Karen Greenberg is quoted in a Daily Beast article about President Trump detaining an American without charge as an enemy combatant for his alleged membership in ISIS.
All of that prompted questions among legal scholars about why the Trump administration chose to detain him militarily, rather than bringing charges against him in federal court.
“If he’s found on a list, then I don’t see why they couldn’t indict him,” said Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham University Law School’s Center on National Security. “They don’t want to use the federal courts for international terrorism prosecutions anymore.”
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Greenberg, however, pointed to the Justice Department’s arguments as the wages of years of bipartisan failure to repeal the 2001 AUMF or offer up a new congressional declaration of war against ISIS.
“There’s been no taking on the AUMF and allowing it to be a placemarker for any kind of military behavior has been a problem forever,” she said. “How many congresses have considered taking it up and decided not to? This is the consequence of not confronting an issue that was too difficult to confront and everyone who could have addressed it ran away from it.”