I am not saying it is the right thing to do, but it is a very very long way from someone being grabbed, bundled into an unmarked van by people who are never identified (either as individuals or who they work for), and turning up later dead - or never turning up at all.
Exactly, I get a little bit uneasy with people throwing around "got disappeared" - it lands as politically charged. What that means to me is something like Khmer Rouge, or Pinochet throwing thousands of people off planes into the ocean (no parachute), tentatively it means gulag, but even with gulag, you're not disappeared, you find out this person is in a gulag somewhere (though is likely to die), having myself read the Gulag Archipeligo.
I'm 100% sure the US government, most governments, have "disappeared" people in a Pinochet style, it's just more rare and likely involves deep state spycraft type things. Even in Guantanamo, people lived, and people were known to be there, and I think that is how people are using "disappeared" i.e. extrajudicial and illegal, but alive and known to be somewhere. It reminds me of people using "violence" to describe writing or speech that make people feel bad, and it's like, okay, if that's what violence means what's the word for getting punched in the face, what's the word for getting tossed off a plane.
You guys are taking my previous comment out of context but that's less interesting than the fact that you have a strange definition of "disappeared".
> Even in Guantanamo, people lived, and people were known to be there, and I think that is how people are using "disappeared" i.e. extrajudicial and illegal, but alive and known to be somewhere.
So you're arguing that no one was disappeared to Gitmo because some information eventually came out about a few people? Or do you really believe everyone at Gitmo was publicly identified?
A quick google reveals that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch don't agree with you.
For one, Bush admitted we were doing enforced disappearances
> In early September 2006, US authorities transferred to Guantánamo 14 men who had been held in secret CIA custody. President George W. Bush finally admitted that, in the “war on terror”, the USA has been resorting to secret detentions and enforced disappearance, which is a crime under international law.
If a government was disappearing people they would not do it with police raids. The last thing they would want is to take responsibility for it.
I have lived in a country where journalists and others were being disappeared, and it was done by unidentifiable people in unmarked vans.