According to the lawyer for Shaker Aamer, one of the many prisoners at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release but not allowed to leave, the authorities did not pass on to his client a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago that he had brought for him. That book dealt with the prison camps in the Soviet Union and was suppressed in that country.
Clive Stafford Smith, Mr Aamer’s attorney and Director of Reprieve said: “This is yet another demonstration of how Guantanamo is destroying the very values the US once stood for. When your country’s Government starts barring books once banned by the Soviets, alarm bells should ring.”
Those alarm bells have been ringing for a long time but the government won’t hear them because they are by now stone deaf when it comes to issues of human rights.
The Soviet Union banned books because it was a totalitarian state. The US bans books because it just loves freedom so darn much.
This isn’t that hard to grasp.
Not surprising from the country that brought us Liberty Cabbage, and more recently, Freedom Fries. Language ain’t gonna control itself, people!
In some fairness, some of those incarcerated who are eligible for release have no country that will accept them.
That’s the US’s problem. Normally, under international law, when you kidnap someone from their home country and smuggle them into your country, *you’re required to let them loose in your country*.
In short, the US is required to give these people US nationality and set them free in the US.
@ ^ nathanaelnerode : Citation needed. Seriously.
I don’t think people end up in Guantanamo Bay prison without durn good reasons.
Those locked up there.
They are not good guys who deserve any sort of support or advocacy..