Sen. Lyndsey Graham called on the Trump administration to
WASHINGTON — The suspect in the terror attack that killed eight in New York City should be considered an “unlawful enemy combatant” and interrogated without having a lawyer present, Sen. Lindsey Graham said Wednesday.
FBI and other officials need to question Sayfullo Saipov for intelligence about other attacks and his motivation, Graham said. The Republican senator from South Carolina called on the Trump administration to reverse the Obama-era policy of treating terror suspects as regular criminals.
“The last thing I think you want to do is lawyer them up and put them in federal court,” he said.
President Trump said at the start of a Wednesday Cabinet meeting that he was thinking of sending Saipov, who is hospitalized from a gunshot wound to the abdomen, to Guantanamo.
The ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said it would be a “serious mistake” to send the suspect to Cuba for trial. The civilian system has a “long, proven track record of imposing tough sentences on terrorists,” Schiff said in a statement.
The ACLU also denounced Trump’s comments, saying whisking him to the naval station in Cuba would be illegal. Saipov has permanent resident status in the United States.
“Sending Saipov to Guantánamo or treating him as an ‘enemy combatant’ would violate due process and the rule of law,” Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU, said in a statement. “The FBI and our federal court system are more than capable of dealing with terrorism cases, and Guantánamo was shown long ago to be an epic failure. It’s a shame that Trump is using this attack as a platform for pushing his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim agenda.”
The government has taken varying approaches prosecuting terror suspects.
• Mohammad Jamal Khweis, 27, of Alexandria, Va., was captured by Kurdish forces in Iraq in 2016. He was brought back to the United States and convicted earlier this year in federal court of providing material support to the Islamic State.
• Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the chief suspect in the deadly assault on the U. S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, is facing trial in federal court in Virginia. He faces 18 charges and has pleaded innocent. But Khatallah was held in legal limbo after his capture in Libya. He was swooped aboard a Navy ship, placed in the brig and interrogated for five days before being read the rights due to a civilian arrested for a crime. Transporting Khatallah by ship was due to the diplomatic and military complications a flight would have caused, according to the government. And the slow boat was simply a matter of trouble with the vessel.
• The Pentagon has acknowledged in September that forces fighting the Islamic State had detained a U. S. citizen there who was described as a “known enemy combatant.”
Saipov, 29, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, allegedly drove his rented truck onto a bike path. He was “radicalized domestically,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio labeled the melee “an act of terror.”
Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have vowed to direct enemy combatants to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Saipov would be the first sent there.
Saipov could not be tried in a military tribunal there, Graham said, because he holds a green card. After being interrogated, he could be tried in civilian court, he said.
Still, Saipov could be sent to Guantanamo first to be questioned and held there for some time, Graham said.
“You could if you wanted to,” Graham said.
The Obama administration, however, refused to send captured militants there and for years had worked to empty its cells. There are 41 detainees there now.
Terrorists radicalized by the Islamic State, Graham said, see an attack on U. S. soil as their top prize — “the Gold medal in the terrorist Olympics.”
“The idea that America is not part of the battlefield is insane,” Graham said.
