So…they’re just going to leave them all there? Harsh.

And Philip, I think the whole idea is to end indefinite detainment, which means not releasing the prisoners outright, but bringing in some legal apparatus to determine whether they’re being lawfully held and/or giving them a fair trial. Closing Guantanamo is admittedly a somewhat (but not entirely) symbolic gesture, but if it’s done for sincere moral reasons, it will be accompanied by some legal provisions for the prisoners, as well as, hopefully, a better detainment policy. That’s why it’s important to do it for moral, rather than practical, reasons.

You make it sound like closing down Guantanamo is useless. It isn’t; it’s an unforgeable commitment in that if they close it, they now have to pay the extra price, if they wish to continue their detaining ways, of either creating an entirely new prison (expensive, nontrivial), or coming up with more capacity in their other prisons. Can they do either of the latter? Sure, but neither is free.

The reason this is nontrivial has to do with the whole “decided in Washington” thing. If they close down Guantanamo because it’s a PR nightmare at home and abroad, then nothing stops them from detaining people indefinitely elsewhere and more secretly. But if Washington takes a sincere moral position, i.e., does it because it is the right thing to do, then the President or Congress won’t just authorize some other similar detention facility because that would be against the moral principle that motivated closing down Guantanamo in the first place. So “doing it because it’s right” says something about Washington and not only Guantanamo.

Another view would be that “the right thing” is simply convenient shorthand describing a variety of rationally-supported arguments tied to human rights and positive social choices that have been hashed out time-and-again historically and in the media, and therefore don’t need to be repeated yet again in full for a brief radio segment

Or it could be that, yeah.

I think that each of these two explanations applies to a lot of people. One person’s shorthand is another person’s literal belief.

Which leads me to question the observation Philip expresses: it seems to me to be based on confusion of logical “right” (factual and rational correctness), with the above sort of “right” (interpersonal and social interaction), and the suggestion (at least to me) of a perception that the latter sort of right is somehow a less valuable or even laughable/primitive form, rather than an entirely separate category of thing.

I wonder if either might not be due the use of the same word for both concepts in English, leading to a subconscious taxonomic confusion of their relationship, and an internal attempt by the mind to thus view both as the same.

But I feel I am gazing deeply into my navel at this point, well past the lint.

Which is a policy that was decided on in Washington DC.