Guantanamo set for a grand re-opening?

1. Marc A. Thiessen @marcthiessen

The New York Times reports that, after an eight-year hiatus of new arrivals, the Trump administration is getting ready to replenish the population of terrorists held in Guantanamo Bay:

The Trump White House is nearing completion of an order that would direct the Pentagon to bring future Islamic State detainees to the Guantánamo Bay prison, despite warnings from national security officials and legal scholars that doing so risks undermining the effort to combat the group, according to administration officials and a draft executive order obtained by The New York Times.
White House officials have detailed their thinking about a new detainee policy in an evolving series of drafts of an executive order being circulated among national security officials for comment. While previous versions have shown that the draft has undergone many changes — including dropping language about reviving C.I.A. prisons — the plan to add Islamic State detainees to the Guantánamo population has remained constant.
The latest version of the draft, which circulated this week, would direct Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to use Guantánamo to detain suspected members of “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, including individuals and networks associated with the Islamic State.”

The paper cites “warnings from career government national security officials that carrying out its plan would give federal judges an opportunity to reject the executive branch’s theory that the war against the Islamic State is legal, even though Congress never explicitly authorized it. The issue could arise when reviewing an inevitable habeas corpus lawsuit filed by an ISIS detainee.”
This is, of course, a risk.  But it should not be difficult for government lawyers to demonstrate that ISIS is in fact the same entity as al Qaeda in Iraq – the enemy we lawfully fought under existing authorizations for the use of military force during the Bush administration.  Indeed, ISIS changed its name from al Qaeda in Iraq to the Islamic State of Iraq during the 2007 surge.  They are an al-Qaeda off-shoot.
The bigger problem is that Guantanamo is no longer useful as a strategic interrogation center – precisely because the courts have ruled that detainees held there have the right to an attorney and to habeas corpus.  You cannot effectively interrogate a high-value terrorist once he has a lawyer and contact with the outside world.  Once the CIA sent Khalid Sheik Mohammed and its other remaining high-value detainees to Guantanamo, they stopped providing useful intelligence.
So Guantanamo may be a good final destination for high value detainees once we are finished questioning them, so they can be held indefinitely under the laws of war and tried, where appropriate, by military commission.  But the Trump administration will need other options if they want to extract useful information from captured terrorists.