President Barack Obama has ordered the prison camps closed by early next year, a deadline the White House now says it may miss.

Meantime, staff there say quality-of-life improvements will continue until the last detainee is gone.

The library is also a featured stop on weekly tours for reporters, members of Congress and other invited guests brought to the sprawling prison camp compound in a Pentagon bid to demonstrate that the much-maligned detention center is "safe, humane and transparent.''

Library staff have since 2005 described the Harry Potter series as a borrowing bestseller among the mostly devout Muslim population -- and shown off translated versions in the stacks that separate Arabic from Urdu, French from Farsi and cover more than a dozen languages.

Other reportedly popular items include old World Cup soccer playoff videos, a French cuisine cookbook published in Beirut and scholarship on the Koran, prescreened to make sure they contain mainstream messages.

For a time, Richard Nixon's Victory Without War flew off the shelves, a librarian reported. So much so that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed referred to it during a war court hearing earlier this year.

CHAVEZ FAVORITE

But not Chomsky, who in recent years got high-profile plugs from two of America's most ardent adversaries.

In September 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez held up Chomsky's 2003 Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance in a speech at the United Nations that also likened President George W. Bush to Satan, and gave the book a bump in sales for several weeks.

A year later, bin Laden popped up in a keep-the-faith video address to his followers that proved he was alive and ridiculed the U.S. invasion of Iraq while praising the professor's "sober words of advice prior to the war.''

DeWalt said "force protection reasons'' barred him from explaining why any title or author was banned but said as of this week there were no Chomsky works of any type at the Guantánamo library in any language.