I don’t know what the book reads like in English, I’ve only read it in Russian, but it is brutally honest about the system. It didn’t flow like his fiction, but you can’t expect it to, and he wasn’t trying to avoid the censors when he completed it.

They will continue to look for a place to hide the reality. They don’t want people to understand what they have done.

[edited for clarity]

the area under the curve suggests we’ve held more prisoners for a longer time at guantanamo, but it looks like we’re ramping up to make afghanistan the main island next.

if for some ungodly reason we do get stuck with a president who wants to keep us in iraq for the next 50 or 100 years, then we’ll probably have to invade russia just to have enough room for all our political prisoners. otoh, if we invade do russia, that’d be that much more oil we could keep out of the hands of the chinese.