John Grisham Decries His Books Being Banned at Gitmo

Author John Grisham is upset that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay don’t have access to his popular legal thrillers.

Grisham wrote an op-ed for The New York Times to decry the book banning, using it as the start of a list of complaints about the U.S.’s treatment of the terrorist detainees. While Grisham mentioned President Barack Obama several times in the article he does not single out the leader who vowed to close the prison on multiple occasions but has failed to do so.

The author does take the side of several Guantanamo prisoners who proclaim their innocence, insisting the U.S. taxpayer should help pay for their eventual re-entry into society.

Last week, the Obama administration announced that it was transferring some more Arab prisoners back to Algeria. It is likely that Nabil will be one of them, and if that happens another tragic mistake will be made. His nightmare will only continue. He will be homeless. He will have no support to reintegrate him into a society where many will be hostile to a former Gitmo detainee, either on the assumption that he is an extremist or because he refuses to join the extremist opposition to the Algerian government. Instead of showing some guts and admitting they were wrong, the American authorities will whisk him away, dump him on the streets of Algiers and wash their hands.