On another track, historical accounts are still coming off the presses -- even as America debates the wisdom and benefit of continuing to keep captives in legal limbo there.

In Illinois, law professor Mark Falkoff has published Poems from Guantánamo, crude English translations of flowery Arabic and Pashtu verse written by 17 captives from behind the razor wire.

The former U.S. poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, wrote in a blurb that the poems deserve "not admiration or belief or sympathy -- but attention."

Gore Vidal declared: "At last Guantánamo has found a voice."

The poems speak of desperation and humiliation, telling a story starkly different from the package tours for press and distinguished visitors that the Pentagon has staged weekly since bringing in the first of 770-plus captives in January 2002.

Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, the prison camps spokesman, said the command staff at Guantánamo hasn't "reviewed" the poetry yet -- but said in an e-mail that the title suggests that lawyers "exceeded the limitations" on their access to the captives arranged with the courts.

His Pentagon counterpart, Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, told reporters on their publication in June that the poems were "another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies against whom they are at war."

The editor, attorney Marc Falkoff, said the Pentagon has not filed a protest over the poems with any of the U.S. lawyers whose detainee clients contributed to the book -- which is on track to be the bestselling U.S. poetry anthology this year.

Five thousand copies were sold in the first six weeks, prompting the publisher to print 5,000 more in a market where most poetry anthologies have an initial 2,500 book run.

Collectively, the ubiquity of the name Guantánamo in 21st-century popular culture -- coupled with its international controversy -- is evolving into a linguistic shorthand.

From the 20th century, Watergate has emerged as a code word for scandal, Munich for appeasement and Auschwitz for the death camps.

But there is still an emerging consensus on the meaning of Guantánamo.

"Obviously, 'ground zero' is the central spot in the spiritual geography of our time, " said the cultural commentator Todd Gitlin, a Berkeley-trained sociologist who now teaches at New York's Columbia University. "Guantánamo is now a reference point -- however you code it."

"If you're a civil libertarian, it symbolizes executive abuse of power, " Gitlin said.

"If you're a true believer in the administration approach, I suppose it symbolizes the special recourse you claim to deal with this sort-of warrish nonwar.

"If this administration or the next actually shuts it down, I suppose it might fade as a place name, as the placeholder. But I think the name Guantánamo will have staying power."

Google "Guantanamo" -- with no accent over the "a" -- and you get 11.5 million hits in 13 seconds. Do the same for "Watergate" and you get a little more than half as many hits, 6.2 million.

You get 1.8 million for "Nuremberg, " the German city where the Nazis stripped the Jews of citizenship in 1935 and where the post-World War II war powers staged the infamous war-crimes trials.

Performance art, meantime, has appeared in pockets of outspoken opposition to Guantánamo -- notably in Australia and Britain. It was no coincidence that Abie Philbin Bowman chose to do his Jesus shtick in Boston -- an Irish Catholic stronghold, to be sure, but also a stronghold of liberal politics.