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Guantanamo Bay libraryThe US military says the detainees at Guantanamo Bay have no legal rights under American law. It says the 445 men held there are unlawful enemy combatants. But commanders at the 4 and a half year old detention center say the detainees are treated humanely. One example they give is the detainee library. It has over 4,000 titles, and it's growing. Lest you think this is just a typical library, note that this one is run by intelligence agents. The World's Jessie Graham got a rare glimpse into the library at Guantanamo.

Detainees aren't allowed to visit the library. Librarians load the books onto a cart which they wheel into the cell blocks. They pick the books based on the languages spoken by the men on the blocks and their past literary preferences. Officials here say most of the inmates have access to one book a week.

Guantanamo's detainee library is a tiny room housed in a trailer, but it brims with books.

Assistant librarian, Ann: "I've left you tone on the edges of the cuts, please loop, because I don't have much.

That's the assistant librarian, Ann. She says so far there are more than 4,000 titles, but the goal is 20,000.

The library has books in sixteen languages...including English, Arabic, Farsi, Pashtu, Urdu and Uzbek.

Assistant librarian, Ann: "Up here we have the comical books the funny books, here we have poetry, down here we have history." Ann says the most popular titles are Harry Potter books. Detainees can read them in seven languages.
Harry Potter book - photo credit: Davíð Logi Sigurðsson

The library was established with help from the international committee of the Red Cross. Now it's the pet project a civilian contractor named Lori. She's not your typical neighborhood librarian. She's in charge of operational security at Guantanamo. She spent twenty years in Army intelligence. She won't let us use her last name and she's touchy about the language reporters use to talk about the inmates here.

Lori: "First of all, we have no prisoners here, we have detainees."

Lori warms up when she talks about the library. She says it gives the detainees a much needed distraction.

Lori: "And we have to give them things to do. Things to take their minds off detention. Things to take their mind off of looking at ways to mess with the guards or attack the guards. So the library gives them things to do. It kind of gives them a mental escape." Lori has just returned from a shopping trip to Dearborn, Michigan, where she and the camp's cultural advisor bought over a 1,000 new books in Arabic.

She proudly points to classics by Naguib Mahfouz and Taha Hussein. Lori is looking to expand the Pashtu section -- since that's another language that's widely spoken by the detainees. Those who can't read have access to picture books of the Middle East that remind them of home.

What you won't find here are political texts or law books. This is something of a sore point at Guantanamo.

Lori: "AAHHH law books. We'll first of all, there's really no need for a law book here. I mean these guys are detained enemy combatants. We have an international right to detain people who were fighting against our coalition forces."

Critics argue that the detainees at Guantanamo are facing a complicated legal challenge and should have access to law books.

Lori concedes that the ten men who have been charged with war crimes may have a need for a law library and officials are considering that option for the future. But for the most part, she says the inmates are interested in books about Islam.

Lori: "We have books by some of the bigger religious philosophers and Imams in the Middle East, because that's what they want to read." Though many of the inmates speak English, the library doesn't have any English as a second language books. Officials say this is a force protection issue. They say with better English, the detainees could better understand conversations among their guards and use that information as ammunition against the guards.

Sometimes inmates return the books they read with pictures and photos of women blacked out -- in accordance with conservative Islamic beliefs.

Translators and intelligence agents scrutinize all of the books when they're returned.

Lori: "When they come back, they are screened. In the case that somebody might write some notes because they have been known to pass notes through reading materials and other things."Detainees at Guantanamo Bay (faces have been blurred to protect identity)

Military officials say library privileges were suspended for all guantanamo detainees for two weeks following the suicides of three inmates in June. Detainees also lose library privileges when they misbehave, but an intelligence officer says at any given time, most of the inmates have access to books.

But lawyers for some of the detainees say access to books is sporadic and random at best.

Joshua Colangelo-Bryan: "The Military controls any detainees' access to these materials completely."

Joshua Colangelo-Bryan represents three detainees from Bahrain. He says one of his clients, Juma Al-Dossari, has tried to commit suicide a dozen times. Colangelo-Bryan says Al -dossari is despondent over his lack of contact with the outside world.

Joshua Colangelo-Bryan: "During one of my interviews with Juma he looked me in the eye and said, what do I do to keep from going crazy?"

Colangelo-Bryan thought Al-Dossari could try to keep madness at bay by reading Arabic novels and working on his English. But the lawyer says Al Dossari's access to the library has been intermittent and is subject to the approval of his interrogator. He has asked a federal court to order the military to provide additional reading material as part of the effort to ease Al-Dossari's psychological isolation.

The court hasn't ruled on his request yet. Meanwhile, Colangelo-Bryan remains concerned that his client seldom has access to books.

Joshua Colangelo-Bryan: "The fact that Juma perhaps had access to novels at a certain point certainly does not believe that he had access to them for a substantial period of time, or that he will ever have access to them again in the future."

The Geneva Conventions mandate that all detainees must have access to objects necessary for religious practices -- like the Koran and for materials necessary for intellectual pursuit. The military says the library at Guantanamo not only meets those requirements. It exceeds them.

For the World, I'm Jessie Graham, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

photos: Jessie Graham