Poems from Guantanamo is just that, a collection of 22 poems written by War on Terror detainees at the Guantanamo Bay facility, translated by U.S. government linguists, approved by the Pentagon, published by the University of Iowa Press, and—naturally!—given a full-page review in the New York Times Sunday book section

National Review, Sept 10, 2007

Poems from Guantanamo is just that, a collection of 22 poems written by War on Terror detainees at the Guantanamo Bay facility, translated by U.S. government linguists, approved by the Pentagon, published by the University of Iowa Press, and--naturally!--given a full-page review in the New York Times Sunday book section.

The reviewer could find no literary merit in the poems, but he blamed that on the Pentagon. "Imagine a volume of Osip Mandelstam's poetry released by the Soviet government in 1938." The reviewer might have chosen a happier parallel. Nineteen thirty-eight was just six years after Walter Duranty got his Pulitzer prize for gushing over Stalin's achievements and denying the Ukrainian terror-famine. The New York Times of 1938 was no longer quite that pro-Soviet, but it was friendlier to Stalin and his work-'em-to-death labor camps then, than it is to George W. Bush and our terrorist-detention centers today, and would have given a better reception to any 1938 Soviet production than it has given to what the review calls the Pentagon's "public relations psych-out."