Drift: How This Ship Became a Floating Gitmo

This is the U.S.S. Boxer. A big-deck amphibious assault ship, the “Golden Gator” displaces about 40,500 tons and provides a working home for more than 2,000 troops. Recently, its brig held a less likely passenger, Danger Room has confirmed: Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali whom the United States just charged with supporting al-Shabaab and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

But if Warsame’s case is the future of terrorism detentions, that’s going to be a problem. The Navy simply doesn’t have enough ships with the brig space to serve as a floating Guantanamo Bay.

Out of the Navy’s 286 ships, only its 11 aircraft carriers and 10 big-deck amphibious assault ships really have brigs to lock up potential dangerous detainees. Its destroyers, cruisers, subs, frigates and littoral combat ships lack the space necessary to operate more than a makeshift brig. They also lack the guards and medical support personnel to detain someone for months, as in Warsame’s case.

“When someone is confined on surface ships,” explains retired Rear Adm. Ronald Christenson, a former commander of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, “they’ll transfer him almost immediately to a big ship that does have a brig, or shore facilities that have those qualifications.” And an aircraft carrier’s brig is only big enough for about “six to ten” detainees, Christenson adds.


Of course, in a pinch, the Navy has workarounds. In February 2009, the Navy placed 16 captured pirates aboard the supply ship Lewis and Clark, where about 20 Marines were tasked with guarding the mostly docile buccaneers. The Navy called the arrangement a “temporary holding facility” en route to depositing the detainees at a Kenyan pirate court. Ironically, after the Lewis and Clark ceased holding its detainees, pirates chased it in May 2009.

“Even though [smaller] ships have this ability, if you want to have a real prison, you need a larger ship,” says Eric Wertheim, who edits the authoritative Combat Fleets of The World for the U.S. Naval Institute. “Also, you have to look at what ships are need for other duties, and how it affects the main mission of the ship. If it’s a small ship, and you’ve got a lot of [detainees], it’s gonna have a big impact.”

Problem is, the way the Obama administration is drifting, the fleet is shaping up to be default jailers in the war on terrorism.

Last week, Vice Adm. William McRaven, the next head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, testified that ever since the Obama team effectively barred detainee transfers to Guantanamo Bay, terrorist suspects taken captive outside Afghanistan or Iraq would be briefly held aboard “a naval vessel.”

As it turned out, McRaven secretly already had Warsame detained in precisely that manner, according to Warsame’s indictment in federal court. Warsame, intercepted in the Gulf of Aden, had been floating out there for more than two months; Danger Room isn’t sure how much time he spent on the Boxer, whose crew did not return an e-mail seeking comment. (The Boxer’s involvement was first asserted by Danger Room pal Raymond Pritchett, but we confirmed it independently.)

McRaven wasn’t exactly happy about it. He urged the Senate Armed Services Committee to keep some long-term terrorism detention facility open, Gitmo or no Gitmo.

It’s not hard to see why McRaven wouldn’t be pleased. It’s not just that most of the fleet isn’t equipped for the detention mission. It’s that the whole enterprise is an improvised, stopgap measure. Since special operations forces snatch missions are classified, they surely involve keeping most of a ship’s crew in the dark, all while diverting resources from its main mission. Then there’s the complexity of getting experienced interrogators flown out to see to pry information out of the detainee.

And hovering over everything is the legal ambiguity and the potential for a PR or human-rights disaster. Obama administration lawyers couldn’t tell reporters why detaining Warsame was legal. The Joint Special Operations Command is still smarting from its detainee abuse scandal at Iraq’s brutal Camp Nama, and there are reports it runs secret jails in Afghanistan, too. Uncertain legal authorities, inappropriate facilities and seat-of-the-pants planning for detentions is a recipe for something going very, very wrong.

There’s reason to suspect that Warsame isn’t the last detainee held on a ship. After a U.S. drone strike on Shebaab targets in Somalia on Friday, the country’s defense minister said that commandos “retrieve[d] the bodies of dead or wounded militants.” Obama officials deny it, but there could be other Warsames in Navy brigs.

It’s either ironic or tragic: Obama’s opposition to Guantanamo Bay has led to precisely the kind of ad hoc, legally murky detentions that created so many problems at Guantanamo. Now the Navy and special operations forces are effectively holding the bag.

Even on the large ships that have brig space for detainees, Christenson says, “extended” detentions — “a month or something” — are very rare. “They’ll transfer them to shore, get them in a big facility,” he says. “They don’t want to keep someone in a ship’s brig for a long time.” Unless Obama can reverse the drift of his detentions policy, they might have to.
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