Nope. The Pres is Commander in Chief of the armed forces. But Congress is tasked with making the laws under which those forces operate. It seems to me that how terrorists will be treated falls more under the congressional power than the presidential power, certainly once the situation is no longer an emergency that must be dealt with immediately, in which case a presidential response is entirely appropriate.
Under our Constitution I don't think the President should be making decisions about long-term imprisonment or even capital punishment, even of non-citizen enemy combatants.
We have laws to punish criminals and to imprison legal POWs till peace is made. Much of the acrimony over our treatment of captive terrorists has arisen because we insist on forcing them into one of these two categories, into neither of which they fit.
So develop a new category for terrorist illegal combatants. I think this should be done by Congress, not the President.
“We have laws to punish criminals and to imprison legal POWs till peace is made .... So develop a new category for terrorist illegal combatants. “
Actually we do have a such a law. In the majority opinion in the 2006 Hamdan case (which went in favor of the defendant), the Supreme Court told Pres Bush that such a law was needed. Bush asked Congress to draft a law covering the detention of foreign terrorist combatants and specifying a denial of habeas corpus. Congress drafted and passed is law.
Oh, by the way, in a subsequent high profile case, the Supreme Court majority ignored the law (as well as 200 years of US precedent and another 900 years of English common law) and proclaimed habeas corpus rights foreign enemy combatants.
So apparently, the Supreme Court doesn’t really need a law any more than it needs a constitution.