White House Preparing Executive Order To Send ISIS Detainees To Guantanamo BayAnd Trump's been in office less than three weeks. Barack who? The White House is finishing an executive order that would instruct the Pentagon to send Islamic State detainees to Guantanamo Bay.
The Obama administration notably refused to send ISIS fighters captured in the fight to the detention facility, but for President Donald Trump, it’s imperative to take high-level radical Islamic terrorists out of the fight, The New York Times reports.
For some, the order could function as a de facto tripwire because it could allow federal judges to rule on whether the war against ISIS is actually legal, since Congress has declined to offer any explicit authorization. Instead, the Obama administration has relied on war authorization granted in 2001, saying that the fight against ISIS is just a continuation of the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban.
Such a claim is tenuous at best, mostly because while the seeds of ISIS first arose through al-Qaida, the group has since become so utterly different from its patriarch that it makes sense to distinguish them as two separate organizations. And if the organizations are deemed separate, it’s unclear how the 2001 war authorization would extend to ISIS, experts say.
“It raises huge legal risks,†Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith told The New York Times. “If a judge says the Sept. 11 authorization does not cover such a detention, it would not only make that detention unlawful, it would weaken the legal basis for the entire war against the Islamic State.â€
An Army captain tried to sue former President Barack Obama in 2016, arguing that the war against ISIS is illegal, but his complaint was dismissed by a federal judge who said that he lacked standing for his lawsuit.