Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are baying for books to read, and their overwhelming choice is fiction. They are a bored lot and deserve some fun
When it comes to books, the bearded inmates of Guantanamo Bay it seems are totally hot for Fifty Shades of Grey, the first novel of a popular trilogy about the erotic adventures of a young female graduate and an international businessman. No, really — a US Congressman said it, so it must be true. Indeed, Representative Jim Moran of Virginia told The Huffington Post: “Rather than the Quran, the book that is requested most by the [detainees] is Fifty Shades of Grey. They've read the entire series.” Apparently Mr Moran learned this while touring a part of the island where ‘high value’ prisoners are kept, including five of the plotters behind 9/11. But officials at Guantanamo would neither confirm nor deny his claim.
It smells a bit fishy, of course, but it could be true. After all, those guys have been at Guantanamo for a long time and they probably know the Quran pretty well by now. Thus it's not unfeasible that they might be casting around for something new to read, and given the lack of female company in their lives, it makes perfect sense that they'd opt for something a bit spicy. Or, as Mr Moran put it: “I guess there's not much going on, these guys are going nowhere, so what the hell.”
By the sounds of things, the Guantanamo library is pretty mediocre. In addition to religious books and stress-reduction manuals, it has Star Trek novelisations, Agatha Christie books, and The Hunger Games, plus a copy of The Odyssey. In short, it's a bunch of potboilers plus the occasional classic.
I'm not surprised that the fiction selection on Guantanamo is so pulpy. It is difficult to concentrate when you are in a state of intense boredom and your sense of time is disrupted. I was once hospitalised for several days in Moscow; there was a copy of The Brothers Karamazov in my bag, but not once did I pick it up. My energy sapped by oppressive lethargy, I just couldn't muster the will.
How much more difficult must it be to read something challenging in prison, where the days stretch ahead of you until deathIJ I don't blame the inhabitants of Guantanamo for seeking escape in poorly written pornography. Boredom rots the mind rapidly. I mean, look at Osama bin laden's compound. It wasn't technically a prison, but he never left the place and it was full of videos of Osama bin laden himself and pornography. A great pall of boredom hung over the house; its inhabitants had long since vanished into a reality of mind-bending solipsism, numbing auto-arousal, religious obsession and fantasies of violence and destruction. That's a soul-destroying combination.
This is why I was fascinated to read about the attempt made by 9/11 ‘mastermind' Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to escape this cycle of crushing boredom. Apparently, while he was being held in one of the CIA's foreign interrogation centres last decade, deprived of sleep and subjected to water-boarding, he asked for the Harry Potter series. Not wanting to drive their captive insane, the CIA agents were happy to let him escape into the halls of Hogwarts. But Mohammed wanted to do more than flee reality; he also wanted to design a vacuum cleaner. You see, apparently, he had received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering in North Carolina in the 1980s, and knew a few things about machines. And so, in detention, he set his mind to re-engineering this ubiquitous appliance. The CIA supplied him with blueprints from the Internet, and he set to work.
It's a fascinating story, but at this point it ends. The CIA will not release Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's designs for a new, improved vacuum cleaner; they claim the information is classified. I don't really understand this; after World War II, the American Government hired Nazi scientists to help them build better rockets. If the criminal mastermind behind 9/11 now wants to gift the world a better vacuum cleaner, why not let himIJ
But it is not to be. Today, Mohammed sits in a cell at Guantanamo Bay, growing his beard, perhaps hallucinating ever more efficient home appliances in the darkness: A fridge freezer that operates on cold-fusion technology, an astounding talking dishwasher with a quantum computer in its hardware. Or maybe he just sits around reading Fifty Shades of Grey all day — with breaks for prayers, of course.
Courtesy: RIA Novosti