This is yet another demonstration of how Guantanamo is destroying the very values the U.S. once stood for. When your country’s Government starts barring books once banned by the Soviets, alarm bells should ring.
– Clive Stafford Smith, attorney for Guantanamo Bay prisoner, Shaker Aamer
In a story that fits in perfectly with recent revelations that UK authorities had smashed hard drives belonging to The Guardian newspaper in an attempt to stop further Snowden leaks, I learned yesterday that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s classic novel about the Soviet prison camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, has been banned at Guantanamo Bay.
I find this to be further proof of what is rapidly becoming a trend in both the U.S. and UK. It consists of moves toward censorship and a ravenous hunger to limit information flow to the public, whether citizen or prisoner. When I started looking further into the case of the ban on The Gulag Archipelago, I learned that John Grisham’s novels had also been banned as “impermissible content.” Incredibly, both the prisoners who have been denied the requested reading material have actually already been clearly for release. USA! USA!
John Grisham recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on the subject. He wrote:
About two months ago I learned that some of my books had been banned at Guantánamo Bay. Apparently detainees were requesting them, and their lawyers were delivering them to the prison, but they were not being allowed in because of “impermissible content.”
I suppose the following fact must have scared U.S. “authorities.”
In the past seven years, I have met a number of innocent men who were sent to death row, as part of my work with the Innocence Project, which works to free wrongly convicted people. Without exception they have told me that the harshness of isolated confinement is brutal for a coldblooded murderer who freely admits to his crimes. For an innocent man, though, death row will shove him dangerously close to insanity. You reach a point where it feels impossible to survive another day.
Now for some context on the Solzhenitsyn ban. From Common Dreams.
The legal team for Shaker Aamer, a British resident who has been detained in Guantanamo without charge or trial for 11 years, attempted to deliver a copy of The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn during a recent visit.
However, Mr Aamer has now told his lawyers that he never received the book.
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G
Follow me on Twitter.
