The Guardian says American security officials perceive risk from releasing any information from the prisoners, including poems:

…most of the poems, including the lament by Al Hela which first sparked Falkoff’s interest, are unlikely to ever see the light of day. Not content with imprisoning the authors, the Pentagon has refused to declassify many of their words, arguing that poetry “presents a special risk” to national security because of its “content and format”. In a memo sent on September 18 2006, the team assigned to deal with communications between lawyers and their clients explains that they do not “maintain the requisite subject matter expertise” and says that poems “should continue to be considered presumptively classified”.

Extreme conditions are said to compel prisoners to take up poetry:

According to the poet Jack Mapanje, who was imprisoned in Malawi because of his writing and now teaches a course on the poetry of incarceration at Newcastle University, prisoners often turn to writing poetry as a way of “defending themselves”.

“People are writing as a search for the dignity that has been taken away from them,” he says. “It’s the only way they can attempt to restore it, but nobody is listening to them.” He was imprisoned himself with many people who were illiterate, he says, but many of them were writing poetry, or singing songs about their captivity – “it’s the same impulse that drives people to prayer.”

Here is an example, posted by Amnesty International:

It certainly is interesting to hear that the Pentagon has a bureau of poetic security.

This strikes me in the same way as when I used to read about people such as Irina Ratushinskaya who was sentenced by Soviet courts to hard labor and exile for “dissemination of slanderous documentation in poetic form”.

While in detention in the 1980s, she was isolated from other criminals and kept among a select group of political prisoners labeled “especially dangerous”.

I hope you can see why, for me, Donald Rumsfeld’s alarmist rantings had a strange echo to them:

The Pentagon called them “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth,” sweeping them up after Sept. 11 and hauling them in chains to a U.S. military prison in southeastern Cuba.

Since then, hundreds of the men have been transferred from Guantanamo Bay to other countries, many of them for “continued detention.”

And then set free.

Ratushinskaya published a book called Grey is the color of Hope while in camp, which eventually led to her release to America.

Perhaps, like her description of camp life in Barashevo, those held captive in Guantanamo Bay will also find the strength to publish uncensored memoirs and thoughts of their love for freedom. Ratushinskaya wrote:

Yes, we are behind barbed wire, they have stripped us of everything they could, they have torn us away from our friends and families, but unless we acknowledge this as their right, we remain free.

The last I heard more than 400 of the approximately 800 men detained since 2001 have been released without charge after years of detention, but their writing did not survive. The Guardian explains:

Many poems have also been lost, confiscated or destroyed. Falkoff is unable to even offer an estimate of how many poems have been written in the camp.

“To start with,” he says, “there are probably 200 detainees who either don’t have lawyers or have not been allowed to communicate with their lawyers. Even for those clients who have lawyers, I really don’t know how many poems they’ve written or whether they’ve been confiscated. Communicating back and forth with our clients is a very, very difficult process.”

Ratushinskaya was lucky enough that Bloodaxe Books could publish her poems. While she grew ill in captivity her book was handed to Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit…soon after she was released.

Who will read the poetry of Guantanamo Bay?