay's detention center be shut down, the detainees moved elsewhere?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No.

Q Because?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Because it's a vital facility. The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb-makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of al Qaeda and the Taliban. We've screened everybody we had. We had some 800 people down there. We've screened them all, and we've let go those that we've deemed not to be a continuing threat. But the 520 some that are there now are serious, deadly threats to the United States. For the most part, if you let them out, they'll go back to trying to kill Americans.

Q Nobody says let them out, but move them to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas or someplace like that.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Why would you do that? ......

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...050620-19.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
June 20, 2005

President Hosts United States - European Union Summit
The East Room

..... Q Mr. President, many in Europe are worrying that with the fight against terrorism the commitment of the United States to human rights is not as big as it used to be -- that is not only to do with Guantanamo, but also with the secret prisons where the CIA holds terror suspects. My question is, what will happen to these people who are held in these secret prisons by the CIA? Will they ever see a judge? Or is your thinking that with some terror suspects, the rule of law should not apply or does not have to have applied.

PRESIDENT BUSH: First of all, I appreciate that question, and I understand we -- those of us who espouse freedom have an obligation, and those who espouse human rights have an obligation to live that to those -- live up to those words. And I believe we are, in Guantanamo. I mean, after all, there's 24 hour inspections by the International Red Cross. You're welcome to go down yourself -- maybe you have -- and taking a look at the conditions. I urge members of our press corps to go down to Guantanamo and see how they're treated and to see -- and to see -- and to look at the facts. That's all I ask people to do. There have been, I think, about 800 or so that have been detained there. These are people picked up off the battlefield in Afghanistan. They weren't wearing uniforms, they weren't state sponsored, but they were there to kill.

And so the fundamental question facing our government was, what do you do with these people? And so we said that they don't apply under the Geneva Convention, but they'll be treated in accord with the Geneva Convention.

And so I would urge you to go down and take a look at Guantanamo. About 200 or so have been released back to their countries. There needs to be a way forward on the other 500 that are there. We're now waiting for a federal court to decide whether or not they can be tried in a military court, where they'll have rights, of course, or in the civilian courts. We're just waiting for our judicial process to move -- to move the process along.

Make no mistake, however, that many of those folks being detained -- in humane conditions, I might add -- are dangerous people. Some have been released to their previous countries, and they got out and they went on to the battlefield again.......

....and here is the documentation that supports the idea that both Bush and Cheney intentionally misled us, and the world, to the point of telling lies, in their descriptions of who the majority of the Guantanamo detainees are, and the circumstances of their capture, and the offense that they have committed against the US and it's allies:

Quote:

http://gtmodocuments.blogspot.com/20...as-lawyer.html
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
My Worst Moment As a Lawyer

By P. Sabin Willett

December 5, 2006
Newburyport, MA

My worst moment as a lawyer took place on August 30, 2006, at the stroke of noon, just as I was leaving Echo One, an interrogation cell at Guantanamo Bay.....

....So let’s have no more of hypotheticals this evening. Let’s stick to facts. Besides, if we don’t get to the facts soon, I’ll never come round to my worst moment as a lawyer. And the main fact we’d like is this. After five years, who are we holding down there at Guantanamo Bay, anyway?

The way we used to answer that question in this country was in a habeas corpus hearing. The prisoner would demand the legal basis for his imprisonment. The government would have its say. And a judge would decide. But this Fall your Congress and your President abolished that.. So how do we answer the question?

One way is rhetorically.

[Slide: Guantanamo Rhetorically: Who are the Prisoners?]

slide
“The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They’re terrorists. They’re bomb makers. They’re facilitators of terror. They’re members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban --
Vice President Cheney

slide
Among the most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth
Donald Rumsfeld (Jan. 27, 2002)

slide
They would “gnaw through hydraulic lines of transport planes.”[1]
Gen. Richard Myers (Jan. 11, 2002),

“Captured on the battlefield seeking to harm U.S. soldiers,”
Sen. John Cornyn.

Guantanamo By the Numbers
So the rhetoric is powerful and alarming. What about the numbers?

Number of Prisoners Held at Guantanamo Bay Cuba
Approx. 450

Years of Captivity for Most Prisoners
4 ½

Number of prisoners charged with crimes
10

Number of prisoners charged with 9/11-Related Crimes
0

Number of prisoners convicted of any crime
0

Percentage of alleged battlefield Captures
5*
*source: summary of military allegations in 517 CSRT transcripts (Seton Hall Law School, February, 2006)

Percentage of prisoners alleged to have engaged in violence
45*
*source: summary of military allegations in 517 CSRT transcripts (Seton Hall Law School, February, 2006)

Well, hold on, wait a minute. Senior officials said these people were the worst of the worst, and you’re saying only 5% were taken on the battlefield? If only 5% were taken on the battlefield, where did the rest come from?

click here to read the rest of this article click to show

Quote:

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njw...06/0203nj2.htm

COVER STORY
Who Is at Guantanamo Bay
·
Empty Evidence

By Corine Hegland, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Feb. 3, 2006

As a result of the habeas corpus petitions filed by attorneys representing Guantanamo detainees, the Defense Department has had to file court documents on 132 of the enemy combatants, or just under a quarter of the prison's population. National Journal undertook a detailed review of the unclassified files to develop profiles of the 132 men. NJ separately reviewed transcripts for 314 prisoners who pleaded their cases before Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantanamo. Taken together, the information provides a picture of who, exactly, has been taken prisoner in the war on terror and is being held in an anomalous U.S. military prison on an island belonging to one of America's bitterest enemies.

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President Bush issued a military order that authorized the Defense Department to detain noncitizens suspected of having ties with Al Qaeda or other terrorists. As a result, hundreds of so-called "enemy combatants" were rounded up and taken to prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Since early 2002, lawyers working on a volunteer basis have filed papers with U.S. courts asking the government to explain why it is holding individual prisoners. These habeas corpus petitions have forced disclosures by the Defense Department that shed light on some of the details surrounding the estimated 500 prisoners currently in U.S. captivity.

The Defense Department declined a request to release comparable statistics for all of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.

The first thing that jumps out of the statistics is that a majority of the detainees in both groups are not Afghans -- nor were they picked up in Afghanistan as U.S. troops fought the Taliban and Al Qaeda, nor were they picked up by American troops at all. Most are from Arab countries, and most were arrested in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities.

to read the rest of this article click to show

Seventy-five of the 132 men, or more than half the group, are -- like Farouq Ali Ahmed, the subject of National Journal's accompanying story -- not accused of taking part in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners. (The 75 include 10 detainees whom the U.S. government "no longer" considers enemy combatants, although at least eight of the 10 are still being held at Guantanamo.) Typically, documents describe these men as "associated" with the Taliban or with Al Qaeda -- sometimes directly so, and sometimes through only weak or distant connections. Several men worked for charities that had some ties to Al Qaeda; Farouq lived in a house associated with the Taliban.

Some of the "associated" men are said to have attended jihadist training camps before September 11, an accusation admitted by some and denied by others. The U.S. government says that some of the suspected jihadists trained in Afghanistan, even though other records show that they had not yet entered the country at the time of the training camps. Just 57 of the 132 men, or 43 percent, are accused of being on a battlefield in post-9/11 Afghanistan.

The government's documents tie only eight of the 132 men directly to plans for terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan.

One of the eight, an Australian fundamentalist Muslim, admitted that he trained several of the 9/11 hijackers and intended to hijack a plane himself; another of the eight, a Briton, is said to have targeted 33 Jewish organizations in New York City. Both men were released to their home governments in January 2005. Neither one is facing charges at home.

The Australian says he falsely confessed while undergoing torture in Egypt; the Australian government, which was watching him well before 9/11, has revoked his passport but has said it lacks sufficient information to press terrorism charges against him. The British man was cleared after a few hours of questioning in London.

The remaining six of the eight were arrested in Sarajevo, Bosnia, after being accused of planning to attack the American Embassy there; the charge was investigated and dismissed by a judge. The country's human-rights chamber issued an order prohibiting the men from being taken out of the country. The Americans seized them anyway.

The Defense Department accusations fall into only two categories -- those who participated in hostilities and those who did not. But the boundaries between the two categories can be fuzzy. In the nonhostile category, for example, is a suspected Qaeda financier picked up in Pakistan. In the hostile group, on the other hand, are a few men whose most direct link to hostilities appears to be getting wounded by one of the thousands of American bombs dropped on Afghanistan.

One hundred and fifteen of the files also note where the detainees were captured. Only 35 percent of the 115 were arrested in Afghanistan; 55 percent were captured by Pakistani forces in Pakistan.

At least 39 of the arrests made in Pakistan came in the border region, where Qaeda fighters, along with civilian Afghan refugees and nonfighting Arabs, were stampeding out of the country in the fall of 2001, desperate to escape the war. Many of the enemy combatants arrested in that region say they fled the sudden chaos of Afghanistan without retrieving their passports and identification papers and that when they asked to be taken to their embassies, they were taken to prison instead. Many of the men who detailed their capture described being taken through one, two, or three Pakistani prisons before they were delivered to the Americans.

Many, though not all, of the remaining 24 arrests made in Pakistan came in targeted raids on senior Qaeda leaders between January and September 2002. The senior suspects captured in these raids immediately disappeared into CIA custody -- they are not at Guantanamo. But their lesser companions, or others arrested in the same town on the same night, were delivered to Cuba.

Also in this group are at least three men who were picked off Pakistani buses in apparently random sweeps for foreigners, and one man who says he answered a knock on the door of the apartment next to his.

The 314 transcripts released to the Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit give similar results. The 314 men described there included 97 Afghans who were arrested in Afghanistan. But they also included 211 foreigners, 152 of whom -- or more than 70 percent -- were arrested outside of Afghanistan. And 145 of those men were captured in Pakistan.

Quote:

http://law.shu.edu/news/guantanamo_r...al_2_08_06.pdf
REPORT ON GUANTANAMO DETAINEES
A Profile of 517 Detainees through Analysis of Department of Defense Data
By
Mark Denbeaux
Professor, Seton Hall University School of Law and
Counsel to two Guantanamo detainees
Joshua Denbeaux, Esq.
Denbeaux & Denbeaux
David Gratz, John Gregorek, Matthew Darby, Shana Edwards,
Shane Hartman, Daniel Mann and Helen Skinner
Students, Seton Hall University School of Law

Page 2.

THE GUANTANAMO DETAINEES: THE GOVERNMENT’S STORY
Professor Mark Denbeaux* and Joshua Denbeaux*
An interim report
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The media and public fascination with who is detained at Guantanamo and why has been
fueled in large measure by the refusal of the Government, on the grounds of national security, to
provide much information about the individuals and the charges against them. The information
available to date has been anecdotal and erratic, drawn largely from interviews with the few
detainees who have been released or from statements or court filings by their attorneys in the
pending habeas corpus proceedings that the Government has not declared “classified.”
This Report is the first effort to provide a more detailed picture of who the Guantanamo
detainees are, how they ended up there, and the purported bases for their enemy combatant
designation. The data in this Report is based entirely upon the United States Government’s own
documents.1 This Report provides a window into the Government’s success detaining only those
that the President has called “the worst of the worst.”
Among the data revealed by this Report:
1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any
hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining
detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive
affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.
3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a
large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist
watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably.
Eight percent are detained because they are deemed “fighters for;” 30% considered “members of;” a
large majority – 60% -- are detained merely because they are “associated with” a group or groups the
Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist
group is unidentified.
4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the
detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States
custody.

to read the rest of this article click to show

If you re-read politicophile's comments in the context of the contradictions between the statements of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. as to the circumstances of the capture of the Guantanmo detainees, and the offenses that these American leaders accused them of, vs. the documentation that the opposite of what the leaders said about the majority of the detainees is probably true, do politicophile's assumptions and opinions speak to the core problem of Guantanamo's existence, which has to do with a lack of truthful justification for detaining most of the prisoners? Do the untruths told by US leaders, but accepted as truth by politicophile, still leave room for him to assess roachboy's OP, if most of the authors of the poetry are unjustly and illegally held....with no hope for the right to appear in front of an impartial judge in a timely manner, to hear the evidence against them, and then be afforded an opportunity to refute that evidence and offer evidence of their own, to the contrary of the US government's allegations against them?

Charlatan · 02-28-2007, 04:16 AM

host

politico doesn't appear to infer anything in his post, in fact all he appears to be saying is that there are concerns (arguably legitimate) that coded messages could be carried out in the poetry. he then goes on to concur that administration is doing trying to sweep the existence of gitmo under the rug (i.e. the poetry would bring the plight of the prisoners under public scrutiny once more).

i completely agree with these points.

politico offer no value judgment on either position. he simply restates what is at stake.

host · 02-28-2007, 06:32 AM

Charlatan, I was reacting to these comments of politicophile:

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile

....I find the administration's argument that poems are formatted in a way that makes concealment of hidden messages easier to be relatively pursuasive.....

.....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 significantly impair this effort.....

politicophile's comments were in the first post to respond to roachboy's OP.
I maintain that it is not possible to find the "the administration's argument that poems are formatted in a way that makes concealment of hidden messages easier to be relatively pursuasive" if one considers the false and misleading statements from the administration, concerning who the prisoners are and where they were actually "captured".

Below, I've posted support for my opinion that contradicts politicophile's opinion that "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"....

I'll admit that I'm too distracted by the intentional "painting" of the large majority of Guantanamo detainees as "combatants" swept off "the battlefield" into detention, when the bulk of them were simply "fingered", in response to a bounty incentive from the US government, and were not from or in Afghanistan when they were "sold" to the US, to focus on the issues that prompted politicophile's posted comments.....

.....while IMO, politicophile is commenting within the framework of the US officials' "paint job" about the "guilt" of the detainees, without allowing them fair hearings that would confirm or refute official allegations....

I see nothing to indicate that the Bush admin. is attempting to "hide" or distract attention to the existence of the Guantanamo prison. I think that one of the primary reasons that it was created is for use as deterrent propaganda:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0060906-3.html
September 6, 2006

President Discusses Creation of Military Commissions to Try Suspected Terrorists
President says the word Guantanamo, 21 times....

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0060907-2.html
September 7, 2006

President Bush Discusses Progress in the Global War on Terror
President says the word Guantanamo, 2 times....

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20060909.html
September 9, 2006

President's Radio Address
President says the word Guantanamo, 1 time....

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0060911-3.html
September 11, 2006

President's Address to the Nation
President says the word Guantanamo, 1 time....

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20060916.html
September 16, 2006

President's Radio Address
President says the word Guantanamo, 1 time....

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0061218-5.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
December 18, 2006

Text of a Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate

....The United States continues to detain several hundred al Qaida and Taliban fighters who are believed to pose a continuing threat to the United States and its interests. The combat equipped and combat support forces deployed to Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the U.S. Southern Command area of operations since January 2002 continue to conduct secure detention operations for the approximately 435 enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay......

The DOD created and approved the following, on it's website, this year:

http://www.defenselink.mil/home/features/gitmo/
January 11, 2007
Guantanamo "feature" web page, with link to "photo gallery" advertising "42 photos".

...and this....

New Guantanamo Facility Safer for Guards
WASHINGTON, Jan. 11, 2007 – Five years after the first detainees from the war on terror arrived at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a new state-of-the-art facility there is making duty safer for guards and more comfortable for detainees. Story
• Guantanamo Facility Needed ‘for Foreseeable Future’
Court Rules Against Guantanamo Detainee
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14, 2006 – Upholding the legality of October’s Military Commissions Act, a federal court ruled here yesterday that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, do not have the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts. Story
Outdated Perceptions Frustrate Troops
U.S. NAVAL STATION GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Dec. 1, 2006 – A 28-year-old block guard here whose mission is to ensure the safe care and custody of enemy combatants said he wishes the world had an accurate picture of the place where he serves. Story
Cold War History Played Out at Northeast Gate
U.S. NAVAL STATION GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Nov. 30, 2006 – Even as deployed National Guard members make history serving with Joint Task Force Guantanamo, they find history at the base’s Northeast Gate. Story

....and links to"
Related Stories
GITMO MISSION
Links to 35 "news reports", re: Guantanamo

GITMO PROCEEDINGS
Links to 35 "news reports", re: Guantanamo

mixedmedia · 02-28-2007, 06:51 AM

Like, hiredgun, I'm having a hard time imagining what sort of coded messages might be hidden in these poems. These prisoners have been incarcerated for almost five years now. I would think that any "projects" they were working on before imprisonment have been taken up by others. What is the likelihood that there are cells sitting all this time waiting for cues to action from someone who has been out of reach for so long?

Or, maybe I'm just being a little naive.

My best guess, like most of you, is that Bush & Co. simply want to discourage the media attention on Guantanamo that publishing this book will no doubt bring about. Although not publishing it could spur just as much unflattering attention as publishing it. What a shame.

roachboy · 02-28-2007, 07:24 AM

i would make a distinction between the way in which gitmo itself is framed as an exercise in the illusion of deterrence and the way in which the folk who are in gitmo are framed--as non-beings wholly defined by the strange rhetoric host has outlined above. so if there is a threat to "national security" contained within these particular poems, whatever they are, it has nothing to do with what the dod memo outlined: the "threat" is the undercutting of the bushco marketing job around guantanomo itself--and that threat is one of individuation. perhaps the "secret message" these folk are really afraid of is not secret at all: i am a human being, i have not and will not face charges, i have not and will not be tried, i have not and will not be found guilty or innocent--i rot here, which is nowhere, a special kind of nowhere, the one that is an internal vanishingpoint, the mirror image of that other vanishingpoint in the ideology of bushworld, the one at the core of the trajectory that would connect the notion "terrorist" to any referent in the reality that other people know about.

what i was really distracted by in the article, however, was the more general statement that poetry in itself constitutes a threat to national security because of its form and content.
even in the context of the grotesque charade being performed around the release of these particular poems, that statement was really striking.

strangely enough, it echoes boundary markers within contemporary poetry--and in many other types of writing--between those who invest in narrative forms, representational language, etc. as over against those who experiment with form and cultivate other models of precision in word usage. behind this, you can see another version of the same political boundaries: narrative forms, representational language are linked to a set of assumptions about the world--that it is given, that it is a collection of objects created once and for all by some god or other along with the forms that define them, that the order of the world is immanent or present within the world, some of it manifest, other aspects hidden. human beings do not make anything, do not create anything: they find what is already there. so narrative and its correlate in representational language is appropriate--it indexes a certain deferrence in the face of the Given.

conversely, to break with these conventions is hubris.
to break with them on conceptual grounds is problematic.
to break with them on political grounds is a threat.
there is no way to tell these apart.
so all of it is a threat.

the perverse thing about this is that it is a validation of that which it would exclude: it implicitly elevates types of writing--and by extension types of cultural work more generally--that break with conventional modes of expression to the status they usually aspire to: to pose a real threat to the existing way of life, rooted in a desire to smash it--all of it--by undermining its relationship to language, exposing as arbitrary its conventions for making meaning. making the entire communicative apparatus shake as a way to make ideology itself shake.

but given the fact that most work on this order sells very little, and is mostly consumed by other people who also do this kind of work, these motivations function largely at the level of self-conception.

so it is a strange kind of favor that the bush squad has done those of us who work away on strange things in obscurity to elevate that work to the status of a national security threat.
and somehow it seems typical of the existing state of affairs in general that this unintended gift to experimental art would come wrapped in a phenomena as outrageous--as reprehensible--as guantanomo bay.

i do and do not look forward to the splitting of the general from the particular statements and the installation of poetry detection technologies in airports.

perhaps people could be encouraged to call the tips line in the event that see someone engaged in suspect activities that could be linked to poetry..."hello? is this the department of heimat security? good. i was driving on I-80 and i passed a car. the passenger was reading susan howe. i thought you should know. yes yes, i copied down the license plate number..."

Astrocloud · 03-01-2007, 07:47 PM

Osama, I'm your berserker,
I hid the Iraqi WMD's,
Where I hope the Americans won't seize
In the closet where my wife keeps her burkahs,

02-26-2007, 07:21 PM	#2 (permalink)
politicophile Addict	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. __________________ 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

02-27-2007, 03:54 PM	#3 (permalink)
hiredgun Addict	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. Last edited by hiredgun; 02-27-2007 at 07:47 PM..

02-28-2007, 04:16 AM	#5 (permalink)
Charlatan Getting it. Super Moderator Location: Lion City	host politico doesn't appear to infer anything in his post, in fact all he appears to be saying is that there are concerns (arguably legitimate) that coded messages could be carried out in the poetry. he then goes on to concur that administration is doing trying to sweep the existence of gitmo under the rug (i.e. the poetry would bring the plight of the prisoners under public scrutiny once more). i completely agree with these points. politico offer no value judgment on either position. he simply restates what is at stake. __________________ "My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars." - Old Man Luedecke

02-28-2007, 06:51 AM	#7 (permalink)
mixedmedia has all her shots. Location: Florida	Like, hiredgun, I'm having a hard time imagining what sort of coded messages might be hidden in these poems. These prisoners have been incarcerated for almost five years now. I would think that any "projects" they were working on before imprisonment have been taken up by others. What is the likelihood that there are cells sitting all this time waiting for cues to action from someone who has been out of reach for so long? Or, maybe I'm just being a little naive. My best guess, like most of you, is that Bush & Co. simply want to discourage the media attention on Guantanamo that publishing this book will no doubt bring about. Although not publishing it could spur just as much unflattering attention as publishing it. What a shame. __________________ Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

02-28-2007, 07:24 AM	#8 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i would make a distinction between the way in which gitmo itself is framed as an exercise in the illusion of deterrence and the way in which the folk who are in gitmo are framed--as non-beings wholly defined by the strange rhetoric host has outlined above. so if there is a threat to "national security" contained within these particular poems, whatever they are, it has nothing to do with what the dod memo outlined: the "threat" is the undercutting of the bushco marketing job around guantanomo itself--and that threat is one of individuation. perhaps the "secret message" these folk are really afraid of is not secret at all: i am a human being, i have not and will not face charges, i have not and will not be tried, i have not and will not be found guilty or innocent--i rot here, which is nowhere, a special kind of nowhere, the one that is an internal vanishingpoint, the mirror image of that other vanishingpoint in the ideology of bushworld, the one at the core of the trajectory that would connect the notion "terrorist" to any referent in the reality that other people know about. what i was really distracted by in the article, however, was the more general statement that poetry in itself constitutes a threat to national security because of its form and content. even in the context of the grotesque charade being performed around the release of these particular poems, that statement was really striking. strangely enough, it echoes boundary markers within contemporary poetry--and in many other types of writing--between those who invest in narrative forms, representational language, etc. as over against those who experiment with form and cultivate other models of precision in word usage. behind this, you can see another version of the same political boundaries: narrative forms, representational language are linked to a set of assumptions about the world--that it is given, that it is a collection of objects created once and for all by some god or other along with the forms that define them, that the order of the world is immanent or present within the world, some of it manifest, other aspects hidden. human beings do not make anything, do not create anything: they find what is already there. so narrative and its correlate in representational language is appropriate--it indexes a certain deferrence in the face of the Given. conversely, to break with these conventions is hubris. to break with them on conceptual grounds is problematic. to break with them on political grounds is a threat. there is no way to tell these apart. so all of it is a threat. the perverse thing about this is that it is a validation of that which it would exclude: it implicitly elevates types of writing--and by extension types of cultural work more generally--that break with conventional modes of expression to the status they usually aspire to: to pose a real threat to the existing way of life, rooted in a desire to smash it--all of it--by undermining its relationship to language, exposing as arbitrary its conventions for making meaning. making the entire communicative apparatus shake as a way to make ideology itself shake. but given the fact that most work on this order sells very little, and is mostly consumed by other people who also do this kind of work, these motivations function largely at the level of self-conception. so it is a strange kind of favor that the bush squad has done those of us who work away on strange things in obscurity to elevate that work to the status of a national security threat. and somehow it seems typical of the existing state of affairs in general that this unintended gift to experimental art would come wrapped in a phenomena as outrageous--as reprehensible--as guantanomo bay. i do and do not look forward to the splitting of the general from the particular statements and the installation of poetry detection technologies in airports. perhaps people could be encouraged to call the tips line in the event that see someone engaged in suspect activities that could be linked to poetry..."hello? is this the department of heimat security? good. i was driving on I-80 and i passed a car. the passenger was reading susan howe. i thought you should know. yes yes, i copied down the license plate number..." __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 02-28-2007 at 07:28 AM..

03-01-2007, 07:47 PM	#9 (permalink)
Astrocloud Apocalypse Nerd	Osama, I'm your berserker, I hid the Iraqi WMD's, Where I hope the Americans won't seize In the closet where my wife keeps her burkahs,