Guantanamo Bay Detentions

Given you are talking about a country which had no qualms about kidnapping people from other countries and also holds people indefinitely without trial, I suppose you are right.

Besides for executing minors/mentally handicapped, the US does all those things. Torture (waterboarding), hold prisoners without trial/charge (Guantanamo Bay), allow their leaders to execute citizens summarily (drone strikes), incarcerate people at a high rate for benefit of state sponsored corporations (drug war - privatized jails). I'm not arguing politics - I don't think HN is the place for it, but you should evaluate your perspective and how it might be changing how you view the world.

You can't compare them. No American accused of terrorist activity on US soil has ever been held at Guantanamo Bay.If you hang around with terrorists in a war zone(i.e Afganistan) you can expect your rights to be violated. Surely mistakes are made in a war. That quite different than being kidnapped from your home for expressing different political views.

They didn't get due process, so there's no way to be sure that American citizens aren't getting sent there.

That is how citizens of the US are treated. Non-citizens end up in places like Guantanamo.

It's already likely that some people were shipped to Guantanamo who were not criminals[1][2]. They were kept in horrible conditions without media access and left without legal recourse or any means of communication with the outside world. Is that OK with you? What happens when Trump decides that "Democrats" or "leftists" are the enemy now, as he's been continuously suggesting[2]?[1]: <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2025/02/13/i

Things like "charges" and "due process" are a luxury for the thousands who were kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured by past US administrations.People like Assange are fortunate to have visibility and nationality that they do. He at least is getting charged for a crime he hasn't really even denied. Thousands of others have lost their freedom and their lives because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time.

You should ask AI go give you a long list of people who were arrested/captured/kidnapped/killed by the USA for the things they did outside of the US. Often, without doing anything illegal (locally, but sometimes even by US law).Guantanamo bay exists outside of the US territory for a reason, so that no legal rules would apply. CIA/USA has been keeping secret prisons and torturing people all around the world (incl. EU).

> But not because some government official suddenly decided they shouldYou mean like this guy, for example? https://www.npr.org/2020/12/11/945565473/u-s-clears-for-rele...Or the (by now, likely in the thousands) people killed by US drone attacks?I don&#x

Perhaps "outside of your civil jurisdiction, involving people who aren't your country's citizens" is a better way to put it (the only, so far, exception to this seems to be Jose Padilla-- yet even then he didn't "disappear"). However, that's odd for me to have this sort of argument, I am against extra-judicial detention. Either someone is a PoW (if they're a member of an army that follows the rules of war) or they're a criminal.