Ghost detainee is a term used in the executive branch of the United States government to designate a person held in a detention center, whose identity has been hidden by keeping them unregistered and therefore anonymous. Such uses arose as the Bush administration initiated the war on terror following the 9/11 attacks of 2001 in the United States. As documented in the 2004 Taguba Report, it was used in the same manner by United States (US) officials and contractors of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC) at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003-2004. I filed a FOIA…
Author: John Greenewald
Background Bowe Robert Bergdahl (born March 28, 1986) is a United States Army soldier who was held captive by the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network in Afghanistan from June 2009 until his release in May 2014. The circumstances under which Bergdahl went missing and how he was captured by the Taliban have since become a subject of intense media scrutiny. Bergdahl was released on May 31, 2014, as part of a prisoner exchange for five Taliban members who were being held at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. This exchange quickly became a political controversy within the United States. Below, are documents…
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence On April 3, 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted to send the Findings and Conclusions and the Executive Summary of its final Study on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program to the President for declassification and subsequent public release. This report was finally released, and is available here: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, released December 9, 2014 [ 525 Pages, 62.71MB ]. Approved December 13, 2012, Updated for Release April 3, 2014, and Declassication Revisions December 3, 2014. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Files CUSTODIAL INTERROGATION FOR PUBLIC…
Background The Guantanamo Bay detention camp, also referred to as Guantánamo, G-bay or GTMO, is a United States military prison located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, which fronts on Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. At the time of its establishment in January 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said the prison camp was established to detain extraordinarily dangerous persons, to interrogate “detainees” in an optimal setting, and to prosecute detainees for war crimes. Detainees captured in the War on Terror, most of them from Afghanistan and much smaller numbers later from Iraq, the Horn of Africa and South Asia were…
The following master theses were published by students in war colleges and military academy’s. They are archived here for reference. Master Theses CBRN Terrorism Obsession Prior to 9/11 [103 Pages, 620kb]- 9/11 highlighted failures by both the intelligence and policymaking communities, and these failures were identified by the 9/11 Commission. These failures only related to the inability of the intelligence community to imagine how terrorists might use aircraft as a suicide vehicle, and how politicians failed to eliminate the al-Qaeda threat and Osama bin Laden. Completely unnoticed by the 9/11 Commission, but acknowledged by many within the academic community, was…