When human rights organizations have called for CLOSING GUANTANAMO, they don’t mean AND CARRY ON ELSEWHERE. “Gitmo” is about the illegal detention and torture of human beings. What kind of rubes are we dealing with?

Guantanamo is an illegal entity. It’s location outside US dominion, and outside Cuba’s border, on technicalities, has been used to pretend there’s a gray area outside the rule of international law. What’s being done inside Guantanamo, holding people indefinitely without bringing charges against them, torture, military commissions, is expressly illegal. Calls to shut Guantanamo down are calls to end the charade of a legal loophole, but they are primarily demands that the immoral behavior be stopped.

We don’t shut down brothels while arranging for their captives to work elsewhere. Polluters aren’t expected merely to shift their poison pipelines into other streams. We don’t make arrangements for drug dealers to relocate before we close a crack house or meth lab.