While the prison offers inmates books and videos on Harry Potter and the World Cup, which are among the more than 16,000 items it holds, leftist intellectual commentary from an 80-year-old MIT linguistics professor is apparently taboo. U.S. military censors rejected the donation of an Arabic-language copy of the 2007 anthology called Interventions, donated by a Pentagon lawyer.

A defense department spokesman didn’t say exactly why the book was rejected, but the slip accompanying the book’s return listed among the categories of books banned from the Guantanamo Bay prison library anything promoting “Anti-American, Anti-Semitic, Anti-Western” ideology, literature on “military topics,” and works that portray “excessive graphic violence” and “sexual dysfunctions.”

“This happens sometimes in totalitarian regimes,” Chomsky told Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg in an email after he learned his book had been banned.

Ben Smith points out some interesting facts about the previous president’s treasonous use of Arabic, but I’ve got a bigger scoop — one surely destined to be blasted across Drudge. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, has nefariously concealed his Muslim heritage. But now it can be told! Just look at what he told the press as he was ending his tour as U.S. commander in Iraq last September:

GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, again, As-Salamu ‘Alaykum, masa’ al-kheir, good afternoon to all of you, and shukran jaziilan for joining us for today’s roundtable.

Can we really trust military commanders who speak other languages on occasion? Everyone knows that by adopting a different language you disrespect the monolinguistic United States and effectively become a citizen of the country in which that language is uttered. Come to think of it, have we ever really seen Petraeus’s birth certificate?

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