The suspect accused of mowing down at least eight people with a rented truck in New York City Tuesday should be labeled an “enemy combatant,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said Wednesday.
The designation would allow alleged attacker Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, a Uzbek immigrant, to be interrogated without a lawyer.
“If you take up arms against the United States in the name of radical Islam, you should be treated as a terrorist,” Graham, a Republican who sits on the Judiciary and Armed Services committees, told reporters Wednesday. “You’ll never convince me that the best way to gather intelligence in this war…is reading them their Miranda rights.”
As commander-in-chief, President Donald Trump can classify an individual as an enemy combatant, empowering the U.S. to detain someone without trial and without the rights granted to civilians, like the right to a lawyer. Guantanamo Bay is the best-known detention center of enemy combatants, where the American Civil Liberties Union says more than half the prison’s detainees are currently being held without charge or trial.
The suspect would not need to be held at the Guantanamo Bay prison, Graham said, though he could, and could be reclassified as a civilian if that is later found to be the best course.
“The idea that America is not part of the battlefield is insane. Tell that to the people who were in the Twin Towers, tell that to people in the Pentagon,” Graham said. “The Constitution is not a suicide pact. We have a rule of law in place that covers situations like this, it’s call the Law of War.”
President Barack Obama’s administration sought to stop using the “enemy combatant” term, arguing in court they could detain terror suspects without it. Despite a similar appeal from Graham in 2013, Obama did not declare another Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev an “enemy combatant,” but the Justice Department did invoke a public safety exception to delay reading the suspect his Miranda rights.
Tsarnaev was tried for his crimes by a jury and sentenced to death in 2015, and he is currently on death row.