What are the books banned in camp Guantanamo? | Hacker News Reader

What are the books banned in camp Guantanamo?

reprieve.bsd.net

65 pointscolinprince39 comments

Apparently, of the 800 men they have detained only 9 ever went to trial. Without trial ...

And the US goes to war over and over without congress approval.

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

This whole WoT was an eye openner. Silly naive younger me, for example, was shocked to find out Geneva Conventions only apply to soldiers in uniforms. (I had assumed earlier it was because of human rights.) Turns out it is a gentlemen's agreement in context of playing war with their cannon fodder.

>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...

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.

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?

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.

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

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

https://www.theguardian.com/world/table/2013/dec/13/guantana...

> 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...

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

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

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.

My bad, I misread the quiz.

I hope you're not serious.

The BSD domain refers to Blue State Digital.

Is Fahrenheit 451 banned?

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. :)

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.

#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

Same for äöü. Dev hates foreigners obviously

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

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.

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.

Sounds like a very hacky way to avoid little Bobby Tables...

But it also forbids characters like ñ or í

Getting names right is very hard: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

No, getting names right is incredibly simple. It's a single unicode `name` field, stored however your language/db stores unicode. E.g.:

    name: [person's name]

No minimum lengths (other than != 0) and a reasonably large maximum length for your db (only to protect against DoS attacks). Accept all input (into properly prepared SQL statements).

Reread the list with your assumptions in mind (one nonzero-length field, with a maximum field, Unicode).

Why the downvotes? Sorry for calling it out, but it is indeed a #DeveloperFail. We (developers) have egos bigger than doctors and lawyerys, is that why everyone is downvoting a legitimate assertion with proof? (and more proof in comments to my original comment )

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

Not really a fair comparison...

Both are absolutely inhumane.

Auschwitz is not in function anymore.

I think there is one.

I doubt there's a gift shop in the prison proper, but the prison is situated on a US naval base which I would assume to have one, as many such bases do.

I live right next to Auschwitz and can confirm that indeed, it has a gift shop. It only sells books and dvds about the camp though, so it's not your traditional gift shop selling all sorts of tat.

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...

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