Anthropologist David Price, of St Martin’s University (http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/dprice/CW-PUB.htm), who specializes in historical and contemporary interactions between American anthropologists and military and intelligence agencies, wrote:

Nice Counterpunch piece.

The FBI has long suspected that poetry was a secret code. I suppose the best poetry is by its very nature – but never the sort these crude thugs imagine. One of my favorite examples of this shows up in Natalie Robins’ fine book, Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression, where Robins examines MD poet William Carlos William’s FBI file and finds that the FBI was so concerned that his poems were somehow secret codes to unseen communists that they had an agent pose as a nurse in WCW’s office to spy and see what was really going on. Turns out what was really going on was poetry: gee, imagine that.

In his poem, Vignettes, Richard Eberhart wrote:

In 1952 I was sitting in my office, in Seattle,
When in came the FBI, truculent and bristling.
Did I know a poet named William Carlos Williams?
He had written a subversive poem called “The Pink Church”
in which he called the Russians comrades. Weren’t they?
We were shoulder to shoulder in the war. I said he was
As good an American as they were or I was,
Investigate America, go back and read his poetry.

Thanks, and peace. David

Dr P. Wilkinson in Dusseldorf wrote:

Reading your report on conditions at Guantánamo, I could not help thinking of all the conversations I have heard from people in the US (but also elsewhere) where the idea that people in prison should have TV, books, or anything comfortable (decent) was turned into a tirade about pampering prisoners who were there to be punished. Of course these discussions were based on ignorance since anyone who has ever been incarcerated for even a few hours knows that there is nothing pampering about being behind bars. Nonetheless this image of prison as a place where people have to be PUNISHED without limit still prevails among a large segment of the population. Funnily enough the same people believe that the death penalty is far more “merciful” than life imprisonment. I think that when these prison directors announce “privileges” they are trying to imply that these people are being punished as much as possible and so that the “correctional” function can be legitimated, they say we have people who respond and therefore can be rewarded with a microgram of their stolen dignity… I wish we had a less vindictive culture capable of real outrage at what US prisons are (and have always been). In the days of the Soviet Union there were those frequently publicized offers of asylum to the “political prisoners” of the USSR. No one has any means of ransoming US political prisoners – even if that would not solve the problem. The very recognition internationally that these are persecuted people and not criminals (the same applies obviously to mainland parts of the Gulag) would certainly be helpful. There is NO one at GITMO who is a criminal or terrorist under any internationally recognized standard of law. However, I fear that neither Europe nor the bulk of American citizens have any say in the matter.

Carol Ross wrote:

Thank you very much for giving these poor people a voice. I have felt bad for them for years. I hope your book will in some way help them to be released from the illegal conditions in which they are being held. I will certainly buy your book when it is released. Thank you again for trying to help them.

And from Strathmore, Canada, Orest Slepokura wrote:

You give new meaning to the Blakean phrase, “a fearful symmetry.”