American Held as ISIS Suspect, Creating a Quandary for the Trump Administration
But holding a citizen in long-term wartime detention as an enemy combatant — something the military has not done since the George W. Bush administration — would rekindle major legal problems left dormant since Mr. Bush left office
and could put at risk the legal underpinnings for the fight against the Islamic State.
"A U.S. citizen may lawfully be subject to military detention in armed conflict under appropriate circumstances," he added, pointing to a 2004 decision
in which the Supreme Court upheld the indefinite wartime detention of an American citizen captured in the Afghanistan war, Yasser Hamdi.
6, 2017
WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials are divided over how to handle a United States citizen
that the military has held in Iraq for more than three weeks as a suspected Islamic State fighter, according to an official familiar with internal deliberations, raising a dilemma that could resurrect some of the biggest wartime policy questions of the post-9/11 era.
Providing the first details about a predicament that the Trump administration has kept draped in near-total secrecy, the official said the problem facing Pentagon and Justice Department officials is how to ensure
that the man — who surrendered on Sept. 12 to a Syrian rebel militia, which turned him over to the American military — will stay imprisoned.
The Supreme Court has never ruled on what kind of hearing — or how much or what type
of evidence — is sufficient to hold an American in indefinite wartime detention.
In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that his detention as a wartime prisoner was lawful — but also
that he had a right to challenge the evidence that he was an enemy fighter in a hearing before a neutral decision maker.
