| | Steve Wolfer: "[...] anyone that thinks there is any merit in freeing terrorists now in Guantanamo, or in ignoring the horrors of Iran going nuclear, has no perspective." (emphasis added)
That, unfortunately, is a classic use of the "'Argument' from Intimidation," especially that last phrase. (Rand was not the first to identify this fallacy, by any means, but she did choose a label for it that cuts to its essence.)
Presenting this viewpoint in such a manner is acting to evict those who supposedly think this from the perimeter of civilized debate. It's a tactic which, I am truly sorry to say, Thomas Sowell is engaging in more than he ever has, especially in demonizing his opponents on foreign policy.
As to the prisoners, the supposed "merit" here lies not in letting any such prisoners loose, but in keeping fidelity in practice to the principles of "habeus corpus, probable cause, the refusal to engage in torture and the need for process that supports innocent-till-proven-guilty." All of which have been blatantly violated in Guantanamo and the other offshore prisons, (formerly) secret and not.
It's precisely that these standards have not been upheld, even in the gathering of evidence and suspects for what is and ought to be a criminal — and not military — issue, that has resulted in the problem of a core of undoubted scumbags being kept. (Many hundreds of others have been released. Even those held for torture have to be fed, after all.)
A puzzle as to how to return the problematic core of them to any other country? Yes, but without charges and evidence being contemplated, they and others shouldn't have been captured and held in the first place. That's the root mistake.
And as to Iran, your evicting any questioners of the scope or existence of such "horrors" from the range of the debate already abandons the use of the same standards, of openly noted evidence and confirmation of actions, that you say are important.
I won't get into dissecting that yet again, though, because it accepts the assumption of the neocons that Iran is a threat to U.S. residents in U.S. territory. As distinct from threatening "our" military in imperial postings that should not exist, or governments living off money and materiel extorted from the American public.
This assumption is one of the supposedly obvious backstops to all such discussion, these days, on Objectivist-ish Websites.
For me, one can only roll the boulder of conceptual dissection up the hill of historical blindness so many times before one gets worn out. I'm not inclined to try again to do so here when I'm tagged as "having no perspective" worth reading — before my even joining the debate.
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