The U.S. military’s detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – almost universally known as “Gitmo” and often abbreviated “GTMO” – is controversial to say the least, prompting continued and heated debates over torture and other legal issues, as well being a lightning rod for general criticism of U.S. counter-terrorism operations around the world. But the camp is also a prison with many of the same banal features of any other such facility, including a library, and thanks to an enterprising individual’s Freedom of Information Act Request, we now know what’s in its somewhat eclectic catalog. In July 2015, a private individual submitted a FOIA request for the “GTMO Inmate Library Catalogue of Books” and the “GTMO Inmate Library Catalogue of Videos/Films.” Nearly two years later, U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the Guantanamo Bay naval base and Joint Task Force-Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO), sent along the more than 600 pages listing all the items in the library’s various catalogs, including duplicates. Government transparency website GovernmentAttic.org posted a copy of these records online in August 2017.

“Upon completion of our line-by-line review, we determined this information is currently and properly unclassified and releasable in its entirety,” Marco Villalobos, the SOUTHCOM FOIA manager wrote in his official response letter. This process is protocol, but it’s hard to imagine that anything in the inmate library would’ve ever been classified. The catalogs read like the description of something that’s one part foreign archive, one part second-hand book store, and one part middle school library. To be sure, there are items in a host of different languages, catering to what has been an especially diverse inmate population since Gitmo’s detention facility first opened in 2002. There are books in Arabic, Bahasa, Farsi, French, German, Pashtu, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, Uigher, and Urdu. A significant number of these are just translation dictionaries or textbooks on how to learn English.

DOD Detainees at the Camp Delta detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.