Latest in Detention
A U.S. citizen from Virginia by the name of Mohamad Khweis apparently was held in detention for three months by Kurdish authorities in Iraq, with the U.S. government seemingly exercising considerable control over the situation.
Georgetown's Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault looks at Trump's campaign rhetoric and describes the peril of his position on torture.
Today marks the seventieth anniversary of the closing of the last of the World War II “Relocation Centers” established by the federal government to intern Japanese Americans during the War. The anniversary constitutes an appropriate occasion to recognize an unsung hero in the movement to close the internment camps: Mitsuye Endo.
Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) introduced legislation yesterday that would prohibit the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility as well as bar transfers of remaining detainees to any foreign country through September 2017.
The United States transferred two Libyan detainees, Omar Khalifa Mohammed Abu Bakr and Salem Abdul Salem Ghereby, from Guantanamo Bay to Senegal on Monday.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee is hearing testimony this morning on the Administration's plan to close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility.
A quick update on a story we've been tracking this week, involving the second publicly-known instance of U.S.-administered military detention of an ISIS member. As noted here, a raid conducted by the Expeditionary Targeting Force last month netted an ISIS member involved with chemical weapons, and fruits from the U.S.-administered interrogation of that detainee appear to have informed some airstrikes on chem-related facilities this week.
It appears that Iraqi officials have leaked the identity of the ISIS leader recently captured in a raid conducted in Iraq by the Expeditionary Targeting Force (that's the label the Pentagon has used in discussing a mini-SOF surge focused on kill/capture missions targeting key ISIS figures).
These days, when the United States plays the lead role in using lethal force or detaining and interrogating prisoners, the force typically involves only airpower and detention-and-interrogation typically are just transient. This has the effect of tamping down the political, legal, and diplomatic headaches that follow from using boots-on-the-ground to conduct raids and from holding detainees for the long term. But these are not the only means by which to tamp down those frictions.
The number of former detainees suspected of reengaging in the fight has doubled—from 6 to 12—since the ODNI released its last report in September 2015.