
What are the books banned in camp Guantanamo? - colinprince
https://reprieve.bsd.net/page/s/what-are-the-books-banned-in-camp-guantanamo
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catuscoti
Apparently, of the 800 men they have detained only 9 ever went to trial.
Without trial ...

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marcoperaza
They exist in a legal grey area between POWs and war criminals.

POWs don't get a trial. They are held indefinitely until the end of
hostilities. Given that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are still operating against
the US and its allies, hostilities are clearly not over. The trouble is that
with such a 'war' against a decentralized enemy that has already lasted 15
years, and could quite conceivably last decades more, it's clear that
'indefinite detention' can effectively become 'life imprisonment' and that
we're venturing into territory not accounted for by the pre-existing legal
framework.

It's not a simple situation. Obama, who ran on a policy of closing Gitmo, was
forced to accept

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upofadown
>They exist in a legal grey area between POWs and war criminals.

Yeah, it is pretty normal for a repressive regime to come up with a legal
theory for why it is perfectly OK to hold people indefinitely without trial.
Normally such theories are only accepted by that particular regime...

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Dagwoodie
I think Obama felt exactly the same way going into office, but quickly
realized the people being sent to Gauntanamo Bay are as dangerous, ambitious
and as hardened extremists as they had been saying. Releasing them would
greatly increase the chances of a terrorist act on western countries. I'm not
saying they shouldn't get some kind of trial, but the notion that they are
very likely all at the very least future suicide bombers is often overlooked.
Bush's administration had been saying it and I think Obama came to believe it
first hand once he got into office.

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JoeAltmaier
We'd know what they were like, if they were allowed a trial and could defend
themselves? As it is, we take the word of military police etc. Who have never
made a mistake?

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EliRivers
So the rule of law is specifically banned in Guantanamo. If I wrote a novel
containing this, my editor would tell me to cut back on the heavy-handed
symbolism; its far too unbelievable.

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schiffern
_The Rule of Law_ by Lord Thomas Bingham appears to be a book adaptation of
this short lecture:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlMCCGD2TeM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlMCCGD2TeM)

After watching it I can definitely see why they would view these ideas as
'dangerous.'

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krick
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/table/2013/dec/13/guantana...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/table/2013/dec/13/guantanamo-
bay-banned-books-list)

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wodenokoto
> Top prize for the winner is a coffee mug from the Guantanamo gift shop,
> bought by one of our lawyers on their next visit.

A prison camp giftshop sounds absurd. However, most articles that come up on
google says that it is the army base that has a gift shop.

The Guardian do however claim the giftshop is associated with the prison:
[https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/gallery/2016/feb/15/guan...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/gallery/2016/feb/15/guantanamo-bay-souvenirs-in-pictures)

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smhost
I don't get it. What're they afraid of?

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nindalf
What if the prisoners draw inspiration from Sirius Black or Edmond Dantes and
attempt an escape? Banning these books ensures that such thoughts never occur
to the inmates. Clearly the wardens have learned the correct lessons from the
Shawshank Redemption [1]

[1] - [https://youtu.be/_359l_9Wyhg?t=48s](https://youtu.be/_359l_9Wyhg?t=48s)

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stordoff
FWIW, Harry Potter ISN'T banned:

> Arabic copies of Harry Potter (which features a hellish Island prison of its
> very own) are very popular amongst detainees. Ironically, Harry Potter
> novels often top US Library’s “Most Banned Books” list.

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nindalf
My bad, I misread the quiz.

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rch
The BSD domain refers to Blue State Digital.

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beardog
Is Fahrenheit 451 banned?

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zatkin
Unrelated to the material, this is a bit silly because you can just brute
force the quiz then write down the answers after and refresh the page to get
all the right answers. :)

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scarecrowbob
IMO, I don't think it's especially silly if the goal isn't to win a coffee cup
but rather to keep folks thinking about your topic for more than 30 seconds.

It worked on me, though I just guessed on all the questions.

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sean_patel
#DeveloperFail

Funny, the page asks for your name, and if you have ' like Irish names, it
marks the name in Red (invalid) and doesn't let you move forward with finding
out the books.

I tested it with the following names.

James O'Keefe

Mullah O'Mar

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Tharre
Why can't a name simply be a string of length X? All this work of checking for
"correct" names is so pointless.

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throwanem
Badly written SQL generation often prompts single quotes being forbidden in
input. "Having single quotes there breaks my queries," one sometimes hears
said. "I don't know why."

This is a great opportunity to mentor one's juniors. An injection attack is
trivial to demonstrate in the local dev environment, and the result strongly
motivates anyone worth working with to learn how not to do that again.

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projektfu
For the 10,000 who might be learning about this today, the answer is prepared
statements with placeholders for the values, like this pseudocode:

    
    
       stmt = driver.prepare("insert into names 
          (firstname, lastname) values (?, ?)");
       stmt.execute("Flannery", "O'Connor");
    

Syntax varies among database interfaces but this ensures that any odd strings
are properly stored by the driver and the application does not need to worry
about them. There is also no risk of someone rewriting the SQL statement.

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tomjen3
There is a gift shop in Guantanamo bay? What's next, one in fucking Auschwitz?

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michaelvoz
Not really a fair comparison...

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ino
Both are absolutely inhumane.

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gpvos
Auschwitz is not in function anymore.

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loopbacker
The list of banned books seems pretty arbitrary... I assume any guidelines are
very vague.

I'd love to know why they chose to ban a Shakespeare play...

