We Now Know What Books and Movies are in the Guantanamo Bay Prison Library

By Joseph Trevithick

Updated Jun 29, 2019 7:52 PM EDT

The U.S. military’s detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – almost universally known as “Gitmo” and often abbreviated “GTMO” – is controversial to say the least, prompting continued and heated debates over torture and other legal issues , as well being a lightning rod for general criticism of U.S. counter-terrorism operations

around the world . But the camp is also a prison with many of the same banal features of any other such facility, including a library, and thanks to an enterprising individual’s Freedom of Information Act Request, we now know what’s in its somewhat eclectic catalog.

In July 2015, a private individual submitted a FOIA request for the “GTMO Inmate Library Catalogue of Books” and the “GTMO Inmate Library Catalogue of Videos/Films.” Nearly two years later, U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the Guantanamo Bay naval base and Joint Task Force-Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO), sent along the more than 600 pages listing all the items in the library’s various catalogs, including duplicates. Government transparency website GovernmentAttic.org posted a copy of these records online in August 2017.

“Upon completion of our line-by-line review, we determined this information is currently and properly unclassified and releasable in its entirety,” Marco Villalobos, the SOUTHCOM FOIA manager wrote in his official response letter. This process is protocol, but it’s hard to imagine that anything in the inmate library would’ve ever been classified. The catalogs read like the description of something that’s one part foreign archive, one part second-hand book store, and one part middle school library.

To be sure, there are items in a host of different languages, catering to what has been an especially diverse inmate population since Gitmo’s detention facility first opened in 2002. There are books in Arabic, Bahasa, Farsi, French, German, Pashtu, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, Uigher, and Urdu. A significant number of these are just translation dictionaries or textbooks on how to learn English.

Detainees at the Camp Delta detention facility at Guantanamo Bay., DOD

There are an equally large number of works of history, folk tales, and other classical and other culturally appropriate texts, including discussions of the tenets of Islam and Sharia law. The library has a number of translated works of western fiction, as well, such as some of the Shakespeare’s plays, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , Dan Brown’s Davinci Code , and dozens of entries from R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series.

Notably, in addition to having them available in English, inmates can read J.K. Rowling’s famous Harry Potter series in Farsi, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. There are two copies of just the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , in Urdu.

This may seem odd, but there is at least one report that detainees took heart in the story of the Prisoner of Azkaban , which focuses on one character’s escape from wrongful imprisonment in the Wizarding World’s secretive jail and its Dementors, effectively soulless demons, who patrol and suck the very happiness out of everything around them.

Shaker Aamer, a Saudi citizen who was a legal resident of the United Kingdom at the time of his capture in Afghanistan in 2001, had this to say in an interview with the BBC after his release in 2015:

“The closest thing for my mind is [a] Harry Potter story. They got an island in Harry Potter, it says ‘Azkaban,’ where there’s no happiness and they just suck all your feelings out of you, and you don’t have no feelings any more. And truly that’s how I felt all the time. Because that’s what they tried, you know. They want to make you feelingless [sic]. They want to deprive you from everything, anything.”

Beyond the foreign language items, there are hundreds of books in English. Again there are a lot of secondary histories and cultural classics, but there is also a wide selection of educational, self-help, and hobby related texts, some of which seem to have been put together haphazardly for a prison. It’s not clear how much use the inmates would ever get out of William Dietz’s Guide to Your Child’s Nutrition , Caroline MacPherson’s Sugar Gliders: A Complete Pet Owner’s Manual , or Cal Orey’s The Healing Powers of Olive Oil .

Inmates can read story books and comics intended for young adults and teenagers, too. In addition to the tales of Harry Potter, the library has J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings ’ trilogy, a collection of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction writing, The Hunger Games books, and the Twilight series.

Just some of the books in the Gitmo prison library., Via GovernmentAttic.org

This is perhaps less surprising than it might seem at first. Many of the detainees come from backgrounds with limited education and may have trouble reading in their own native languages, let alone English. It helps explain the large selection of picture books with little or no text that are in the catalog, as well. On top of that, for a time, the U.S. military also infamously detained more than a dozen minors, including Mohamed Jawad who may have been as young as 12 or 13 years old when he first entered Gitmo, housing them in a special detention block known as Camp Iguana .

The lists of movies and television shows are similarly diverse, including documentaries and other educational programs in English and other languages and recordings of sporting events, mostly soccer matches, including various World Cup matches from before and after 2002. Detainees have access to a wide range of popular media, too, including relative recent blockbusters like Disney’s Frozen and The Lego Movie .

A part of the Gitmo prison library’s video catalog., Via GovernmentAttic.org

Not surprisingly there are all the Harry Potter movies. There are utterly forgettable movies intended for children and adults, too, such as Alvin and the

Chipmunks , The Smurfs , The Lorax , Paul Blart: Mall Cop , and SWAT . There’s also The Will Smith Music Video Collection and I have no idea what Americans Convert to Islam is.

The library has impressively broad selection of American television, old and new, including seasons of Battlestar Galactica , The Cosby Show , Star Trek , and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air , which is amusingly written as the “Price of Bel-Air.”

There seem to be an oddly large amount of procedural crime dramas, such as Bones , CSI

and its spin offs, Law and Order , The Mentalist , and Monk . NCIS seems conspicuously absent for a prison on a naval base.

However, in this particular case, there may well be a more complex explanation for this inclusion of these and other programs that depict various elements of the United States, its legal system, and other aspects of its society. It is possible that there is a hope that inmates may come to temper their anger at the U.S. government after watching some of these programs.

According to a December 2016 report by PBS , North Korean defectors and other activities in South Korea routinely include American crime dramas in media they smuggle into the reclusive communist regime. “Scenes … from NCIS that show police officers reading suspects their rights are especially useful” in countering North Korea’s anti-American propaganda, defector Kang Chol-hwan explained in an interview for the combined print and television special.

We don’t know if allowing inmates to watch The Boondock Saints , The Sopranos , House of Cards , Taken , or The Wire would have the same potential impact. Whether Duck Dynasty or Swamp People is an accurate depiction of real America is up for debate, too.

It’s all in the Gitmo prison library though, along with hundreds more entries. There are way too many items for us to list them all here, so feel free to browse the list yourself and let us know what else you find in the comments.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com

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作者：约瑟夫·特雷维西克

更新于美国东部时间2019年6月29日晚上7:52

美国位于古巴关塔那摩湾的军事拘留设施——几乎普遍被称为“关塔那摩”（Gitmo），通常缩写为“GTMO”——争议不断，引发了关于酷刑和其他法律问题的持续激烈辩论，同时也成为美国反恐行动普遍受到批评的焦点。

世界各地。但该营地也是一座监狱，与其他此类设施一样，它也有许多相同的平庸之处，包括一座图书馆。多亏一位有进取心的人士根据《信息自由法》提出的申请，我们现在才知道其略显杂乱的藏书目录里有什么。

2015年7月，一位私人人士根据《信息自由法》（FOIA）提交申请，要求获取“关塔那摩监狱囚犯图书馆图书目录”和“关塔那摩监狱囚犯图书馆影视目录”。近两年后，负责监管关塔那摩湾海军基地和关塔那摩联合特遣部队（JTF-GTMO）的美国南方司令部寄来了这份超过600页的文件，其中列出了图书馆各类目录中的所有物品，包括重复项。政府透明度网站GovernmentAttic.org于2017年8月将这些记录的副本发布在了网上。

“经过逐行审查，我们认定这些信息目前属于非机密信息，可以完整公开，”南方司令部信息自由法案（FOIA）主管马可·维拉洛博斯在正式回复信中写道。这一流程符合规定，但很难想象囚犯图书馆里的任何资料曾经被列为机密。这些目录读起来就像是在描述一个融合了外国档案馆、二手书店和中学图书馆功能的场所。

诚然，监狱里有各种语言的物品，以满足自2002年关塔那摩监狱启用以来就格外多元化的囚犯群体的需求。这里有阿拉伯语、印尼语、波斯语、法语、德语、普什图语、俄语、西班牙语、斯瓦希里语、土耳其语、维吾尔语和乌尔都语的书籍。其中相当一部分是翻译词典或英语学习教材。

关塔那摩湾德尔塔营拘留设施的被拘留者，美国国防部

馆内藏书同样丰富，包括大量历史著作、民间故事以及其他古典和文化相关的文本，其中也包括对伊斯兰教义和沙里亚法的探讨。此外，图书馆还收藏了不少西方小说译作，例如莎士比亚的部分戏剧、马克·吐温的《汤姆·索亚历险记》、丹·布朗的《达芬奇密码》以及R·L·斯坦的《鸡皮疙瘩》系列数十部作品。

值得一提的是，除了英文版外，囚犯还可以阅读J·K·罗琳著名的《哈利·波特》系列小说的波斯语、法语、德语、俄语和西班牙语版本。此外，还有两本乌尔都语版本的《哈利·波特与阿兹卡班囚徒》（第三部）。

这或许看起来很奇怪，但至少有一份报告称，被拘留者从《阿兹卡班囚徒》的故事中得到了鼓舞。该故事讲述了一个角色从魔法世界秘密监狱阿兹卡班的冤狱中逃脱，以及那里的摄魂怪——实际上是没有灵魂的恶魔，它们巡逻并吸走周围一切事物的快乐。

沙克尔·阿米尔是一名沙特公民，2001年在阿富汗被俘时是英国合法居民。他在2015年获释后接受BBC采访时说了以下这番话：

“我脑海里最接近的画面就是《哈利·波特》的故事。哈利·波特里有个岛，叫阿兹卡班，那里没有快乐，他们会吸走你所有的感情，让你变得麻木不仁。而我一直以来的感受也正是如此。因为他们就是想让你变得麻木，他们想剥夺你的一切。”

除了外语书籍外，还有数百本英文书籍。其中不乏历史类书籍和文化经典，但也包括大量教育类、自助类和兴趣爱好类书籍，有些似乎是为监狱随意拼凑起来的。我们不清楚囚犯们究竟能从威廉·迪茨的《儿童营养指南》、卡罗琳·麦克弗森的《蜜袋鼯：宠物主人完全手册》或卡尔·奥雷的《橄榄油的疗愈功效》中得到多少帮助。

囚犯们也可以阅读面向青少年和年轻成人的故事书和漫画。除了《哈利·波特》系列故事外，图书馆还藏有J·R·R·托尔金的《霍比特人》和《指环王》三部曲、艾萨克·阿西莫夫的科幻小说集、《饥饿游戏》系列以及《暮光之城》系列。

这是关塔那摩监狱图书馆的部分藏书。（图片来自 GovernmentAttic.org）

这或许并不像乍看之下那么令人惊讶。许多被拘留者来自教育程度有限的家庭，他们可能连自己的母语都难以阅读，更遑论英语。这也解释了为什么目录中有大量文字很少或没有文字的图画书。此外，美军还曾臭名昭著地拘留了十几名未成年人，其中包括穆罕默德·贾瓦德，他最初进入关塔那摩监狱时可能只有12或13岁，他们被关押在一个名为“鬣蜥营”的特殊拘留区。

电影和电视节目的种类同样丰富多样，包括英语和其他语言的纪录片和其他教育节目，以及体育赛事录像，主要是足球比赛，包括 2002 年前后的各种世界杯比赛。被拘留者还可以接触到各种各样的流行媒体，包括相对较新的热门电影，如迪士尼的《冰雪奇缘》和《乐高大电影》。

这是关塔那摩监狱图书馆视频目录的一部分，来源：GovernmentAttic.org

不出所料，哈利·波特系列电影也位列其中。当然，也有一些面向儿童和成人的、完全不值一提的电影，例如《艾尔文与野兽》。

《花栗鼠》、《蓝精灵》、《老雷斯的故事》、《百货战警》和《反恐特警组》。还有《威尔·史密斯音乐录影带合集》，至于《美国人皈依伊斯兰教》是什么，我完全不知道。

该图书馆收藏了大量美国电视节目，包括新老节目，例如《太空堡垒卡拉狄加》、《考斯比一家》、《星际迷航》和《贝莱尔的新鲜王子》（这部剧的标题被戏称为“贝莱尔的代价”）。

似乎出现了数量异常多的程序性犯罪剧，例如《识骨寻踪》（Bones）和《犯罪现场调查》（CSI）。

以及它的衍生剧《法律与秩序》、《超感神探》和《神探阿蒙》。然而，以海军基地监狱为背景的《海军罪案调查处》却明显缺席。

然而，就此案而言，纳入这些以及其他展现美国各方面内容、法律体系和社会面貌的节目，或许有着更为复杂的解释。或许有人希望，囚犯在观看这些节目后，能够缓和他们对美国政府的愤怒情绪。

据美国公共广播公司（PBS）2016年12月的一篇报道，在韩国的朝鲜脱北者和其他活动人士经常将美国犯罪剧作为走私到朝鲜的媒体资料。脱北者姜哲焕在接受该媒体的专访时解释说：“《海军罪案调查处》（NCIS）中警察向嫌疑人宣读权利的场景，对于反击朝鲜的反美宣传尤其有用。”

我们不知道允许囚犯观看《处刑人》、《黑道家族》、《纸牌屋》、《飓风营救》或《火线》是否会产生同样的潜在影响。《鸭子王朝》或《沼泽人》是否真实反映了美国社会，也值得商榷。

所有这些资料都收藏在关塔那摩监狱图书馆里，还有数百条其他条目。数量太多，我们无法在此一一列举，所以请自行浏览列表，并在评论区告诉我们您还发现了什么。

联系作者：joe@thedrive.com

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