Andy Worthington: The military, as we have discussed, has a special fear of poetry, suspecting, as you describe it in the book, that poetry "presents a special risk" to national security because of its "content and format," which, it is believed, could be used to smuggle coded messages out of the prison to waiting terrorists. You explain that, in order to prevent this, the majority of the poems, which were written in Arabic, were translated by military linguists, and that independent experts, who may have been able to do more "justice to the subtlety and cadence of the originals," were prevented from having access to them. I do find this an extraordinarily paranoid response, and I wondered if you think that, at some point, you or others will be allowed less restricted access to the original poems, and to some of the others that remain classified?
Marc Falkoff: OK, well first of all it has been reported a little bit in the press that these were military linguists who had translated the poems, but this is inaccurate. The poems were translated by our translators, all of whom, however, had to be security cleared by the FBI, just like all of the lawyers working on the cases had to get FBI security clearance. So that's where that misconception came about, and that's actually one of the reasons, I think, that the New York Times book review believes that this is all kind of a Pentagon project... these little pieces of misinformation that are floating around out there. So, the thing is, they were our interpreters, but there is only a small universe of Arabic-English translators who have security clearances that we could use in our litigation, and none of those whom we identified and who could be of use to us have any literary credentials. So the translations were done by workaday translators who never pretended to have any literary feel for what they were doing.
Now, because the military, as you say, was unwilling in many cases to release the original Arabic versions, we haven't been able to get those literary translations done, outside of the secure facility [where all the documentation on the detainees is held], because we don't have access to unclassified versions of the original Arabic language poems. I have no reason to believe that we will ever get access to those. It's simply not going to happen. Once the military has made its decisions, it appears unwilling to revisit any of them. So, even after I resubmitted poems to JTF-GTMO to be cleared, they've been refused. I don't think there's any reason to believe, for example, that Abdur Rahim Muslim Dost, whose 25,000 lines of poetry were confiscated by the military before he left, is ever going to get those back.
AW: While we're on the topic of censorship, which I know is not confined solely to the detainees' poetry, I wondered if you could provide the readers of this interview with some other information about the secrecy, censorship and obstructive tactics carried out Guantánamo against those attempting to provide legal assistance to the detainees?
MF: This regime... to give it a little bit of context, when we first went down to Guantánamo — and I don't mean just me, but all the lawyers who went down in the fall of 2004 to meet for the first time with the detainees, who had never had any significant contact with the outside world apart from a few censored letters from the International Committee of the Red Cross — we brought back stories about all sorts of abuse that they had suffered. We brought back their stories about how they were taken into custody, and about their alleged innocence, but we also brought back the stories of abuse — sometimes tantamount to torture — at the hands of Americans, at Kandahar and Bagram, and to a lesser extent, but still there, at Guantánamo. Just as an example, I brought back a story which later turned out to be true, which a client of mine told me about another detainee who, during an interrogation, had refused to talk and then had menstrual blood smeared by a female interrogator onto his chest or his face — that kind of story that I didn't even plan to write down because it sounded so absurd. But later we found out, both in [former military linguist] Erik Saar's book, Inside The Wire, and in the Schmidt-Furlow Report, a Pentagon investigation, which was mostly a whitewash, that this allegation was indeed true — though the "menstrual blood" turned out to be red ink, a ruse. But when we sent information of this nature through the Privilege Review Team — this Pentagon censorship team — initially we weren't allowed to make that information public. It was deemed classified because releasing it would reveal interrogation methods and procedures. We had to threaten legal action to loosen up that standard, and it's at that point that you first started hearing — really first-hand — about what was going on at Guantánamo.
And there's been all sorts of interference with the attorney-client relationship at Guantánamo, most obviously when the government suggested that the men at Gitmo should not have a right to a lawyer, and then when they argued to a judge in the fall of 2004, right before we went down to Guantánamo for the first time, that the military reserved the right to videotape and audiotape and contemporaneously monitor our conversations with our clients, and, I mean, talk about trying to undermine the lawyer-client relationship... We heard stories about clients being told that they shouldn't cooperate with their lawyers because their lawyers were Jews, and why would Jews be looking out for their best interests, and Clive Stafford Smith's clients were told that Clive was gay [he is, in fact, happily married], and therefore shouldn't be trusted. Our clients have told us that their interrogators have said that you're not going to get out of Guantánamo if you've got a lawyer, that you're better off without a lawyer. So there are all sorts of difficulties inherent in these cases, and the government is acting frequently in a relatively underhanded manner. To distinguish, I'm not saying that the Privilege Review Team is acting in bad faith in some way, or in an underhanded manner, because I'm not privy to their internal decision-making process...
AW: From my point of view, I wouldn't say that they are, actually, because frequently I've been surprised, over the years, at what they have allowed to be declassified and to have come out of Guantánamo. It's why I was quite shocked, in what we were discussing earlier, that they reached a cut-off point with poetry, where they're absolutely refusing to declassify anything, whereas it still remains plausible to me that many stories which look quite damaging to the administration will actually be cleared for release. So on that front, the review process is not as much of a reflection of an administration that leans towards totalitarianism as the administration's policies themselves.
MF: I'll be honest with you. I don't begin to understand it. I think it's a mixture of some legitimate concern with the form of poetry, some haphazardness in their criteria, and some concern about the public relations effect of this that may be trickling down from the upper echelons of the Pentagon. I don't think it's necessary to impugn anyone, but the facts are as they are, and there are a lot of poems that were not cleared, and we've been supplied with odd reasons for that.
AW: I think that, fundamentally, as you've described it, the whole process is haphazard and arbitrary, and the same thing applies to the poetry, but it remains interesting to me that, perhaps not through the review process, but through the higher levels of the administration — the people running Guantánamo — they really do have a fear that poetry is a weapon somehow. It's probably a testament to the power of poetry, really.
MF: Well, poetry is all about packing meaning into words. Words are supposed to — maybe this is a badly chosen metaphor, but they're supposed to explode, supposed to provide a punch, so you can understand why the Pentagon would be wary of letting loose language like that on the world. To be honest, I think this fear that men who have been in confinement for five or six years, scribbling poetry on stray pieces of paper that eventually they gave to a lawyer — the idea that somehow this is a coded message to a sleeper cell is way overblown. If this were true, why not write exactly the same thing in a letter to an attorney? Why break up your lines into stanzas and turn them into a poem? The literary scholar in me loves the fact that the military had recognized the power of poetry, but the fear's overblown and a little bit paranoid. If they fear that there's a code, that's one thing. But just to exempt poetry on the basis of the way the lines are broken up, that's just silly.
AW: I noticed also that, although a profound sense of injustice permeates the poems, there are no poems that are stridently militant. What I found instead were the following two forms: political complaint, and, more deeply, the consolations provided by Allah, and a deep well of religious belief. The lack of militancy doesn't surprise me, as I believe that there are very few militants actually in Guantánamo, but what I've found, when talking to many people, is that they come up with comments along the lines of, "But if they weren't terrorists when they went in, they will be when they come out." This seems to me to be a profound misunderstanding of the majority of the detainees in Guantánamo, and I wondered if, through you experiences with the poetry, and perhaps with your clients, you could shed some light on who we're really dealing with.
MF: First of all, I think your characterization of the poems is right. It's difficult to generalize too much about the poems: many of them are pastoral in nature, some of them describe homesickness and loneliness, a lot of them are decrying injustice, and a lot of them express some disillusionment with America. You're right, it's kind of a wide variety, but what you really don't see, as you say, is much in the way of hatred of America, and certainly no militarism of the kind that people would expect. There's an occasional poem in which clearly the poet's anger and frustration is boiling over on the page — I'm thinking in particular of Martin Mubanga's poem "Terrorist 2003." Martin's a British citizen, who was released in 2005, and in his poem, without doubt, he expresses some anger at the United States, but I don't really see any militarism. To the extent that it's there at all, it's glancing.
To turn to one of your other points, the fundamental misconception about Guantánamo is that the men inside are terrorists, and we understand exactly why people in America think like that, because that's what they've been told by George Bush. They've been told that the detainees are the worst of the worst, they're terrorists, they were picked up on a battlefield fighting American troops. "Trust us!" And you know, there was a time when a lot of us were willing to trust the Executive. When I got involved, I didn't know if everyone in Guantánamo was a terrorist, I didn't know if my clients were terrorists. I can dislike George Bush, and I can detest the idea of holding people without charge or trial, and not following the rule of law, but that doesn't mean that the men in Guantánamo were necessarily innocent or not terrorists. But when I got involved — even though all of my clients could have been terrorists — my goal was to bring back the rule of law to Guantánamo, to give them a hearing — an appropriate habeas corpus hearing — and if they're terrorists then we can decide whether to charge them, or if it's appropriate to keep them in detention for a longer period; we can talk about that.
But the plain fact is that we went down to Guantánamo and we found that hundreds of these guys are in fact innocent civilians. So the problem is that the public has been hearing for six years that these people are terrorists, and it's very difficult to get over that misconception. People think that I'm going down to Guantánamo to try to find technicalities to get detainees out of there, that they're really terrorists, and I'm just trying to do some lawyerly hocus-pocus, and it's far from the truth. We're just asking for a hearing, in front of a judge, where the government has to put its evidence on the table, and the judge gets to look at it. When I look at the evidence, I'm not looking at it and saying, "Oh well, this is technically hearsay, and I don't see a chain of evidence here, and therefore this guy should be released." I'm looking at evidence that, if the ordinary person looked at it, they wouldn't say, "Oh, this is technically inadmissible," they would say, "This is absolutely, thoroughly ludicrous. Are you serious that this is why this guy is here?" I mean, I'm talking about triple or quadruple hearsay, where the original declarant was tortured or abused in some way. That's the kind of quality of evidence. To compare Guantánamo to the Salem Witch Trials is bang on. That's what we're talking about: webs of incriminating statements from increasingly untrustworthy sources.
So, to move on: "if the men weren't terrorists when they went in, they'll be terrorists when the come out"? We have all sorts of DNA exonerations these days, where men who've been convicted of rape and murder have been exonerated ten, 15, 20 years later. Now, do you think those men are bitter for having spent all that time unjustly imprisoned? Sure. Do you think they may have become hardened and exposed to a criminal element? Sure. Do you really think that it would be appropriate to continue to detain these men because of the harm they may have experienced when they were in prison? Of course not, that's absurd, but that's where the debate is right now at Guantánamo.
Is there potential for some of the men in Guantánamo to have been radicalized by their experience? You know, it's a relatively hard question to answer. For some of the men, the answer is absolutely no; it was like your next-door neighbour being thrown into prison. These are people, many of them with absolutely no radicalism about them to begin with, and they're not going to become radicalized just because they're surrounded by some men who are undoubtedly bad apples. There may be men who were picked up who were on the verge of going to an al-Qaeda training camp, or on the verge of signing on to some radical Islamist agenda. What happens when you throw those people into Guantánamo and mix them up with real al-Qaeda operatives? Sure, I can imagine that there's some portion of men for whom Guantánamo represented the tipping point, and they were pushed over the edge. I can imagine it in theory. I don't know if it's true in fact, but I can imagine it. But the fundamental fact is that I think those are going to be few and far between, and, you know, we made a mistake doing what we did, and you can't deny that something like that has happened in the past. This is what happened with Syed Qutb [the key ideologue for modern Sunni militants, who was executed in Egypt in 1966] and the Egyptian radicals; they were all tossed into prison in Egypt, and this is how all that started...
AW: Well, sure, but it's important to remember, as we've spoken about, that a lot of the people in Guantánamo didn't come out as radicalized, because they didn't have a radical bone in their body when they went in. And another thing that struck me, Marc, is that, apart from anything else, the administration has done absolutely nothing to help these people in any way, that if there were any people there who were going to be thinking about militancy, what is the American administration doing for these people there, to encourage them to learn about the West, to learn English, to learn about the law? They don't do any of that.
MF: They could. I've spoken with my clients about this, and I've asked them, "Do you feel hatred towards America? What are you going to do when you get out?" and to a man they just want to go home and put this behind them. They recognize the difference between the Bush administration and the American people; they've no intent of joining some radical cause. Most of them were young when they got there, they just want to get married, have children, and go back and live with their families. So that's one thing.
The second thing is, we definitely could be doing exactly the opposite of what we're doing. We could be doing things to discourage them from radicalization. We could, for example, be teaching them English, something that my clients have asked for for years. I have tried to clear, through the military, English language primers, like Dr. Seuss' ABCs — they've been denied; English-Arabic dictionaries — they've been denied. For the first time, a couple of months ago, the military floated the idea that the most compliant detainees might be allowed English language instruction. That's one thing they could do, which they haven't done yet.
Another thing they could do is engage in dialogue, like Judge Hitar's project in the Yemen — it's controversial, certainly — where men who've been picked up and accused of associating with al-Qaeda and terrorist organizations have been forced to sit down with learned scholars, and they put a Koran down in front of them and challenge them to find where in the Koran Allah says that it's OK to kill innocent people. They engage in this dialogue and it turns out that most of those proto-terrorists really don't know their Koran very well, and they're dissuaded through these conversations from engaging in terrorism, and Yemen will frequently let the men out after this reeducation programme. Senator Lindsey Graham just told us about a week ago that this is exactly what the United States is starting to do in Iraq, and I think it's a brilliant idea. I mean, essentially, if you realize that you aren't going to be the world's jailer, and that you're going to have to release a lot of these people eventually, then engage them in some kind of dialogue, talk to them. It's a battle of ideas, right? So engage at that level.
AW: Thank you, Marc. I hope that one day you will be able to produce another, more comprehensive book of poems by the Guantánamo detainees —
MF: I hope to get to do one by ex-detainees exclusively.
AW: Absolutely, but in the meantime I think that the mixture of the poems themselves and the constraints placed on the detainees' freedom of expression is a particularly powerful combination that paints the administration in a paranoid and vindictive light. I note also that three of the detainees in the book — Juma al-Dossari, Abdul Aziz al-Oshan and Abdullah al-Anazi — have been released since it was published, and I hope that augurs well for those who remain in Guantánamo. Before we finish, is there anything that I haven't asked you that you'd like to mention?
MF: Only that I always like to make sure that people realize that any profits that this book makes are going to the Center for Constitutional Rights. I'm not making any money on this, and in fact none of the poets are making any money on this. This is all going towards the public interest law firm that has spearheaded the Gitmo litigation. I say this because I, in the past, have been accused of profiting on the dead bodies of our soldiers in Afghanistan, and other nonsense like that...
AW: That's a terrible thing, but it doesn't surprise me. Well, that's a good point to make then, Marc. Thanks for that, and thanks again for your time.
Andy Worthington is an author and journalist. The Guantánamo Files, the first book to tell the stories of all the detainees, was published in November 2007. He previously wrote two books of British social history: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield.