Executive Order to Keep Guantanamo Bay Open Is Trump’s Gift to ISIS
Enemy combatants have the right to challenge their detention in federal court. When that happens with a member of the Islamic State, the entire war will go on trial.
In The News Piece in The Daily Beast
U.S. Department of Defense
Jan. 31, 2018
Joshua Geltzer was quoted in the Daily Beast about President Trump's decision to authorize sending terrorist detainees to Guantanamo Bay:
“To bring new detainees associated with ISIS to Guantanamo would be to essentially acquiesce in putting before a federal judge our whole theory of the case,” said Joshua Geltzer, who was a senior counterterrorism official at the National Security Council and Justice Department in the Obama administration.
Geltzer “feels confident in our domestic law theory of [the] counter-ISIS” campaign, he said, but putting an ISIS detainee in position to file a habeas lawsuit “runs totally counter to caution.”
“Guantanamo seems to have taken on some strange symbolic value to this president and this attorney general,” Geltzer observed. “It’s detrimental to national security, but fits a domestic narrative on national security.”