[tptacek]

Without arguing in favor of Guantanamo, which is indeed a travesty that urgently needs a decisive fix, there is a difference between detaining foreigners captured in an active combat theater because the State earnestly believes them to be an immediate, violent threat to Americans and "disappearing" its own citizens.

Also, people in Guantanamo haven't been "disappeared". They're being detained indefinitely, which is a problem, but we know where they are, and they have access to courts and lawyers (albeit hard-won access).

The "disappeared" in Central and South America were more often than not murdered.

[dragonwriter]

> Without arguing in favor of Guantanamo, which is indeed a travesty that urgently needs a decisive fix, there is a difference between detaining foreigners captured in an active combat theater because the State earnestly believes them to be an immediate, violent threat to Americans and "disappearing" its own citizens.

There's also, it must be noted, a fairly enormous difference between "detaining foreigners captured in an active combat theater because the State earnestly believes them to be an immediate, violent threat to Americans" and what the US government has been doing with the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, in which the government has detained many people who it never had any reasonable cause to believe were an "immediate, violent threat to Americans" and many of the prisoners were not captured in an active combat theater.

[tptacek]

The process by which the USG selected people for detention in Guantanamo was obviously flawed, but it does not from that follow that the USG has endorsed "indefinite detention at Guantanamo" as a solution to arbitrary political problems.

[dragonwriter]

What relevance does that have to the post it is offered in response to? It seems to me to be a pure strawman, rebutting a point that wasn't argued.

[tptacek]

Just because you can't keep a history of more than 2 comments back in your head doesn't mean I have the same limitation. If you follow the thread from the top, you'll see that it refers to the notion of the USG "disappearing" its citizens. Guantanamo is a travesty, but it isn't that travesty.

[dragonwriter]

Yeah, but that's not the claim that the post you responded to was about. If you want to talk about that, respond to someone who is debating you about that.

Just because you have a drum you want to beat doesn't make it sensible to keep beating it when its not relevant.