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2 books match the query 'Guantánamo Bay Naval Base'

cover of Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak

Poems from Guantanamo

The Detainees Speak

Marc Falkoff

University of Iowa Press, 2007

Since 2002, at least 775 men have been held in the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to Department of Defense data, fewer than half of them are accused of committing any hostile act against the United States or its allies. In hundreds of cases, even the circumstances of their initial detainment are questionable.

This collection gives voice to the men held at Guantánamo. Available only because of the tireless efforts of pro bono attorneys who submitted each line to Pentagon scrutiny, Poems from Guantánamo brings together twenty-two poems by seventeen detainees, most still at Guantánamo, in legal limbo.

If, in the words of Audre Lorde, poetry “forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change,” these verses—some originally written in toothpaste, others scratched onto foam drinking cups with pebbles and furtively handed to attorneys—are the most basic form of the art.

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cover of The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison

The Guantanamo Files

The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison

Andy Worthington

Pluto Press, 2007

In 2006, four years after the illegal prison in Guantánamo Bay  opened, the Pentagon finally released the names of the 773 men held there, as well as 7,000 pages of transcripts from tribunals assessing their status as 'enemy combatants'. Andy Worthington is the only person to have analysed every page of these transcripts and this book reveals the stories of all those imprisoned in Guantanamo. 

Deprived of the safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, and, for the most part, sold to the Americans by their allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the detainees have struggled for five years to have their stories heard. Looking in detail at the circumstances of their capture, and at the coercive interrogations and unsubstantiated allegations that have been used to justify their detention. Stories of torture in Afghanistan and Guantanamo are uncovered, as well as new information about the process of 'extraordinary rendition' that underpins the US administration's 'war on terror'. 

Who will speak for the 773 men who have been held in Guantanamo? This passionate and brilliantly detailed book brings their stories to the world for the first time.
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