Still waiting - then - Buchman, Ratner, Falkoff, Redgraves

Eating sour candy (thanks to the Kunstlers). Live feed going to the lobby. People watching in the lobby. Out of coffee. Slight delay, perhaps caused by a minor hip-pain in one of the guests. Audience jovially chatting. The murmur through the booth-wall (I'm again in the booth - it's really crowded) is warm and pleasant. Outside, cold and rainy. Daresay like London in the Holmes books.

Clapping, Allan Buchman takes the stage, wearing a vibrant (extremely vibrant) pink scarf. The Redgraves follow, clapping throughout. The Redgraves sit. Allan grabs the mic and orates, gives props to Michael Ratner from the Center for Constitutional Rights (one wonders if he read Sean Penn's wonderful speech yesterday). Short speech, more clapping. Ratner takes the stage.

Ratner notes that the CCR first took the risk of representing the 300-something detainees at Gitmo. Twice the CCR has won Supreme Court cases; twice Congress has overridden those victories. Another case goes to the S.C. soon. Half the detainees have been released, but there remain over 300. Lawyers interviewed detainee Maji Khan (sp?), but the CCR isn't allowed to know what was said in the interview...

"When we were out front, on the legal front... it was incredible to see the Redgraves, early on, start the Guantánamo Human Rights Commission in the United Kingdom... Most of the U.K. Guantánamo detainees have been freed." He introduces Mark Falkoff, a Gitmo lawyer who put together the book of poetry the Redgraves will read.

Falkoff is a lawyer for sixteen clients at Guantánamo. None of his clients have been charged with crimes. They've been interrogated hundreds of times. Mostly, the lawyers have been asking for a simple hearing to question the legality of the clients' detention; these requests have been denied.

Falkoff was in D.C. one day at a "secure facility," a special locked office where the information on all his clients' cases must be kept - by the government. All the Gitmo writing is automatically classified material, all Falkoff's notes and writings and interviews, since the notes might have something to do with terrorism. Falkoff had translators translate the Arabic notes; he discovered some weren't notes, but poems.

Falkoff read Brian Turner's amazing book Here, Bullet. (I've met Turner; he's one of the most humane, interesting men I've encountered, and his poetry is top-notch.) Falkoff asked around and found that all his lawyer friends with clients at Gitmo had come across such poetry, and he decided to put together a book. [Long aside about life at Gitmo, origins of detainees.]

Only 5% of the Gitmo detainees were captured on the battlefield; the vast majority were picked up by Pakistani mercenaries. (Our government used to pay bounties for "al-Qaeda" representatives, not that we could tell the difference or have even tried, in three years.)

When not given paper, the detainees, would write on their Styrofoam cups - so that at least their fellows could see short haiku about their small, terrible world...

Falkoff had to get special permission to allow the poetry to leave the secure location; at first, this was no problem. Obviously, the poems weren't terrorist details. Later, the government decided that the poems constituted a special threat, since they might inspire people against the U.S. (Well, hell yeah; that's rather the idea. We must become a better United States.)

***

Here, Bullet

by Brian Turner

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.