Despite tough talk, Trump follows Obama on terror suspects
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US President Donald Trump promised he would fill the military prison at Guantanamo Bay with "bad dudes" and slammed the Obama administration for prosecuting terrorists in US courts. But so far, Trump has treated terror suspects just as President Barack Obama did, passing on Guantanamo in favor of having his own Justice Department lawyers try them in federal court. The strongest sign yet that he is retreating from his earlier promise came Thursday, when Trump conceded that the civilian courts offer a swifter way to bring terror suspects to justice in the communities they attacked.
A day after he assailed the US criminal justice system as a "joke" and a "laughingstock," Trump backed off his threat to send the suspect in Tuesday's New York bike path rampage to the troubled military commission system at Guantanamo. "Statistically that process takes much longer than going through the Federal system," Trump said in an early morning tweet, adding that there is "also something appropriate" about keeping him "in the home of the horrible crime he committed."
It was legally questionable whether the Trump administration could have sent 29-year-old Sayfullo Saipov to Guantanamo, in part because the courts have not ruled whether the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force—which permits the government to detain enemy combatants for the duration of a military conflict—applies to the Islamic State and its followers. And no one held within the US has been sent to Guantanamo since the detention center opened in January 2002 to hold suspected members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
