Guantanamo detainee poems to be published

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Poems scratched on styrofoam cups and written with toothpaste by inmates at the US "war on terror" prison in Guantanamo Bay will soon be printed in a book, the publishers said Wednesday.

"Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak," published by University of Iowa Press, includes 22 works by 17 prisoners at the US naval prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The works were collected by volunteer lawyers for the detainees -- most of whom remain in the prison -- and translated into English for publication under the scrutiny of the US Department of Defense.

The book's editor is Marc Falkoff, an Illinois law professor and attorney for 17 Guantanamo detainees, who said of the detaines "most of them had not written poetry before."

The poems, written in Arabic, were eventually declassified by the Pentagon after Falkoff was given them by his clients and hit on the idea of publishing the works.

"They try to understand their situation, many of them are ruminative in nature, about their situation, justice," said Falkoff. "They show disillusionment with America, some anger sometimes, a lot of nostalgia, longing to be home."

One of the works, "death poem" by 33-year-old Bahraini Jumah al-Dossari, evokes his plight in the Guantanamo military prison since early 2002:

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.

"We thought it was very important to be published," said Allison Thomas, publicist of University of Iowa Press, which will publish 5,000 copies of the book in August.

"We feel that the University of Iowa Press is fulfilling the core responsibility of all university presses: promoting lively engagement with ideas and, in doing so, contributing knowledge to the informed public on which a democracy depends," she told AFP.

The United States has placed nearly 800 of its "war on terror" detainees in Guantanamo since 2002, and some 380 remain prisoners at the facility. Many of them have yet to be officially charged with any crime.

Falkoff said none of the detainees wrote the poems with the express aim of having them published. But he said his clients had so far been denied the opportunity of making their cases public in a court room.

"To publish the poems is one way the public can hear the voices of the detainees," he said.

The profits from the book will be given to the Center for Constitutional Rights which has taken up the detainees cases.

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