The New Year Quote by Linda Chavez

The sentence is engineered to sound like a neutral timeline, but its real work is to cordon off moral urgency behind bureaucratic calm. Chavez leads with a date and a procedural verb - "began detaining" - as if Guantanamo were an administrative program that simply switched on after 9/11. That framing matters: it invites the reader to treat everything that follows as policy management, not as an open-ended emergency to the rule of law.

The key rhetorical move is the placement of "critics have complained". "Complained" is doing quiet demolition. It recasts allegations of torture, indefinite detention, and legal black holes as nagging dissent rather than substantive charges. The phrase turns human rights advocacy into a kind of ambient noise that predictably accompanies hard choices. Even "human rights abuses" is presented at a distance: not as abuses that occurred, but as accusations that irritate the narrative.

"Enemy combatants" is the other loaded term. It’s post-9/11 vocabulary designed to float between categories - not quite prisoner of war, not quite criminal defendant - and that ambiguity is the point. It smuggles in an assumption: these detainees fall outside the normal moral and legal contracts, so the usual outrage can be safely filed under "criticism."

The context is early-2000s U.S. politics, when the "war on terror" offered a storyline expansive enough to absorb Afghanistan, Iraq, and "other fronts" without defining endpoints. Chavez’s intent isn’t to litigate Guantanamo; it’s to normalize it, positioning the controversy as a partisan or rhetorical dispute rather than a foundational test of democratic restraint.