Saturday, August 18, 2007

Poems from Guantanamo

This small book, edited by Marc Falkoff, a lawyer for 17 of the detainees, is subtitled "The Detainees Speak."
But Dan Chiasson from the NYT Sunday Book Review notes that it might be better titled "The Detainees Do Not Speak" or "The Detainees Are Not Allowed to Speak," due to the Pentagon's heavy vetting of the edition.
Still, given the human drive for expression, and the circumstances under which these were written, (one of them, Falkoff says, carved into a Styrofoam cup when pen and paper were banned, one of them, a despondent claim of innocence by a prisoner who has been in solitary confinement for nearly four years and tried to kill himself 12 times) it seems worth looking at.

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