Trump follows Obama on terror suspects

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Donald Trump promised he would fill the military prison at Guantanamo Bay with “bad dudes” and slammed the Obama administration for prosecuting terrorists in U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. has been sent to Guantanamo since the detention center opened in January 2002 to hold suspected members of al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Trump has passed on other chances to send suspects there, including earlier this week, when the Justice Department said a militant captured in Libya and accused of playing an instrumental role in the 2012 Benghazi attacks would be prosecuted in federal court in Washington, where a trial for the possible mastermind is already underway.

On Wednesday, the U.S. announced that a man arrested in Bosnia had been brought to New York to face charges that he abandoned the United States in 2013 to join the Islamic State group.