Sunday, August 5, 2007
It never ceases to amaze. The Boston Globe today has provided pride of place on the Sunday Op-Ed page, complete with color illustration (above), to excerpts from a collection of poetry from prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Of course all three come with introductions strongly implying the innocence of the authors, since, as all right-thinking Globe readers and Kerry/Kennedy voters know, there are no real evil men at GTMO, only innocent souls whose spirits haven't been freed and appreciated by we heathens yet: Poems from Guantánamo.
We wait with bated breath for a similarly unequivocal feature on the inmates upon whose guilt there is little doubt, or the other side of the question of these featured, or an examination, in prominent placement, of the many released inmates who returned to a life of terror.
By the way, the illustration is by Tim Brinton. Remember him? He's the guy who brought us:
And:
Well, the company you keep and all that...
[BTW, I put the word "To" Guantanamo in the title because, to me, by publishing these, the Globe is sending its own message back to the detainees, "Hang in there, you have our sympathy..."]
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Well, there's one selection curiously left out of that collection of poems written by the darlings of Guantanamo. Debra Burlingame writes about it in the Journal: From Gitmo to Miranda, With Love Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi, on the left, in a... Read More
If the texts are not written in the inmates blood on their jail clothes, I am not buying ;-)
It's interesting that you take issue with the fact that the introductions "strongly imply the authors' innocence." In any humane country, people are innocent until proven guilty. The vast majority of men held at Guantanamo Bay have not been charged with a crime, let alone proven guilty.
I certainly understand that you would not want to have a terrorist's poetry lauded and displayed in the Boston Globe--but by the Pentagon's own admission, only 5 percent of Guantanamo detainees were picked up on a battlefield and only 8 percent are suspected--SUSPECTED--of ties to al Quaeda. In fact, three of the poets represented in Poems from Guantanamo have since been released--after six years of imprisonment and torture, never having been charged with a crime.
One of the very few detainees against whom the government had enough evidence to bring a trial, David Hitchens, was given nine months in prison in exchange for keeping silent about his treatment while in American custody. He was the "worst of the worst," and in nine months he'll be free.
Meanwhile, hundreds of men who have never been charged with a crime or suspected of terrorist ties languish in solitary confinement. Does that sound like your government is interested in keeping you safe–or interested in stopping the public relations nightmare that would certainly result from letting the world know how they’ve treated these men?
As for Poems from Guantanamo, I've read it cover to cover, as I have been read anythign at all related to Guantanamo in the past three years (including pro-Guantanamo writings). It certainly had flaws as a work of literature, but please, have some shread of a heart: after six years of being held incommunicado, tortured (by the FBI's own records), and never charged with a crime, are you really going to begrudge these men the few lines of poetry (out of tens of thousands composed) that the Pentagon deemed appropriate for publication?