IRAQ/NATIONAL SECURITY/SAUDI ARABIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Senior national security officials in the Trump administration are embracing a proposal to transfer to Saudi Arabia an American citizen being held in Iraq as a wartime detainee, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations.
A meeting last week of the National Security Council’s ‘deputies committee’ — the No. 2 leaders of national security departments and agencies — found its members united around a goal of pursuing such a transfer for the detainee, suspected of being a low-level Islamic State fighter, who has been held in military custody as an ‘enemy combatant’ for the past three months, the officials said.
The man, whose name the government has refused to make public, was born in the United States to visiting Saudi parents, the officials said.
A spokesman for the National Security Council declined to comment. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal deliberations.
The Trump administration has been wrestling with what to do with the man since a Syrian militia turned him over to American forces in mid-September. Legal pressure to resolve his fate has been building since the American Civil Liberties Union filed a habeas corpus lawsuit in October challenging his detention on his behalf.”
-Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Adam Goldman, “Officials Weigh Sending American Detainee to Saudi Arabia,” The New York Times online, Dec. 20, 2017