Deb’s House Concerts …………

Deb’s House Concerts

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Here are excerpts from two articles on Huffington Post:

Terrorists Among Us: Rep. Sally Kern

Every thinking citizen of this country should write to Rep. Chris Benge, Speaker of the House for the Oklahoma House of Representatives asking for censure of this terrorist. Free speech is not a license to incite hate and violence, and sadly that is what this ugly oration is all about. Today, in regions all over this country where ignorant people actually accept these stupid lies as having some basis in fact, school-aged boys and girls who may appear a little more feminine or masculine than Sally thinks is appropriate are going to be terrorized by peers who listen to this crap because their parents listen to this crap. And that’s just for starters. This type of terrorism is the genesis of all hate crimes from name calling to murder.

Poems from Guantanamo Bay

Since prison authorities initially banned writing utensils, prisoners first carved their verses into Styrofoam cups with pebbles or their fingernails. After the first year, the Red Cross began providing pen and paper, and just recently, prisoners have been granted access to books.

They’ve also only recently been given something of a voice. Twenty-one poems written “inside the wire” at Guantanamo have been gathered together by Mark Falkoff, a lawyer and professor who represents many of the Guantanamo detainees. The collection, entitled Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, was recently published by University of Iowa Press.

Three poems:

Dossari claims that life in the prison drove him to attempt suicide more than a dozen times. And he wrote the following poem as part of a suicide letter he sent his lawyer.

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 of peace.”

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Here’s another poem from the collection. It’s by a man named Abdulla Thani Faris al Anazi, and it’s difficult to read it as a security threat.

To My Father

Two years have passed in far-away prisons,

Two years my eyes untouched by kohl.

Two years my heart sending out messages

To the homes where my family dwells,

Where lavender cotton sprouts

For grazing herds that leave well fed.

O Flaij, explain to those who visit our home

How I used to live.

I know your thoughts are swirled as in a whirlwind,

When you hear the voice of my anguished soul.

Send sweet peace and greetings to Bu’mair;

Kiss him on his forehead, for he is my father.

Fate has divided us, like the parting of a parent from a newborn.

O Father, this is a prison of injustice.

Its iniquity makes the mountains weep.

I have committed no crime and am guilty of no offense.

Curved claws have I,

But I have been sold like a fattened sheep.

I have no fellows but the Truth.

They told me to confess, but I am guiltless;

My deeds are all honorable and need no apology.

They tempted me to turn away from the lofty summit of integrity,

To exchange this cage for a pleasant life.

By God, if they were to bind my body in chains,

If all Arabs were to sell their faith, I would not sell mine.

I have composed these lines

For the day when your children have grown old.

O God–who governs creation with providence,

Who is one, singular and self-subsisting,

Who brings comfort and happy tidings,

Whom we worship–

Grant serenity to a heart that beats with oppression,

And release this prisoner from the tight bonds of confinement.

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Another poet in the collection, Abdul Rashim Muslim Dost, claims that writing poems kept him sane during his three year imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay. A scholar with some reputation before his arrest, having written and published 19 books, he was the only prisoner to have written poems before his incarceration. Like Dossari, he was arrested by Pakistani authorities and then turned over to the United States. He claims his arrest stemmed from his ties to Pashtun nationalists disliked by the Pakistani Government. Here is the official explanation:

“Many Afghans who had been involved in terrorist activities in Afghanistan had moved to Peshawar at that time…men were arrested and passed to the Americans. The U.S. has subsequently questioned them and established during the past three long years that they were, in fact, innocent.” Here’s one of his poems:

“Just as the heart beats in the darkness of the body, so I, despite this cage, continue to beat with life. Those who have no courage or honor consider themselves free, but they are slaves. I am flying on the wings of thought, and so, even in this cage, I know a greater freedom.”

Dost claims to have written more than 25,000 lines of poetry during his imprisonment. He recently said, “I wrote from the core of my heart in Guantanamo Bay. In the outside world I could not have written such things.”

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