A non-profit legal advocacy group with a long history of defending Guantanamo Bay detainees slammed President Donald Trump on Wednesday for the suggestion that the suspect behind a terrorist attack in New York City on Tuesday should be detained there.
“Guantanamo Bay is and always has been a prison exclusively for Muslims, which is undoubtedly the only reason Donald Trump made the idiotic suggestion to send Sayfullo Saipov there,” the Center for Constitutional Rights said in a press release.
The group, then led by the late Michael Ratner, was the first to successfully challenge former President George W. Bush’s use of Guantanamo Bay as a detention center for foreign nationals, and has continued to coordinate the representation of detainees there.
Sayfullo Saipov, who authorities have identified as the man who carried out the attack on Tuesday, is a legal permanent resident of the United States.
“He did this in the name of ISIS,” the deputy commissioner of the New York City Police Department said at a press conference Wednesday, referring to Saipov. “And along with the other items recovered at the scene [were] some notes that further indicate that.”
The Center for Constitutional Rights added: “Fifteen years has proven no one will ever be successfully tried or ‘brought to justice’ at Guantanamo, and the President and his supporters within his own party are deluded if they believe otherwise.”
Trump on Wednesday said he “would certainly consider” sending the suspect behind Tuesday’s terrorist attack in New York City, which left eight dead, to Guantanamo Bay. He also said that the “punishment” doled out by America’s justice system needed to be “far quicker and far greater.” Trump has previously advocated for the use of torture.
There are currently 41 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, according to a list maintained by the Miami Herald.
