American Held as ISIS Suspect, Creating a Quandary for the Trump Administration<br />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<br />and could put at risk the legal underpinnings for the fight against the Islamic State.<br />"A U.S. citizen may lawfully be subject to military detention in armed conflict under appropriate circumstances," he added, pointing to a 2004 decision<br />in which the Supreme Court upheld the indefinite wartime detention of an American citizen captured in the Afghanistan war, Yasser Hamdi.<br />6, 2017<br />WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials are divided over how to handle a United States citizen<br />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.<br />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<br />that the man — who surrendered on Sept. 12 to a Syrian rebel militia, which turned him over to the American military — will stay imprisoned.<br />The Supreme Court has never ruled on what kind of hearing — or how much or what type<br />of evidence — is sufficient to hold an American in indefinite wartime detention.<br />In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that his detention as a wartime prisoner was lawful — but also<br />that he had a right to challenge the evidence that he was an enemy fighter in a hearing before a neutral decision maker.
