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Letter to Obama Regarding Warsame from House Committee Chairs

Raffaela Wakeman
Tuesday, July 19, 2011, 11:59 AM
Several House committee chairs have sent this letter regarding the Warsame case to President Obama.

Published by The Lawfare Institute
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Several House committee chairs have sent this letter regarding the Warsame case to President Obama. Their primary concerns are summed up in the first full paragraph of the second page:
We are concerned that the lack of a comprehensive military detention system will continue to have numerous detrimental results, including: incentivizing lethal operations over law of war detention; the loss of critical detainee-provided intelligence; forcing the United States to be wholly dependent on foreign governments to hold and provide access to detainees; and, as in Warsame's case, bringing terrorists to the United States.
The letter was signed by: Buck McKeon (HASC Chairman), Mike Rogers (Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Committee on Foreign Affairs Chairwoman), Lamar Smith (Committee on the Judiciary Chairman), and Peter King (Committee on Homeland Security Chairman).

Raffaela Wakeman is a Senior Director at In-Q-Tel. She started her career at the Brookings Institution, where she spent five years conducting research on national security, election reform, and Congress. During this time she was also the Associate Editor of Lawfare. From there, Raffaela practiced law at the U.S. Department of Defense for four years, advising her clients on privacy and surveillance law, cybersecurity, and foreign liaison relationships. She departed DoD in 2019 to join the Majority Staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where she oversaw the Intelligence Community’s science and technology portfolios, cybersecurity, and surveillance activities. She left HPSCI in May 2021 to join IQT. Raffaela received her BS and MS in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 and her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 2015, where she was recognized for her commitment to public service with the Joyce Chiang Memorial Award. While at the Department of Defense, she was the inaugural recipient of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s General Counsel Award for exhibiting the highest standards of leadership, professional conduct, and integrity.

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