Chomsky Banned in Guantánamo

That’s right. A book by the leading leftwing intellectual in America is verboten in the prison library there.

Though the library has 16,000 books, according to the Miami Herald, and though some of them deal with politics and current events, a book of Chomsky’s essays post 9/11 was expressly denied to a Guantánamo prisoner.

All of those essays were op-eds that Chomsky had originally written for the New York Times syndicate.

A spokesperson for the prison said “force protection reasons” precluded him from discussing the matter, but he confirmed that not a single copy of any Chomsky book was in the library.

Chomsky was his usual matter-of-fact self. “This happens sometimes in totalitarian regimes,” he told the Miami Herald.

But it shouldn’t happen at Guantánamo.

Nor should such censorship happen in U.S. prisons here at home.

Every once in a while a prisoner sends me a note telling me that the warden wouldn’t let him read The Progressive magazine.

We’re supposed to believe in free speech in this country.

And it seems to me that when we’ve taken every other freedom away from a prisoner, that the least we can do is not imprison that person’s mind.

That is, as Noam Chomsky said, a totalitarian impulse.