“The ongoing detention without trial of over 400 individuals in the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay has rightly been decried as an ongoing human rights scandal by everyone from Amnesty International to the Vatican,” British human and medical rights activist Dr. David Nicholl has written.
Other than the Iraq war, there is nothing more effective as a recruiting tool for terrorists than the policy of indefinite detention at Guantanámo without trial and the allegations of torture and extra-judicial killings there, which have provided Al Qaeda with a propaganda coup.
But for all the crimes against humanity that George W. Bush and his administration are guilty of, the legal precedent for the extra-judicial regime of indefinite detention without trial was established not by the current administration but by the previous administration led by Bill Clinton.
Hillary Clinton likes to take credit for every success of her husband’s administration — including, rather incredibly, helping bring about peace in Northern Ireland. The question I would pose to the junior senator from New York is this: whatever foreign policy successes that Hillary likes to claim credit for, is she also willing to accept responsibility for the establishment of the illegal regime at Guantánamo?
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