Asymmetric Warfare? Please can we wake up from these lies...

Well hello. I find myself back at my desk. Here, where it feels like home, which is nice -- especially when coming from my other home. There are beloved people all over! Thanks be for them.

I was on a plane and several trains -- in transit -- on January 11th when all the protests against Guantanamo Bay were going on, so I couldn't participate. I did however recently buy a book that I thought I would share with you. You should most definitely check it out.

It's called Poems from Guantanamo: the Detainees Speak. Put together by a team of volunteer lawyers who first visited the military detention center in November 2004, it provides a rare glimpse into the suffering going on 'inside the wire'.

I think the first thing to appreciate is just how incredible it is that these poems have been shared with us. The introduction to the book is harrowing. Some excerpts:

"My colleagues and I -- all volunteer lawyers -- first visited Guantanamo in November 2004, after receiving 'secret' level security clearances from the FBI. What we learned from our clients on that trip was shocking. During the three years in which they had been held in total isolation, they had been repeatedly abused. They had been subjected to stress positions, sleep deprivation, blaring music, and extremes of heat and cold during endless interrogations. They had been sexually humiliated...They were denied basic medical care. They were broken down and psychologically tyrannized, kept in extreme isolation, threatened with rendition, interrogated at gunpoint, and told that their families would be harmed if they refused to talk." (1)

"It is difficult to see how hope can flourish in such an environment, where the only contact with the outside world is an occasional visit from a lawyer or an infrequent and heavily censored letter from a relative. Indeed, dozens of prisoners have attempted suicide by hanging, by hoarding and then overdosing on medicine, or by slashing their wrists. (The military, in true Orwellian fashion, has described these suicide attempts as incidents of 'manipulative self-injurious behavior." When three detainees successfully killed themselves in June 2006, the military called the suicides acts of 'asymmetric warfare.") (2)

I don't know about you but those last few sentences really made me want to throw up. I don't really know what else to say.

Most poetry written by inmates gets thrown away, so the poems in the book are only a few of many other creations that will never reach the eyes of the outside world. Go read them.

For more on the book, read this Guardian article (and anothere here) which has other related links. Buy the book from Amnesty International here. The site also has links to info about their campaign to close the detention centre. The book's full citation is: Falkoff, Marc (ed.). Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 2007.