Report from Guantanamo #2

by Rhona Mahony. Marc Falkoff came to Stanford University last week, on May 29, to describe his Guantanamo clients. Like his colleague on the speakers’ panel, Anant Raut, he wore a fine suit and looked like a prudent member of the legal establishment. He is now a professor at Northern Illinois University’s law school. When he began to work for Guantanamo prisoners, he worked at an expensive law firm, Covington & Burling. I learned something immediately: Covington represented Fred Korematsu, the Japanese-American man whose internment during World War II was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1944 in Korematsu vs. United States. Law professors now tut-tut the decision as shameful. President Clinton awarded Fred Korematsu the Medal of Freedom in 1998. Back in the 1940’s, though, very few people spoke up to protest the imprisonment of their Japanese-American neighbors and fellow citizens. So, good for Covington.

Today, 54 years after the Korematsu decision, Covington partners are again paying for the representation of despised, supposed enemies of U.S. national security. Fallkoff represents 17 men locked up in Guantanamo. The first time he went there, he said, he was surprised to learn that his client had written him a poem. More poems followed. Falkoff had, in addition to his law degree, a Ph.D. in Literature. Poems piqued his curiosity. He began to wonder how many other prisoners were writing poetry. It turned out, several were. Possibly many. He conceived the idea of collecting and publishing those poems. The military officers running Guantanamo, however, disapproved. They disapproved of the project and of the poems themselves. One intelligence officer intoned, “Poetry represents an enhanced national security threat.”

Ho, what happy words for protest poets ’round the world! Byron writing on behalf of the Greeks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning scribbling stanzas for the Italians, and so many others seeking through verse the liberation of their fellows longed for the effectiveness that the U.S. Pentagon fears. The mighty quake before the slender pen of the poet!

At least, the mighty quake before the possible disapproval of their superiors.

Falkoff was able, after months of negotation with military censors, to publish an 84-page volume, Poems from Guantanamo. The poems appear in English. The authors wrote their poems in Arabic, Pashto, and English. The original Arabic and Pashto texts don’t appear in the book, though. The censors were afraid that they might contain coded messages.

The Guardian (U.K.) ran a review of the book last year. Falkoff read one of the poems for us that night, “Death Poem,” by Jumah al Dossari:

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors or peace.”

Fallkoff said that he donates all the revenues from the book’s sales to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The CCR is a non-profit law firm in New York that takes on human rights cases. It was CCR lawyers who first won for the Guantanamo prisoners the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court. Take a look at the book. You can consider donating a copy to your local library.