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Captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan in March 2002, al-Sharbi was transferred to Guantanamo Bay later that year. In 2006, al-Sharbi told a military commission that he was a member of al-Qaeda and proud of his actions against the United States. Serious war crimes charges were dropped against him in October 2008, as it had been found they were based on evidence gained through torture of Abu Zubaydah. Al-Sharbi had a habeas corpus petition which his father had initiated on his behalf; when it reached the court in March 2009, al-Sharbi requested that it be dismissed. He did not want to pursue it.
Al-Sharbi was held at Guantanamo for twenty years.
The rest of his wikipedia page is not particularly flattering. I don't know to what extent the quasi-justice system that applies to enemy combatants went off the rails here, but I do know that if you're being accused of waging war against the United States, maybe chanting "May God help me fight the infidels or the unfaithful ones" is a bad idea.
> David Matthew Hicks
His story is way too complex to summarize here, but the Wikipedia page is fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hicks
Say what you will, a lot of legal process (good and bad) was applied, and we're talking about a guy who sought out and attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. He spent 5 years in Gitmo. This is not someone who challenged a political leader by calling him a funny name.
The word "vanished" is a massive over-dramatization.
16 year old American, vaporized by intentional US drone strike. For the crime of being the son of an alleged terrorist.
That’s the opposite of vanished.
Vanished would be things like [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_flights] where many of the victims were never recorded, and literally no one from their lives knows what happened to them - and many of the perpetrators have taken the memories to their graves, or never knew the victims names to begin with.
Did the guy deserve to spend 20 years in Gitmo? Maybe not. But if I look into my heart of hearts, I genuinely have a tough time feeling too much sympathy. The crazy guy off his meds who points a fake gun at police officers probably didn't deserve to get shot to death either, but that's just what happens.
Can those rights be violated? Yes, governments do bad things all the time. But that is not the same as a foreign national participating in Al-Qaeda training camps and meeting with Osama bin Laden. No nation on Earth has a strong history of giving full citizenship legal rights to foreign nationals and/or enemy combatants captured in a warzone.
Hicks was also returned to Australia to be dealt with by his own government, where presumably he then did retain his legal rights as a citizen of Australia. And at that point it would indeed be a violation on part of Australia if they did not treat him as any citizen of their nation should be treated.
All of that said, Guantanamo has still been a completely broken and messed up situation. We the people of the US owe it to ourselves and the rest of the world to hold our government accountable for that and not allow it to happen again.
It's just if you are wanting to say that the US treatment of it's citizens has been on par with China's treatment of it's citizens, your case may be better served by finding a more direct example.
You're aware that the US actually kidnapped random people because they had the misfortune of using the wrong watch type or having the same name as an alleged terrorist, right? They didn't "capture enemy combatants in a warzone".
> Note that this does not apply to US citizens. US citizens, even those accused of terrorism, still retain their legal rights under US law. That is what citizenship in any country, is.
And also murdered US citizens abroad that were alleged to have ties to terrorists, without due trial.
> Hicks was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 by the Afghan Northern Alliance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hicks
>He was captured in March 2002 by Pakistani forces during a raid at Faisalabad, Pakistan. He was held in Islamabad for two months before being turned over the United States forces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghassan_al-Sharbi
As I said, they were captured as enemy combatants, in a warzone. The circumstances of Sharbi's capture are much more questionable. But from the US's perspective, an ally turned him over as a captured enemy combatant.
It's all questionable and stupid, of course. But the question of their status at the time is relevant to the question of whether the US "vanishes" it's own citizens. These two were not citizens, so what happened to them does not support the case that the US is just as bad as China on that point.
No nation on Earth has a history of treating such captives as full citizens entitled to the same legal rights as it's own people. But maybe that's what we all would want. That's a fair point to argue, separately.
However, that is not the point the person I was responding to was making. Which is part of why I say the examples they offered were ineffective as support for their point.
You may find it helpful to practice re-reading and making sure you understand the case a post is making before responding to it.
You and I clearly agree that what the US did in Guantanamo was bad. You and I also agree that the US can, has, and may yet still violate the rights of it's own citizens as well as the rights of people who are not it's citizens, even in situations where it has signed treaties with those people's nations. And the US government should definitely be held accountable whenever it does something like that.
None of that changes the observation that the US's failure to give full citizen legal rights to Ghassan al Sharbi and David Matthew Hicks, people who were not US citizens, does not make a good supporting example to the case for the US being just as bad as China about "vanishing" it's own citizens.
You are, of course, free to offer concrete examples which would better make that case. That is essentially what I was opening the door for. But here you seem to be responding more to an emotion evoked by how I said something rather than the point I was actually making.